The Millions

Storytelling Has Gotten Out of Hand: The Millions Interviews Peter Brooks

In 1984, , now an emeritus professor of Comparative Literature at Yale, published , in which he argued that “[o]ur lives are ceaselessly intertwined with narrative, with the stories that we tell and hear told, those we dream or imagine or would like to tell, all of which are reworked in that story of our own lives that we narrate to ourselves in an episodic, sometimes semiconscious, but virtually uninterrupted monologue. We live immersed in narrative, recounting and reassessing the meaning of our past actions, anticipating the outcome of our future projects, situating ourselves at the intersection of several stories not yet completed.”

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