AN122B-WE ARE ALL EARS: THE POWER, POLITICS, AND ETHICS OF STORYTELLING

SPRING 2023 - BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY . DESIGNED AND TAUGHT

What do we learn by listening to or reading about someone else? This course digs deep into the power of stories and storytelling in four overlapping ways. First, we will explore storytelling more broadly as a cultural activity that shapes who we are and how we interact with one another on ethical, political, and social terms. Next, we will focus on the violent, volatile, and/or oppressive conditions under which stories are told—or silenced. With an emphasis on the United States, we will look at the wide-ranging ways dominant narratives have the power to create, sustain, or remake reality. Third, we will consider the underbelly of these stories – the lives, experiences, and counternarratives of those at the margins. Here, we will learn to actively listen to multiple, diverse stories often hidden from view. Finally, inspired by Hannah Arendt’s contention that stories mediate the space between private and public realms, and that by enlarging our horizons of understanding storytelling helps reconcile singular and plural worlds, we will discuss how stories not only transport us but also transform us. In conversation with storytellers – inside and outside of academia – this course culminates in designing your own creative, public-facing storytelling project (ie: podcasts, exhibitions, performances) and sharing it in a venue open to the Brandeis community.

This course is not only interdisciplinary; it is, in a sense, meta-disciplinary. By focusing on storytelling as an explanatory mode, it asks questions and challenges conventional assumptions about the nature of inquiry and the various ways in which knowledge can be produced. Centering the course on storytelling also enables an engagement with broad questions regarding the relationship between science and myth, fact and fiction, real and illusory. This course ultimately probes a fundamental question about the role of storytelling as a universal aspect of the human condition. To do so, it draws on multimodal “texts” ranging from (but not limited to) Arabian tales, the Frankfurt School philosophy, African oral literature, literary criticism, classic and contemporary ethnography, narrative journalism, medical journals, popular science, visual studies, public radio, and guest storytellers.