HUM 210: Understanding our World Through the Arts

The term “vulnerable realism” can imply two different understandings: one presenting weak realism as incomplete, and mixed with other literary styles; the other bringing realistic vulnerable experience into narration. The second is the key concern of this work, though it does not exclude the first, as it asks questions about realism as such, entering into a polemic with the tradition of literary realism. Realism, then, is not primarily understood as a narrative style, but as a narration that tests the probability of nonhuman vulnerable experience and makes it real.

In Curated Stories, Sujatha Fernandes considers the rise of storytelling alongside the broader shift to neoliberal, free-market economies. She argues that stories have been reconfigured to promote entrepreneurial self-making and restructured as easily digestible soundbites mobilized toward utilitarian ends. Not just a critical examination of the contemporary use of narrative and its wider impact on our collective understanding of pressing social issues, Curated Stories also explores how storytelling might be reclaimed to allow for the complexity of experience to be expressed in pursuit of transformative social change.

Veteran podcast creator and strategist Eric Nuzum distills a career's worth of wisdom, advice, practical information, and big-picture thinking to help podcasters "make noise"--to stand out in this fastest of fastest-growing media universes. Nuzum identifies core principles, including what he considers the key to successful audio storytelling: learning to think the way your audience listens.

Mediated Narration in the Digital Age examines mediated narration from 1991 through 2018. Peter Joseph Gloviczki considers this pivotal period spanning the rise of the World Wide Web through the growth of social media to understand how contemporary media accounts storied everyday life and times of crisis. He uses examples across media culture to show that complicated issues benefit from a critical poststructuralist approach to journalism, which promotes a communitarian ethos of respect, inclusion, and dialogue.

Every communication field now requires students to be fluent in visual storytelling skill sets, and as the present-day media adapt to a multiplatform world (with ever-increasing delivery systems from desktops to cell phones), students specializing in different forms of communication are discovering the power of merging new multimedia technology with very old and deep-rooted storytelling concepts.

Performing Environmentalisms examines the existential challenge of the twenty-first century: improving the prospects for maintaining life on our planet. The contributors focus on the strategic use of traditional artistic expression--storytelling and songs, crafted objects, and ceremonies and rituals--performed during the social turmoil provoked by environmental degradation and ecological collapse.

Journalist and critic Robert Fulford explores narrative in all of its forms--from conversation, gossip, and urban legends to journalism, literature, film and television. Fulford illustrates how storytelling formed the core of civilized life, how stories shape us as much as we shape stories, and why the human appetite for narrative persists.

Initiating a transgeneric, intermedial and interdisciplinary approach to narrative unreliability, this volume is meant to enrich, modify and refine our understanding of (un)reliable narration by taking into account research in a variety of fields. The three sections of the volume comprise articles on the theory of unreliable narration, transgeneric and intermedial issues, and studies from areas such as journalism, politics, law and medicine.