This is the course home page for Jonah Willihnganz. I am the Braden Lecturer in Narrative Art at Stanford University and the director of the The Stanford Storytelling Project. an initiative that explores the power and craft of oral narrative. I teach courses at Stanford in creative writing, literature, and cultural studies, and I am also a former Fellow of the Stanford Humanties Center. My writing has appeared in places like American Literary Review and The National Interest (weird, I know) and I sometimes tell stories live for the San Francisco Porchlight Storytelling Series. My latest piece, on Richard Wright's first novel, Lawd Today!, appears in the collection Broadcasting Modernism. From this page you can navigate to some of the courses I teach. If a link is not active, the course is under construction or off-line at the moment. |
| The Art of Storytelling | The Rhetoric of Oral Narrative |
The Rhetoric of Modernism |
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Life's splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come. You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait, be quiet still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.
—Franz Kafka
photo: The Pacific, Big Sur © 2011 Kristin Herbster