Often, "storytelling" is a word with negative associations, like "old wives' tale" or "gossip". It's a word we confuse with "lying" or "telling a falsehood", even as we acknowledge the ability of great fiction to reveal powerful truths about ourselves and the world we live in. In some sense, this division represents a disconnect between the Great Literature we value and the stories told by "real" people, as though authors were somehow invented as a vehicle to sell books. In examining the limited perspective of all storytellers, even Great Writers, we can feel empowered to add out own stories to the mix, almost like a dialogue of equals--students can retell and talk back to William Goldman in the same way that Goldman "abridges" and critiques his fictional source, S. Morgenstern.
Putting together these lessons has been a challenging task for me, especially when it comes to writing questions and instructions for a particular activity - because of the collaborative nature of my teaching, fixing these words to the page is like transcribing half of a conversation before the responses can be given. I believe that input and collaboration from students is essential to making the study of any texts meaningful, but especially in the study of storytelling, which relies on a group of people for its very existence--who can tell a story without a listener?
While I already had an idea of which texts and audiovisual materials I wanted to include, those in turn led me to discover new sources--too many to include in a four week unit! By including a variety of stories and mediums for storytelling, this unit intends to expose students to new ways of experiencing and/or creating stories.
In discussing works by James, Austen, Nabokov and others, Azar Nafisi and her students explored their own complex feelings of oppression, anger, and guilt: "The worst crime committed by totalitarian mind-sets is that they force their citizens, their victims, to become complicit in their crimes" declares one student upon finishing Nabakov's Invitation to a Beheading (76). The story acts as a catalyst for the student's own story of being jailed and forced to confess to crimes she had not committed, a testament to the sometimes dangerous and destructuve power of stories. However, the false confession is challenged by the student's version of events narrated in Nafisi's work, an attempt to reclaim the powerful role of storyteller. As a reader and an educator concerned with global justice , I find hope (I must) in the idea of telling and sharing stories as a subversive act, a way of diverting and disrupting the powerful stories that seek to oppress, and reclaiming the freedom to shape one's own experience through language.
