Are we more connected than ever, or lonelier than ever? And are we lonelier precisely because of the constant availability of  “connection”? Increasingly, we find ourselves in insular communities of like-minded people, consuming culture curated to please us. Not only does social media control the content we consume, it also controls the way we respond to it. By translating complex feelings and ideas into pictorial signs, social media tells a simplified story about who we are, what we know, and where we belong, glossing over the paradoxical nature of community as both a refuge from violence and alienation and a site of that very violence and alienation. How might we tell these stories differently? How might we capture our human complexity and ambivalent desires? How might we specify the relationship between the individual and the group?  

This FIG offers two courses on modes of storytelling in society. The Literature and Society course will address these questions through a comparatist approach to literary, cinematic, and philosophical narratives. Assignments ranging from academic papers to video projects and fiction writing will help us to engage with storytelling both as critics and practitioners. While the Comparative Literature course focuses on aesthetic cultural texts, (fiction, literary nonfiction, and film), the FIG’s accompanying Media Studies course focuses on nonfiction storytelling, examining both the historical and structural features of media and its representations of gender, race, and class that form the basis of so many communities. Both of these perspectives will contribute to an examination of the utopian and dystopian dimensions of the bonds that ground communities as we attempt to answer the question of whether “belonging” is still imaginable.