Professor Barnhurst's Lecture

Professor Barnhurst’s guest lecture was about storytelling and some of the elements of it.  The lecture begins with an activity.  He first tells the students to get into pairs and tell each other the most recent story of a pivotal or important moment in their life.  While they do this, they take notes about each other’s stories.  After this, Professor Barnhurst tells every group to find another group to team up with and make a group of four.  In these groups of four, they share their stories again, observe their notes, and try to find patterns or consistencies between all four stories.  Some of the similarities that students found were that they tended to be brief stories with not very much detail, they tended to answer the questions who, what, where, when and why, and they tended to tie their stories into what happened in the future.

From here, the professor starts to explain the elements of storytelling.  He introduces a theorist named Lebob (or at least that’s what it sounded like) and explained some of his findings about storytelling.  He claims that before every story, there is an announcement that a story is about to be told, because if there wasn’t, people would be caught off guard and confused about what the speaker is talking about.  This kind of relates to “code switching” from our textbook, a term that describes when people use different kinds of communication styles to get a desired response from someone.  Introducing and beginning a story is a form of code switching.  The next part of the story is the “complicating action”, or the problem.  As we all know, the problems are what creates a story, because it is something that must be resolved.  Even in the studies that we have read for this class, they begin by introducing what they set out to learn from their experiments, so this is a form of introducing the “complicating action.”  Next comes the response to the problem, and the resolution of the story.  Among all of these elements, he placed another element into its own category; interpretation.  Interpretation takes place during every part of the story from the listener’s perspective, so it isn’t in a specific part of the order of the story.  Interpretation relates to what we learned in our own class because we are constantly trying to interpret the actions of others, through their intentional, unintentional, verbal, and non-verbal cues.

Finally, he mentions judgment, but this is when the video cuts off.  I wonder how the lecture actually ended because the beginning was pretty interesting, but I guess I’ll never know.  I assume that he would say that judgment is an accumulation of all of the interpretations of the story put together at the end.  Storytelling is one of my favorite ways of communicating, so it’s a shame the video was messed up.