Story OriginsEnglish I Honors

Warm Up: 20 Second Story

• Partner up.

• Think of the last story you encountered. The story can be true or fictional.

• In turns, we will go around the room. Everyone will tell the 20 second version of his or her story.

• Partners will act out the story through gestures.

What is a story?

• A story is a chronological sequence of events.

• A narrative (or discourse) is a story that has been shaped to create an effect. A narrative emphasizes certain elements of a story over others.

• Stories can be found anywhere and everywhere. Narratives exist within mediums (writing, art, photo, dance, etc).

• In a general setting, the terms story and narrative are used interchangeably.

Why do they matter?

• Stories and narratives (like science and mathematics and history) matter because they extend our understanding of what is possible in the world.

• Even stories that feature “impossible” or imagined events tell us something about what it means to be a person living in a particular time or place; stories and narratives tap into the heart of what makes us human.

• Our ability to understand stories and narratives is directly related to our ability to believe in and understand the lives of those around us.

“In a series of five experiments, 1,000 participants were randomly assigned texts to read, either extracts of popular fiction such as bestseller Danielle Steel's The Sins of the Mother and Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, or more literary texts, such as Orange-winner The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht, Don DeLillo's "The Runner", from his collection The Angel Esmeralda, or work by Anton Chekhov.

The pair then used a variety of Theory of Mind techniques to measure how accurately the participants could identify

emotions in others. Scores were consistently higher for those who had read literary fiction than for those with popular fiction or non-fiction texts.

"What great writers do is to turn you into the writer. In

literary fiction, the incompleteness of the characters turns your mind to trying to understand the minds of others," said Kidd.”from “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy, Study Finds,” The Guardian

article by Liz Bury, October 2013

“The fMRIs after the reading assignments revealed heightened connectivity in the left temporal cortex, the area of the brain associated with receptivity for language. Heightened connectivity in other parts of the

brain suggested that readers may experience “embodied semantics,” a process in which brain connectivity during a thought-about action mirrors the connectivity that occurs during the actual action. For example, thinking about swimming can trigger the some of the same neural connections as physical swimming.

“The neural changes that we found associated with physical sensation and movement systems suggest that reading a novel can transport you into the body of the protagonist,” said Gregory Berns, the lead author of the

study. “We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense. Now we’re seeing that something may also be happening biologically.””

from “Study: Reading a Novel Changes Your Brain,” The Atlantic article by Julia Ryan

When you listen to a PowerPoint in bullet point form, there are two areas of the brain that are activated, the Brocas Area and the Wernicke Area. These are simply the language processing areas of the brain, where words are turned into meaning but nothing else.

However, when being told a story, other areas of the brain used for actually experiencing an activity are engaged.

But there’s more! Scientists have discovered that telling a story can plant emotions, ideas, and thoughts into the brain of a listener. In studies at Princeton University, a woman telling a story and her listeners were monitored. Over the course of the story, the listeners’ brains actually fell into sync with the brain of the woman telling the story.

Stories therefore have an ultimate power: to influence people.

What do stories look like?

• Narratives tend to fall into one of five genre categories:• Fiction, Nonfiction, Folktale, Drama, and Poetry

• Within genres, there is a great deal of variety and experimentation.

• Since the first narratives were told, writers have experimented particularly with the grey areas between genres. So hybrid texts, that blur the lines between, for example, fiction and nonfiction, exist.

• Some texts, such as The Odyssey, can be described in terms of multiple genres. The Odyssey is an epic poem, but also an example of myth or folktale.

But how do they really matter? (Where did they come from?)

• Initially, stories had an extremely practical use. They were striking and important ways of passing along information before writing and printing became widespread. The fact that stories were shaped allowed them to be more easily remembered and therefore re-told. For example, early rhyme schemes helped listeners to retain key details.

• For example, family histories would be told from generation to generation as oral narratives.

• A farmer might tell his children a story about a particularly bad winter to help teach them the signs of an early frost.

• Early stories also played an important role in moral education. All religions include origin stories as well as parables or short instructional tales aimed at teaching followers how to behave.

Not to mention, storytelling was the world’s first form of entertainment…

…Imagine a world without radio, television, board games, toys, cars, books…

Professional storytellers even got paid for their great skill at entertaining crowds.Some of their most popular stories were tales, myths, and legends.

Tales• Tales probably began as

moral education.

• Consider tales as Parenting 101: If you don’t want your child to talk to strangers, scare them with stories of strangers actually being wolves who eat grandmothers.

Tales…

• Tales were also used to explain things that could not yet (or still can’t) be explained through science or history.

• For example, mermaids, sirens, and other sea creatures likely originated from sailors mistaking whales or manatees for womanly creatures.

“Tales are the skeletons of stories, perhaps.”

--Kate Bernheimer, from “Form is Fairy Tale, Fairy Tale is Form”

Four Elements of Tale

“These techniques have shown up in some way in nearly every literary fairy tale over hundreds of years from the seventeenth century to the present, across the globe and across styles.”

--Kate Bernheimer, from “Form is Fairy Tale, Fairy Tale is Form”

Flatness

“Fairy-tale characters are silhouettes, mentioned simply because they are there. They are not given many emotions—perhaps one, such as happy or sad—and they are not in psychological conflict. This absence of depth, this flatness, violates a technical rule writers are often taught in beginning writing classes: that a character’s psychological depth is crucial to a story. In a fairy tale, however, this flatness functions beautifully; it allows depth of response in the reader.”

Kara Walker’s art does with visual language what a fairytale does with actual language in

terms of flatness.

Abstraction

“Fairy tales rely on abstraction for their effect. Not many particular, illustrative details are given. Things in fairy tales are described with open language: Lovely. Dead. Beautiful… Fairy tales tell; they do not often show…[in] very exciting violation … of ye olde “show don’t tell” rule.”

Intuitive Logic

“The language of traditional fairy tales tells us that first this happened, and then that happened. There is never an explanation of why. In fact the question why does not often arise. Things usually happen in a fairy tale when they need to happen, but other things happen that have no relevance apart from the effect of language… Despite their reputation as plot driven narratives, fairy tales are actually extremely associative when you begin to unstitch them. They use intuitive logic…and of course, this associative quality is also a sort of violation, a violation of the rule that things must make sense.”

Normalized Magic

“The natural world in a fairy tale is a magical world. The day to day is collapsed with the wondrous. In a traditional fairy tale there is no need for a portal. Enchantment is not astounding. Magic is normal.”

Charles Perrault

• 1628-1703 (17th Century)• French writer

• Most famous tales: Little Red Riding Hood, Cinderella, Puss in Boots, The Sleeping Beauty, and Bluebeard.

• Grimm Brothers copied many of his tales over 200 years later.

Brothers Grimm• 1785/6-1863/59

• Wilhelm (back) and Jacob (front)

• German

• Most famous tales: Aschenputtel (Cinderella), The Frog Prince, The Goose Girl, Hansel and Gretel, Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin, The Sleeping Beauty, and Snow White.

time/placelessness vs cultural (moral) specificity

convention vs experimentation

small size vs. large impact/longevity