The World as Story was interesting to me because it gave me a chance to hear scholars from other disciplines more formally introduce narratology into their work. While ideas about story formation and interpretation implicitly underlie almost everything else I engage in, I hadn’t seen the kinds of direct arguments for the relevance of narrative which each of the readings and lectures presented.
I’ve been privileged to study largely within contexts where humanities study is valued already, so I’ve never really had to convince a skeptical audience of the value of different narrative theories, methods, and practices to my more technical skills domains. But seeing the specificity with which fields like narrative ecology and narrative economics are laid out reminds me that many fields in academia and industry will take more groundwork and careful convincing to see the relevance of the “soft” skills I’m gaining in this program.
What influence this is going to have on my futures project, I can’t possibly say, but I’ll bear it in mind as I move forward with my proposal.
