The Art of Storytelling

We tell ourselves stories in order to live. —Joan Didion 

Stories are the creative conversion of life itself into a more powerful, clearer, more  meaningful experience. They are the currency of human contact. —Robert McKee 

Great stories happen to those who can tell them. —Ira Glass 

This is a small, advanced seminar designed for students interested in comparing the formal constraints and opportunities of storytelling in different media. Students will examine the hallmarks of storytelling in different media and then adapt or create a story in two media.  We live by and through stories, whether they are family stories, national stories, or even spiritual stories. They are the medium of our lives, and the vehicle for changing our lives, so understanding how they work and how to use them gives us enormous power, as almost any artist, politician, or executive will tell you. In this course we investigate a variety of storytelling forms to build a repertoire of tools for telling the stories that are important to us, whatever they be and whatever form they take—sonic, textual, visual, or some combination thereof. We will begin with what is still the most common and influential form of narrative, oral storytelling. We listen to segments of Homer’s Odyssey, performed folklore, and public radio’s This American Life, and discuss what the fields of rhetoric, linguistics, and neuroscience have revealed about both the nature of narrative and our experience of it in this form. We will then look at forms of textual narrative, especially modern fiction and memoir, and through short readings by writers and critics alike we identify the principal features that distinguish textual storytelling, whether it be realist or not. Next, we turn to purely visual storytelling by exploring the “visual grammar” of forms such as the photo essay, text-less cartoon, and silent film, and compare their strategies to the oral and textual forms we have considered. In the second part of the course we will turn to forms that combine the oral, textual, and visual—the feature film, the  graphic novel, and video games. Through screenings, short documentaries, and maybe a little game playing, we examine how these forms both adapt and invent new strategies for telling a story.  

Instructor: Jonah Willihnganz.