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Storytelling as Inquiry: Course Schedule

College Seminar
Bryn Mawr College
Story Telling as Inquiry
Fall 2007

Course Schedule

   
I. Reading and Revising One's Self
 
T, 9/4

Introduction to the course

Reading an image

 
Th, 9/6 Tracy Chapman. "Telling Stories."
Patricia Hempl. "Memory and Imagination." I Could Tell You Stories. New York: Norton, 1999. 21-37.
Mary Catherine Bateson. Composing a Life. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1989. 1-34, 232-241.
Maxine Hong Kingston. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts. New York: Knopf, 1976. 189-196.
Audre Lorde. "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action." Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Freedom, California: Crossing Press, 1884. 40-44 		Forum writing
 
T, 9/11 Reflection/discussion Write a 2-3 page essay on your own life of learning
Th, 9/13 Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm. "Little Briar Rose" and "Cinderella." The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales. Trans. Margaret Hunt. Revised James Stern. New York: Pantheon, 1972. 118-122, 64-71.
"A Boarhog for a Husband" and "Yeh-Shen." Myths, Legends and Folktales of America. Ed. David Leeming and Jack Page. New York : Oxford University Press, 1999. 90-93, 202-206.
"Making the Stone Smoke" and "Why They Name the Stories for Anansi." Afro-American Folktales: Stories From the Black Tradition in the New World. Ed. Roger Abrahams. New York: Pantheon, 1985. 97-98, 182-183.
Karen Armstrong. Buddha. New York: Viking, 2001. 30-33.
Anne Sexton. "Cinderella" and "Briar Rose (Sleeping Beauty)." Transformations. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. 52-57, 106-112. 		Forum writing
 
T, 9/18 Reflection/discussion Recompose your life of learning as a fairy tale
Th, 9/20 Bruno Bettelheim. "Reflections: The Uses of Enchantment."The New Yorker (December 8, 1975): 50-114. Forum writing
 
II. Ordering and Re-ordering the World
 
T, 9/25 Reflection/discussion Write an analysis of your fairy tale
Th, 9/27 Bertolt Brecht. Galileo. 1952; rpt. New York: Grove, 1966. Forum writing
 
T, 10/2 Reflection/discussion Write a 2-3 page essay on motivations/ways of revising stories, pros/cons of doing so.
Th, 10/4 Edwin Abbott. Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions. 1885; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1984.
Michel Foucault. Preface and Forward. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. 1966; 		Forum writing
 
T, 10/9 Reflection/discussion Revise your essay, incorporating ideas from Abbott/Foucalt
Th, 10/11 Daniel Dennett. Chapters 1-3. "Tell Me Why," "An Idea is Born" and "Universal Acid." Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995. 17-83. Forum writing
 
T, 10/16 Fall Break
Th, 10/18 Fall Break
 
III. Recognizing and Using the Story Teller
 
T, 10/23 Reflection/discussion Revise your essay again, incorporating ideas from Dennett
Th, 10/25 Michael Polanyi. The Tacit Dimension. New York: Anchor, 1967. 3-25
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. "Introduction: Who are We?" "The Cognitive Unconscious" and "The Embodied Mind." Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books, 1999. 3-44.		 Forum writing
 
T, 10/30 Reflection/discussion Summarize your observations on tacit understanding
Th, 11/1 Lev Semenovich Vygotsky. "The Problem and the Approach" and "Thought and Word." Thought and Language. Trans. Eugenia Hanfmann and Gertrude Vakar. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press, 1962. 1-8, 119-153
Steven Pinker. "An Instinct to Acquire an Art" and "Chatterboxes." The Language Instinct. New York: HarperPerennial, 1995. 15-54		 Forum writing
 
T, 11/6 Reflection/discussion Draft an interpretation of your observations on tacit understanding
Th, 11/8 Oliver Sacks. "The Last Hippie" and "A Surgeon's Life."An Anthropologist on Mars. New York: Vintage, 1995. 42-107. Forum writing
 
IV. Noticing and Revising Cultural Stories
 
T, 11/13 Reflection/discussion Complete a 4-5 page paper on tacit understanding
Th, 11/15 Leslie Marmon Silko. "Language and Literature from a Pueblo Indian Perspective." Critical Fictions, ed. Philomena Mariani. Seattle: Bay Press, 1991. 83-93.
Clifford Geertz. "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight." The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays. New York: Basic, 1973. 195-240. 		Forum writing
 
T, 11/20 Reflection/discussion Write a 2-3 page essay on some aspect of a culture with which you are familiar
Th, 11/22
Thanksgiving Break
 
T, 11/27 Ray McDermott and Hervé Vareene. "Culture As Disability." Anthropology and Education Quarterly 26, 3 (1995): 324-348. Forum writing
Th, 11/29 Reflection/discussion Write a 2-3 page essay on the disabling features of a culture with which you are familiar
 
T, 12/4 Mary Shelley, Frankenstein Forum writing
Th, 12/6 Frankenstein, continued  
 
V. Noticing and Revising Bryn Mawr's Stories
 
T, 12/11 Reflection/discussion Complete a 4-5 pp. essay on the relation between individual and cultural aspirations
Th, 12/13 Helen Horowitz. "A Certain Style of Quaker Lady Dress" and "Behold They Are Women!" Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s. New York: Knopf, 1984. 105-133.
Rita Rubinstein Heller. "An 'Unnatural' Institution." "The Women of Summer: The Bryn Mawr Summer School for Women Workers, 1921-1938." Dss. Rutgers University, 1986. 1-36.
Selections from Bryn Mawr Alumnae Bulletin. (October 1921-May 1935). Anthropology and Education Quarterly 26, 3 (1995): 324-348. 		Forum writing

A final performance, plus a 3-5 pp. written project:
(an account of the performance, or of what you've learned in the course generally,
or a critical reflection on Bryn Mawr culture particularly).

Portfolio, including final project, are due by 12:30 pm, Friday, December 21.

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Narrative is determined not by a desire to narrate but by a desire to exchange. (Roland Barthes, S/Z)