TORCH Goes Digital! Storytelling
Good morning, and welcome to the fifth week of #TORCHGoesDigital! We can't believe it's been a month already! A huge thank you to everyone who tuned in to watch our second Big Tent, Big Ideas! live-streamed event with Professor Sally Shuttleworth and Professor Erica Charters.
This week, we are focusing on the theme of "Storytelling". We have carefully curated a brilliant programme of blog posts, podcasts, news articles, poems, performances and more.
As Joan Didion once said, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." From the captivating Lascaux cave drawings, to The New York Time's Modern Love column, storytelling has been an integral part of the human experience for millenia. Storytelling encompasses a rich variety of methods, sometimes with theatrics, improvisation and embellishment. Every human culture has its own stories and narratives. We tell stories to entertain, to educate, or to preserve the culture and history of our ancestors. We also tell stories to instill moral values and to persuade and manipulate. Margaret Atwood once said: "You’re never going to kill storytelling because it’s built into the human plan. We come with it.”
This week, we will be considering questions such as:
- How does performance and song bring poetry alive?
- How is disability treated in art and literature?
- How can reading affect eating disorders, for good or ill?
- How can comics develop new ways of critical thinking?
This Thursday 23rd April 2020, from 5.00pm-6.00pm, we have our next Big Tent, Big Ideas! live-streamed event! Prof Emma Smith (English Faculty, University of Oxford) and Erica Whyman OBE (Royal Shakespeare Company) will be speaking on "This is Shakespeare".
Remember, we are happy to feature any and all content submissions related to this theme, be it a poem, artwork, blog post, or book review!
Unleash your creativity, and send any and all suggestions and content to torch@humanities.ox.ac.uk.
