Introductory Material
Storytelling
Storytelling has evolved from what we usually imagine to be a group of primitive beings gathered around a campfire listening to one member of the group entrancing the rest with his tales. Today's frenetically paced television and YouTube snippets of life take the place of storytelling for us. The traditional study of stories and storytelling reveals many elements common to a good story. In addition to a concrete story structure, plot structures involving characters with specific purposes are necessary in certain types of stories. For instance, the sequence of events in hero stories follows a pattern, cautionary tales often have a series of three warnings, fairy tales which test the true nature of an individual offer three chances to show goodness of heart, and African tales feature a griot, or storytelling guide who leads the young with his tales of creation and how one is to function in the world. For further study of narrative conventions, consult any of the resources in the Bibliography.
The Short Stories
Each of the three short stories was chosen to explore how the individual functions alone and within society. The American way is to praise individualism and the first and third of the stories shows how individualism can have dire or positive results, but the second story is set in Rhodesia, where the native culture's idea of the importance of the individual and the importance of community differ from that of the Western world. To direct the study I have decided on a three-pronged interpretation of the theme of the Individual and Society: Identity, Fidelity, and Conformity. Each of the stories takes up one of these themes and will be followed by the study of a film that correlates to that theme.
Comments: