MW 11:15am-12:30pm
EO B01

This course will focus on the nature and role of stories.  Why do we
tell stories and pay such attention to them?  What role do stories
play in the creation of individual and cultural meaning?  How are
stories put together to make them interesting and meaningful? What
skills do we need to understand them and enjoy them fully? What
broader benefit is there in developing these skills? This course
will address these issues by considering a wide range of materials,
but with a particular emphasis on individual short stories, single-
author collections of short stories, and films – forms which create
and convey meaning in especially condensed ways. To give the course
further focus, we will concentrate on stories that convey a sense of
urgency in one way or another, stories that “matter” in an intense
way.

The premise of this course is that by becoming more aware of how
stories work and what they convey, we will develop skills that will
not only help us understand the texts we read, the stories we tell
and listen to, and the films we watch, but will also help us
understand the ways by which we make – and remake – sense of our own
lives and of events around us.