Rukmini Bhaya Nair – författare

In this elegantly written and theoretically sophisticated work, Rukmini Bhaya Nair asks why human beings across the world are such compulsive and inventive storytellers. Extending current research in cognitive science and narratology, she argues that we seem to have a genetic drive to fabricate as a way of gaining the competitive advantages such fictions give us. She suggests that stories are a means of fusing causal and logical explanations of 'real' events with emotional recognition, so that the lessons taught to us as children, and then throughout our lives via stories, lay the cornerstones of our most crucial beliefs. Nair's conclusion is that our stories really do make us up, just as much as we make up our stories.

In this elegantly written and theoretically sophisticated work, Rukmini Bhaya Nair asks why human beings across the world are such compulsive and inventive storytellers. Extending current research in cognitive science and narratology, she argues that we seem to have a genetic drive to fabricate as a way of gaining the competitive advantages such fictions give us. She suggests that stories are a means of fusing causal and logical explanations of 'real' events with emotional recognition, so that the lessons taught to us as children, and then throughout our lives via stories, lay the cornerstones of our most crucial beliefs. Nair's conclusion is that our stories really do make us up, just as much as we make up our stories.

Exposes the complicity of language and its uses in the colonial projectA revealing look into the long afterlife of colonial conquest, Lying on the Postcolonial Couch offers an original, overarching concept that informs-and helps to explain-the workings of postcoloniality. This concept, "indifference," is a play on the key critical term "difference." Indifference is a cognitive stance invented during the colonial period for the purpose of organizing the complex domain of the Indian subcontinent, one that created its own brand of poetics. Considering postcoloniality as a symptomatic condition, this book proposes a cure involving a return to buried memories of colonial trauma before the phenomenon itself succumbs to the absolute indifference of the slowly gathering amnesia of the new millennium. Rukmini Bhaya Nair traces a paper trail beginning in 1757 with the Battle of Plassey, winding through the contentious Mutiny of 1857, and ending with Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses predicament. Along this trail, she uncovers hidden residues of feeling, from guilt and mistrust to wonder and pleasure, and analyzes the linguistic pillars that hold up the institution of bureaucratic indifference that she exposes.

In this elegantly written and theoretically sophisticated work, Rukmini Bhaya Nair asks why human beings across the world are such compulsive and inventive storytellers. Extending current research in cognitive science and narratology, she argues that we seem to have a genetic drive to fabricate as a way of gaining the competitive advantages such fictions give us. She suggests that stories are a means of fusing causal and logical explanations of ''real'' events with emotional recognition, so that the lessons taught to us as children, and then throughout our lives via stories, lay the cornerstones of our most crucial beliefs. Nair''s conclusion is that our stories really do make us up, just as much as we make up our stories.

In this elegantly written and theoretically sophisticated work, Rukmini Bhaya Nair asks why human beings across the world are such compulsive and inventive storytellers. Extending current research in cognitive science and narratology, she argues that we seem to have a genetic drive to fabricate as a way of gaining the competitive advantages such fictions give us. She suggests that stories are a means of fusing causal and logical explanations of ''real'' events with emotional recognition, so that the lessons taught to us as children, and then throughout our lives via stories, lay the cornerstones of our most crucial beliefs. Nair''s conclusion is that our stories really do make us up, just as much as we make up our stories.

What terms are currently up for debate in Indian society? How have their meanings changed over time? This book highlights key words for modern India in everyday usage as well as in scholarly contexts. Encompassing over 250 key words across a wide range of topics, including aesthetics and ceremony, gender, technology and economics, past memories and future imaginaries, these entries introduce some of the basic concepts that inform the 'cultural unconscious' of the Indian subcontinent in order to translate them into critical tools for literary, political, cultural and cognitive studies.Inspired by Raymond Williams' pioneering exploration of English culture and society through the study of keywords, Keywords for India brings together more than 200 leading sub-continental scholars to form a polyphonic collective. Their sustained engagement with an incredibly diverse set of words enables a fearless interrogation of the panoply, the multitude, the shape-shifter that is 'India'. Through its close investigation and unpacking of words, this book investigates the various intellectual possibilities on offer within the Indian subcontinent at the beginning of a fraught new millennium desperately in need of fresh vocabularies. In this sense, Keywords for India presents the world with many emancipatory memes from India.

What terms are currently up for debate in Indian society? How have their meanings changed over time? This book highlights key words for modern India in everyday usage as well as in scholarly contexts. Encompassing over 250 key words across a wide range of topics, including aesthetics and ceremony, gender, technology and economics, past memories and future imaginaries, these entries introduce some of the basic concepts that inform the 'cultural unconscious' of the Indian subcontinent in order to translate them into critical tools for literary, political, cultural and cognitive studies.Inspired by Raymond Williams' pioneering exploration of English culture and society through the study of keywords, Keywords for India brings together more than 200 leading sub-continental scholars to form a polyphonic collective. Their sustained engagement with an incredibly diverse set of words enables a fearless interrogation of the panoply, the multitude, the shape-shifter that is 'India'. Through its close investigation and unpacking of words, this book investigates the various intellectual possibilities on offer within the Indian subcontinent at the beginning of a fraught new millennium desperately in need of fresh vocabularies. In this sense, Keywords for India presents the world with many emancipatory memes from India.

