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I agree, David--

though we all might try harder to do without the defensive, moralizing, self-serving sort of stories Professor X promulgates--that recognizing the contingency and constructness of stories doesn't make them "go away," that indeed we can't do without 'em (see the piece on the "privileged status of story" in American Educator 2004, which argues that, since people prefer structures that lead 'em into inferences, stories are easier to comprehend than other forms of text).

But I'd also say that there's still an open question about your notion that all stories depend on "shared understandings." How much do we really know about what it is we know? How dependent are our stories on a shared format that gives us an idea of what to expect? Just how much insider talk, how many shared assumptions, how much language must we have in common, in order to communicate with one another? How dependent are successful stories on causal connections and structures that make 'em easy to remember? How dependent on a shared sense of meaning for the events described?

I've found myself, for instance, over time, moving away from teaching senior-level seminars (the sort of courses that presume a shared vocabulary and shared basis of understanding), in favor of interdisciplinary first-year and mid-range courses in which students who are majoring in bio and and comp sci and english and gender studies and philosophy and psych can rub their very different disciplinary assumptions up against one another, in the hope of coming up with something new....

Speaking of generative "rubbing-against": have you noticed that your great questions about storytelling as a kind of shared convention have provoked some local conversation here @ Bryn Mawr about the intersections between teaching in the humanities and the sciences? One piece in particular that has prodded discussion, and which I find particularly apt for this conversation between you and me, is about metaphors for composing authors. Briefly, it argues that it is metaphor's lack of directness which it makes it so effective for students (=all of us), because it allows us to express attitudes we would/could not express in direct dicourse:

"metaphors work when (and because) they are incorrect, untrue, inaccurate, and subjective...precisely because they are wrong...'there is always the hope that this secret apprehension...which...I do not even know that I know...has a chance of being validated by what you said'" (my emphasis).

The author of this essay suggests that metaphor is a necessary feature of discourse when we try to cope with a new concept, and only becomes optional when we achieve mastery. If--as I think--we never actually master any thing, then metaphors are never optional, always useful, because always dependent on inexact, incomplete analogy. In this view, communication becomes less about shared conventions, more about making connections across difference. As see also Theorizing Interdisciplinarity and Why Words Arise--and Wherefore.

So: what place does the edgy metaphor fill in your own notions of rhetoric and conventional language?

[also x-posted on The Long Eighteenth]