Explore/Literature & storytelling

Literature & storytelling

A narrator’s selection of detail affects what a reader can infer.

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Introduction to Literature & storytelling

How does a story guide what we notice?

Literature & storytelling3h · IntroductionBeginner

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Close reading

How do you build an interpretation from the words on the page?

Literature & storytelling22h · TopicBeginner

Narrators and trust

How can we test a narrator’s account?

Literature & storytelling14h · TopicSome background

Poetry and address

What changes when a poem addresses someone?

Literature & storytelling14h · TopicSome background

Read a thinker or author

W. E. B. Du Bois

Sociology, history and literary arguments about race, citizenship and double consciousness. Read the framing of a passage alongside the evidence it uses.

Rabindranath Tagore

Poetry and arguments about education, imagination and human relations. Attend to the differences between Bengali works and their English renderings.

Iris Murdoch

Moral attention, imagination and the difficulty of seeing another person fairly. Her fiction and philosophy offer different ways to examine those problems.

Zhuangzi

Stories and arguments about perspective, language and skilled action. Start with a short episode and examine what its change of viewpoint does.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Nishnaabeg intellectual traditions, land-based learning and Indigenous resurgence. Begin with a specific account of learning rather than a universalised idea of Indigenous knowledge.

Jorge Luis Borges

Stories that examine memory, authorship, infinity and imagined systems of knowledge. Track the narrator’s evidence and the status of invented references.

Murasaki Shikibu

Narrative, poetry and relationships in the world of The Tale of Genji. Keep court titles, changing perspectives and translation choices visible.

Toni Morrison

Narrative memory, language and the afterlives of slavery. Distinguish a character’s recollection, a narrator’s arrangement and a historical claim.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Fiction and essays that reconsider social arrangements, gender and the technologies of ordinary life. Examine the assumptions built into a fictional world.

Clarice Lispector

Fiction that makes ordinary perception strange. Read the shifts in voice and attention before reducing a scene to a single theme.

Robin Wall Kimmerer

Botany, Potawatomi knowledge and arguments about reciprocity. Keep empirical questions and obligations toward the living world visible together.

Connect this subject

How does a language shape a question?

Compare conceptual translation, argument and literary voice. A shared question can expose differences without erasing them.

Who gets to tell a history?

Study narrative voice alongside archives and collective memory. Compare the evidence available to a reader and the people left outside the account.