What Time's Got to Do With It. Storytelling and Popular Culture. (Theoretical seminar)

Seminar by Ursula Ganz-Blättler

From a structuralist viewpoint the activity of storytelling is explained as a way of organizing the world - AS IT IS - according to paradigmatically and syntagmatically structured sign relations. In a more constructivist, system-oriented view the art of telling stories is explained as a collaborative, profoundly social process of world making and - maintenance via the strategic use (and not so strategic slippage) of what is known, and not known, about these collectively shared and inhabited worlds. In this seminar emphasis is given to the workings of time within this process, via basic readings (Luhmann, Ricoeur, Hagemann, Tudor, Jenkins, and Newcomb) and the close reading of examples that are taken from serial storytelling in "quality" television (80s and 90s) and trans media storytelling in the web 2.0 age.