Preface:

Since 2004, an event known as World Storytelling Day has been celebrated globally every year on the March Equinox (around March 20). Wikipedia notes that the “significance in the event lies in the fact that it is the first global celebration of storytelling of its kind, and has been important in forging links between storytellers often working far apart from each other. It has also been significant in drawing public and media attention to storytelling as an art form.” What is the future of the art of storytelling? To what extent will our students carry the stories of the past into the new imaginative worlds of the future? This course began with the foundational storytelling traditions of the premodern worlds of the nations which now comprise the regions of Asia and the Middle East – covering
the classic storytelling traditions composed in Sanskrit, Arabic, Chinese, and Persian. We carried this understanding of the past to engage with how storytelling continued into the modern world – and in its new languages – and what the future may hold for this fundamental of all human art forms. In addition to the stories themselves, of course, we considered theories of narratology, their relationship to religious and secular forms of life in these regions, and how to tell apart distinct forms of storytelling (myth, folklore, novelistic, sonic, graphic and visual storytelling).