Stories are the architecture of our lives. As Joan Didion once wrote, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live,” and it is through stories that we give shape to “the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.” This course explores the complex relationship between storytelling and worldbuilding across different media formats. Drawing on concepts from narrative theory and media studies, we’ll explore techniques of storytelling by reading and analyzing the structure of nonlinear novels, experimental literature, short stories, graphic novels, theatrical performance, interactive texts, and games. Through medium-specific analysis, we’ll investigate how narrative techniques are used to construct and simulate different models of intelligence, interaction, and memory. What do we learn by building and breaking down stories? How are acts of building, thinking, making, and creating embodied in narrative structure? By returning to such elemental questions, we will learn to build and analyze anew, thinking with the materials, tools, and techniques that shape the stories around us. As we pursue this project, we’ll also touch upon topics such as amnesia, forgetting, erasure, dreams, fantasy, trauma, performance, virtuality, play, deception, and more. Course requirements include active participation, two presentations, short discussion responses, a short narrative analysis, an interactive Twine project, and final seminar paper.
Required Texts
Jason Shiga, Meanwhile
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Nick Sousanis, Unflattening
Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon’s Daytripper
Tom McCarthy’s Remainder
Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi
Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
Nick Sousanis, Unflattening
Gabriel Ba and Fabio Moon’s Daytripper
Tom McCarthy’s Remainder
Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi
Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven
Course Goals & Objectives
• To think critically about the relationship between literature and media
• To reframe interpretative questions through medium-specific analysis
• To understand and apply concepts relevant to storytelling and narrative theory
• To explore how narrative structures, models, and techniques operate differently in literature, film, comics, games, theater, and other media.
• To explore how the affordances of form are exploited by authors, creators, and designers
• To analyze the properties of non-linear, multi-linear, and interactive narratives
• To understand how narratives experiment with time, space, perspective, movement, rhythm, memory, and communication
