Stories and Storytelling
Courses in this cluster will examine storytelling traditions across cultures and time. While these courses approach storytelling from different academic perspectives, they all address the importance of storytelling and the way that the storyteller influences society (and vice versa).
Associated Course Pairings:
Course Descriptions
Instructor: Chet Lisiecki
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Analysis & Interpretation of Meaning
Block: 1
This class will focus primarily on the fairy tale (“Märchen” in German), a category of folklore containing elements of the supernatural, miraculous, and wondrous. In Germany, the fairy tale is most closely associated with the Brothers Grimm, who collected and transcribed these tales in the early nineteenth century. In 1812, they published the first edition of Children’s and Household Tales (Kinder- und Hausmärchen), which they continued to edit and update throughout their lives. This collection contains many fairy tales that are familiar to us today, including “Hansel and Gretel,” “Cinderella,” “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Snow White,” and “Sleeping Beauty.” Our class will engage with fairy tales and fairy tale scholarship in a variety of ways. We will study the social and political history of fairy tales and analyze their formal structure. We will critically examine how fairy tales represent different aspects of human identity—including gender, race, class, ability, sexuality, and age—as well as how they represent animals, plants, and the natural world. We will also compare different versions of the same tale, including queer, Black, and feminist adaptations and retellings.
CC120: Yōkai: Monsters in Japanese Fiction and Popular Culture
Instructor: Francesca B. Pizarro
Block: 2
Delve into the captivating world of yōkai, the enigmatic monsters that populate the worlds of Japanese folklore, literature, and popular culture! The course introduces students to the study of Japanese literature and culture through an examination of the way yōkai are depicted in fiction and various forms of popular media including but not limited to manga, anime, film, and video games. Through a focus on yōkai, students will gain a broad understanding of Japanese history and society through its various modes of cultural production. Students will also learn about the field of Japan studies and how to be participants in the production of knowledge within Japan studies. In this process of knowledge production, they will learn to read literary, visual, and critical texts actively and present analytical arguments about the course materials in both written assignments and class discussions. As a CC120 Writing Seminar, students will hone their writing skills for college, learning how to engage in scholarly inquiry, argumentation, and research. Engaging with primary texts, scholarly articles, and multimedia materials related to yōkai in particular and Japan studies in general, students will navigate diverse perspectives, cultivating their ability to craft compelling and well-written pieces of academic writing.
CC101: “Fighting Words”: Satire Through Time
Instructor: Jared Richman
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Analysis & Interpretation of Meaning
Block: 1
From the Roman writers Horace and Juvenal to television commentators Samantha Bee and Jon Stewart, the art of satire remains a controversial yet powerful expression of protest in contemporary society. This course will explore the idea and practice of satire through literature, visual art, cinema, and digital media. We will read works by some of the most influential English and American satirists, such as Aphra Behn, Jonathan Swift, Alexander Pope, Voltaire, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain, and Evelyn Waugh. We will also see how satire shifts into various other media, such as caricature, cartoon, and film in graphic works by William Hogarth, James Gillray, and G.B. Trudeau (Doonesbury) and films by Stanley Kubrick, Monty Python, and Jordan Peele. Requirements will include spirited class participation, various short writing assignments, and a satirical work of your own creation.
Occasional afternoon film screenings.
CC120: Reading Fiction: How Stories Make Meaning
Instructor: George Butte
Block: 2
The purpose of this literature class is to help you become a better reader of stories. We will read a wide variety of fictions, from different periods and cultures. Understanding how narrative works is a fundamental cultural skill. You will also practice writing about that understanding, including revising papers after one-on-one tutorials. Questions we will address: how to read fiction, themes and form? How do we read our reading? What assumptions underlie our processes? And how can your writing and argumentation improve? We will look at different kinds of academic writing (assumptions, conventions). We will also discuss the racism, classism, and sexism of Standard (White) English. We will discuss a major conflict at the College: on one hand, we are anti-racist, anti-classist, anti-sexist, and you will have the opportunity to write free of Standard English values. But on the other hand, to succeed after college in many professional careers (at least until the revolution comes), at Yale Law School or the New York Times, you will have to write good Standard English, and so endorse some racist and classist values. This class allows you to choose between those options.
CC101: Shakespeare, Power, and Contemporary Identity
Instructor: Genevieve Love
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Analysis & Interpretation of Meaning
Block: 1
How does Shakespeare intersect with contemporary experiences of race, gender, and disability? In this course, we explore how three of Shakespeare’s plays (Twelfth Night, Richard III, and Othello), and contemporary adaptations of these plays, represent power, inequity, and resistance. As scholar Kim F. Hall writes, “To study Shakespeare is to study power.” We will address not only the operations of power within the plays themselves, but also the powerful forces that have made Shakespeare an authority on “universal” human experience. This course considers the relationship of Shakespeare’s plays to contemporary experiences of gender, disability, and racial identity; it will equip you to understand the idea of “Shakespeare” as multiple, contested, contingent, and evolving.
