'The Bearer-Beings': Portable Stories in Dislocated Times
Convened by Marina Warner, Weidenfeld Professor of Comparative European Literature, 2016 and President of the British Comparative Literature Association (BCLA) and Prof. Matthew Reynolds, Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation (OCCT). This initiative was kindly supported by the Metabolic Studio.
The workshop was led by the writers Philip Terry, Alice Oswald, and Tamim al-Barghouti, and the storyteller Ben Haggarty. It revolved around the concept of stories and their literary, oral, visual, or musical transmission, and explored how individuals communicate stories in different cultures, spaces, and times, with en eye to helping workshop participants create and transmit their own interesting variations of ancient myths or more modern folklore. Participants brought examples of myths and folktales to the workshop, and investigated how the transmission of stories is a distinctive, energetic, and dynamic process.
Videos of the presentations, readings and discussion are available here.
These Oxford-based workshops feed into a 3-day workshop in Sicily, September 26th-28th, 2016 that will engage with the expression, circulation, translation, and re-telling of stories in contemporary refugee and multicultural communities.
