Rationale
Storytelling, around since at least the Paleolithic, exists in many modes and is one of the most popular forms of entertainment all over the world. This omnipresence offers the opportunity to study it both in its universality and its particularity. That is, nowadays it is possible to study storytelling with the most rigorous research methods and means. These include a scientific aesthetics, socioneurobiology, and narratology.

Such concepts and categories are meant to show how storytellers create blueprints that direct understanding and guide interpretation by readers and audiences. We shall see that authors, author/artists and filmmakers follow generic structures or recreate them anew as their stories unfold for their audiences to be both in familiar and unfamiliar territory. This will lead us to examine aesthetic categories of genre (tragedy, comedy, the grotesque) and distance (including habituation and enstrangement) as well as their concomitant emotions. And of course, this discussion will allow us to look more closely at the notion of the aesthetic itself, as a specific domain of human activity marked as a particular relational activity.

Questions we will ask ourselves include: What do we mean by the aesthetic relation, or what is the aesthetic relation? What is the aesthetic object as an organic whole? Why do the aesthetic genres, their combinations, and their concomitant emotions (the comic, the tragic, the grotesque) play a role in the creation of the artistic blueprint and also in its interpretation and understanding?

This will lead us to explore the concept of the blueprint as the specific form storytelling assumes: a set of minimal road signs that the skilled storyteller establishes for the skilled readers/audiences to follow in their understanding and interpretation of the work, be it a short story, a comic book, or a film. We will come to understand better how as the story unfolds and we interpret it in its parts and as a whole, following the signposts inscribed by the author in the making (writing, filming) of her/his blueprint (short story, comic book, film). Our secondary readings in the field of narratology along with the application of findings in socioneurobiology will enrich our understanding of the creative mind as it concerns authors and readers, filmmakers and audiences.  Such general and specific knowledge will take some of the enigma out of how these complex processes take place.

Stories possess an internal and external meaning. They are “about” something (the plot, the story) and they are a shape, a form, a particular way of having been told (what narratologists call “discourse”). Stories are understood in these two dimensions as they unfold, and both are equally the pillars of all storytelling. But “discourse” has the more dynamic role, for it acts as the prime shape-giving and generative operator. Thanks to “discourse” storytelling is potentially an ever creative activity, always new, always renewed.

If, as Jorge Luis Borges once suggested about metaphors, stories too are limited in number, their telling is limitless; it can always be fresh and new because humans possess a unique capacity to generate an infinite number of shapes or forms and are able to apply to stories that same infinite creativity. So a question arises: what is narrative in general? And this question poses several other ones: What is narrative fiction in particular? Why nonfiction narrative is governed by the rules of truth and empirical discovery? And why narrative fiction is governed exclusively by the rules of sovereign creativity and is the product not of discovery but of constructed, imagined, created ingredients.

We want to know in the clearest terms possible, what elements are comprised within the category of story and within the category of discourse.  In the first case, we will explore and come to understand what plot and theme are and what character and events are. In the second case, we will study carefully and come to understand concepts of form and shape-giving, such as ordering, sequentiality, flashback and flashforward, rhythm, frequency, space, focalization, visual and auditive narrators, intradiagetic and extradiegetic music, mise-en-scène, panel, framing, and so on.

In our allotted two week period we will examine concepts that are not only useful, but indispensible to the scientific understanding of the specific domain of aesthetic activity we call the creation and reception of what have becometoday the dominant three storytelling media.  We will learn and explore as many well defined and clear cut concepts or tools that are necessary for the analysis of works (multicultural and otherwise) at hand in the domain of short story, comic books, and films. 

Wi
th an eye toward texts (multicultural and otherwise) we might teach in the classroom, the Project Narrative Summer Institute 2012 will explore these themes in conjunction with a group of diverse multiple media fiction narratives—short story, comic books, and film (t.v inclusive)—to provide insight into essential elements of narrative fiction and narrative theory.

PNSI 2012 has an explicit pedagogical aim.  We will work step by step toward the final goal of the course: to develop courses that use the tools of  narratology and advances in the brain sciences to analyze comic books, films (t.v.), and/or short stories.  This is an opportunity to develop courses that are attuned and responsive to the ever more present needs and interests of students today in audiovisual storytelling media.  We will end the two weeks with each of you developing your ideal course with the tools and knowledge acquired.