What terms are currently up for debate in Indian society? How have their meanings changed over time? This book highlights key words for modern India in everyday usage as well as in scholarly contexts. Encompassing over 250 key words across a wide range of topics, including aesthetics and ceremony, gender, technology and economics, past memories and future imaginaries, these entries introduce some of the basic concepts that inform the ''cultural unconscious'' of the Indian subcontinent in order to translate them into critical tools for literary, political, cultural and cognitive studies. Inspired by Raymond Williams'' pioneering exploration of English culture and society through the study of keywords, Keywords for India brings together more than 200 leading sub-continental scholars to form a polyphonic collective. Their sustained engagement with an incredibly diverse set of words enables a fearless interrogation of the panoply, the multitude, the shape-shifter that is ''India''. Through its close investigation and unpacking of words, this book investigates the various intellectual possibilities on offer within the Indian subcontinent at the beginning of a fraught new millennium desperately in need of fresh vocabularies. In this sense, Keywords for India presents the world with many emancipatory memes from India.

What terms are currently up for debate in Indian society? How have their meanings changed over time? This book highlights key words for modern India in everyday usage as well as in scholarly contexts. Encompassing over 250 key words across a wide range of topics, including aesthetics and ceremony, gender, technology and economics, past memories and future imaginaries, these entries introduce some of the basic concepts that inform the ''cultural unconscious'' of the Indian subcontinent in order to translate them into critical tools for literary, political, cultural and cognitive studies. Inspired by Raymond Williams'' pioneering exploration of English culture and society through the study of keywords, Keywords for India brings together more than 200 leading sub-continental scholars to form a polyphonic collective. Their sustained engagement with an incredibly diverse set of words enables a fearless interrogation of the panoply, the multitude, the shape-shifter that is ''India''. Through its close investigation and unpacking of words, this book investigates the various intellectual possibilities on offer within the Indian subcontinent at the beginning of a fraught new millennium desperately in need of fresh vocabularies. In this sense, Keywords for India presents the world with many emancipatory memes from India.

Deception challenges readers to think about their own lies – from their first lies in childhood to the clever, provocative ones they told just recently. Scouring a number of texts in philosophy, poetics, literature and theory, both western and eastern, the book urges that, at a time when phrases like ‘fake news’ ‘gaslighting’ and ‘false narratives’ have become an intrinsic part of global vocabulary, an interdisciplinary discussion on the intertwined future of the twins ‘lying’ and ‘truth-telling’ is an urgent imperative. Rukmini Bhaya Nair explores the distinction between lies, metaphor and narrative performativity, presenting them as part of an interactive continuum informing how cultures engage with the concept of truth. With an engaging intellectual energy, Nair’s discussion traverses an impressive diversity of writers and thinkers including Paul Grice, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Paul De Man, Noam Chomsky, the Natyashastra of Bharata, Sylvia Plath and Salman Rushdie. She argues that literary texts permit a re-evaluation of truth-telling conventions and offer a space to theorize and understand crises and problems in the world. Augmenting observations on philosophy, fiction, poetry and literary theory with scholarship in cognitive linguistics, the book shows how metaphors, fictions, and lies can function as potent cognitive stimulants.Deception lays the groundwork for a truly inter-disciplinary account of lying as a deep-rooted form of linguistic behavior, which will appeal to anyone interested in research on developmental psychology, philosophy of language, literary and cultural studies, and linguistics.

Deception challenges readers to think about their own lies from their first lies in childhood to the clever, provocative ones they told just recently. Scouring a number of texts in philosophy, poetics, literature and theory, both western and eastern, the book urges that, at a time when phrases like 'fake news' 'gaslighting' and 'false narratives' have become an intrinsic part of global vocabulary, an interdisciplinary discussion on the intertwined future of the twins 'lying' and 'truth-telling' is an urgent imperative. Rukmini Bhaya Nair explores the distinction between lies, metaphor and narrative performativity, presenting them as part of an interactive continuum informing how cultures engage with the concept of truth. With an engaging intellectual energy, Nair's discussion traverses an impressive diversity of writers and thinkers including Paul Grice, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Paul De Man, Noam Chomsky, the Natyashastra of Bharata, Sylvia Plath and Salman Rushdie. She argues that literary texts permit a re-evaluation of truth-telling conventions and offer a space to theorize and understand crises and problems in the world. Augmenting observations on philosophy, fiction, poetry and literary theory with scholarship in cognitive linguistics, the book shows how metaphors, fictions, and lies can function as potent cognitive stimulants.Deception lays the groundwork for a truly inter-disciplinary account of lying as a deep-rooted form of linguistic behavior, which will appeal to anyone interested in research on developmental psychology, philosophy of language, literary and cultural studies, and linguistics.