Jonathan Griffin

Canal Projects, New York

The story, as literary theorist Peter Brooks has observed, is today’s dominant cultural form. To Brooks, this “overabundance” of narrative is worrying: he criticizes the deference of virtually all strands of culture (not only literature, TV, and movies but art, museology, and—especially—news media) to the persuasive rhetorical power of the story.¹ I share many of his concerns. “The universe is not our stories about the universe,” he writes, “even if those stories are all we have.”²