Teaching Thursday: Narrative and the Humanities

We’re just concluding week 3 of the semester and I’m starting to feel like both myself and my students are settling into a groove. For example, my students in my first year seminar style class refused to answer fairly simple questions about the text we were discussing. This is usually a week 7 or 8 move, but they’re already bringing in week 3 (fortunately next week is the final week of the course!). I do my best to keep my research out of the class. This both keeps my work from becoming all consuming and keeps my students from feeling that all I do is talk about “my stuff.” That said, I’ve been all pepped up on Byung-Chul Han over the past year and this weekend had a chance to re-read his work, The Crisis of Narrative (2024). This prompted me to introduce to my class the tension between additive storytelling and traditional narrative. For Han, the former reinforces our experience of time being fragmented and (famously) whizzing around without structure, rhythm, or coherence. As a…