Instructor: Jordan Lord
Block: 4
This course will offer a variety of approaches for thinking about how to write about film and media, by starting with the (often underappreciated) role an audience plays in making a film. During this course, we will not only watch films but learn about different ways in which audiences have given meaning to films, including instances where just being in a film’s audience is a kind of activism and where audiences have reimagined films and their afterlives in ways that contradict the intentions of their so-called creators. We will especially consider this in terms of how queer, Black, brown, and disabled audiences disidentify with representations of their identities and use (mis-)representations for their own ends. As we consider these relationships between film and audience, students will attune to their own ways of being an audience by practicing different styles of writing on film and media, including personal essay, film criticism, formal analysis, and research-based writing. Ultimately, students will use these assignments to reflect on how these different styles of writing, rooted in active audienceship, are foundational for both disciplinary writing in film and media studies (and filmmaking), as well as many other disciplines, including literary, cultural, and visual studies.
Class goes until 1:30 (with a break partway through) so have time to screen a film.
CC102: Our Bodies in Motion: Moving, Thinking, and Collaborating
Instructor: Shawn Womack
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Creative Process
Block: 1
Body in Motion is a body-centered creative process course. Our movements, gestures, stories, and physical actions are the materials for individual and collective creative exploration. Drawing on somatic exercises, movement composition and improvisation, we will broadly investigate the interconnection between body and mind, between ideas and their kinesthetic manifestation and between expression and physical form. How does movement communicate? What do our bodies already know and how might our bodies become a source of new knowledge for us? We will explore our movement potential, move extemporaneously, analyze movement, and arrange movement drawing on a variety of creative processes. During our three and half weeks together, the fundamental aim is to become a community of movers and thinkers. No previous specialized physical or dance abilities are necessary to participate in and enjoy this course.
One day field trip, one evening performance, 2-3 afternoon sessions.
Instructor: Ryan Platt
Block: 2
This course proposes that serious learning depends on a frequently neglected skill: play. Play cultivates our capacity to make new discoveries, imagine alternative possibilities, and contend with setbacks, failures, and challenges. The course explores many types of play, including children’s play, rule-based games, improvisation, and combat sports. Reaching across disciplines, we will speak with scholars and scientists about how they experiment with ideas and possibilities in their research. The course also introduces methods and materials that theatre artists use to write plays and hone their skills as actors. While taking inspiration from theatre, this course is primarily a writing seminar and does not require prior experience on stage. Students should expect to play and experiment with writing in daily in-class exercises that draw on an unruly combination of scholarly and non-academic readings drawn from philosophy, sociology, performance studies, literature, and journalism.
CC102: Film Manifestos/Filmmaking
Instructor: Dylan Nelson
Learning Across the Liberal Arts Designation: Creative Process
Block: 1
In this course, you will interrogate assumptions, structures, processes, and meanings within the concept of the “manifesto.” We’ll study film manifestos from various artists, movements, and time periods in cinema and watch films relevant to these manifestos, examining – through close reading and visual and narrative analysis – how each film puts its guiding manifesto’s theory into practice. Drawing upon this study and a series of personal creative and craft responses, you will write your own film manifestos, then make short films that exemplify your manifestos’ ideals. This course meets the requirements for the Creative Process designation by asking you to investigate and clarify, for yourselves, “Why me? Why this work? Why now?” Serious consideration of the artistic possibility and power of the manifesto will ground attention to your own experiences and creative ideas, helping you codify vague senses of “taste,” preference, and personal values into an aesthetic and ideological framework that explicitly guides your filmmaking processes and reflections.
Class will meet from 9-12 and 1-3:30 for film screenings and production workshops. There may also be a few afternoon field trips.
Instructor: Pamela Reaves
Block: 3
In this course, you will learn disciplinary modes of research, analysis, and writing in religious studies through a consideration of particularly “American” expressions of Jesus. We will consider not only how Christian traditions contribute to critical moments in U.S. history, but also how the figure of Jesus functions foundationally in certain constructions of national history and identity. Encountering significant representations of Jesus in popular culture, visual art, and political discourse, we will examine how Jesus is deployed in diverse, and often divergent, ways. We will especially focus on portraits of Jesus that illuminate notions of race and gender. As a CC120, the course attends to the critical study and analysis of primary texts (of varied media) and scholarly discourse. In addition, it highlights the interdisciplinary nature of religious studies, orients students to how scholars understand the crafting of religious identity, and demonstrates how religion operates in wider social, political, and cultural contexts.
One afternoon writing workshop.