Event Host: Project Narrative
Short Description: Angus Fletcher, associate professor of English, will lay out some evidence from his book Wonderworks to identify 25 global literary inventions that can plug into our brain to alleviate trauma, increase problem-solving prowess, enhance creativity, mimic the anti-depressant effects of LSD, boost mental energy, spark love, encourage empathy and nurture mental health and wellbeing in dozens more ways.
In our STEM-mad age, we’ve become intimately familiar with the wondrous powers of cell phones, social media and other gadgetries. Yet what if we humans possessed an even more potent technology, one better than any steel-or-silicon apparatus at giving us the things we most deeply want and need? What if that technology was contained in the dusty old libraries of the humanities? And what if the way to access its empowering blueprints had been discovered by an underfunded gang of renegade scholars who called themselves the ‘Narrative Theorists’?
In this short talk and (hopefully) long discussion, Angus Fletcher, associate professor of English, will lay out some evidence in favor of the farfetched hypotheticals above. The evidence will be taken from his book Wonderworks (Simon & Schuster, 2021), which draws on neuroscience, experimental psychology and narrative theory to identify 25 global literary inventions that can plug into our brain to alleviate trauma, increase problem-solving prowess, enhance creativity, mimic the anti-depressant effects of LSD, boost mental energy, spark love, encourage empathy and nurture mental health and wellbeing in dozens more ways.
