Against Storytelling

AN UNUSUAL SELECTION OF WRITINGS ABOUT THE DIFFERENT ASPECTS OF STORYTELLING IN OUR TIME.

At what point did we begin to say, ‘We are all storytellers’? Far from being a timeless idea, the statement seems to go back to no further than the 1980s, coterminous with the dawning of a new kind of epic novel, an unprecedented supremacy for the English language, and the era of economic liberalisation. Who was it who made ‘storytelling’ synonymous with cultures outside the West? And could it just be conceivable that much of what’s most worthwhile about writing and creativity occur on the fringes of the story?

The essays in this book, delivered originally as talks at a Literary Activism symposium, look again at the assumptions that underlie the way we think of storytelling and storytellers. The contributors include Tiffany Atkinson, Charles Bernstein, Jean-Frédéric Chevallier, Jeremy Harding, Anjum Hasan, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Geoffrey O’Brien and Gurvinder Singh.