Narrative Analysis: Stories of Self and Others
A Critical Inquiry elective offered through the College of Performing Arts in the School of Drama. I developed this course to apply the ethical lens of oral history to creative work in a range of forms, asking students to grapple with what it means to be making work with, for, or about the stories of others.
Narrative Analysis: Stories of Self and Others, Fall 2018
Course Description
“Aesthetic education is an effort to make it more likely that people will lend their lives to forms of art, bringing them alive, opening the questions that keep human beings wide awake and in the world.” Maxine Greene, “Countering Indifference: The Role of the Arts. ”
In this course, we will close read narratives – visual, aural and written – that tell the stories of self and others. More than simply documentary or memoir, these narratives originate of specific desires: to reveal, to complicate, to challenge, to bear witness, to un-silence the self or (or for) others. We will read and view historical narratives, narratives of witness, narratives of illness and disability, slippery narratives or narratives with slippery witness, and narratives alive to their own construction. Through critical and creative inquiry into the work of these artists, we will seek to challenge, enrich and expand our ideas of memory and narrative, as we deepen our own work telling the stories that haunt or obsess us, the stories that contain and express our joy, that keep us “wide awake and in the world.”
But what does it mean to make stories “in the world”? As we develop our skills in imaginative attention - how we see, hear, and respond to the course texts - we will ask larger questions about how these narratives are created within, and in turn create, culture in society. Taking guidance from the field of oral history, which attends to the ethics of telling, listening, and interpreting the self and others, we will ask broader questions such as: Who benefits from the telling of a story? How does the particular telling of a story impact the meaning it generates? How do narratives of self and others reflect, reinforce, or challenge power structures and/or existing narratives? When a narrative sets out with a particular aim or desire, how can we evaluate its success or failure? Who is a narrative accountable to? Who is it for?