2023
Teaching Experimental Narratives
I have always thought of teaching as a great privilege, and the idea that I would be paid to read, think, write, collect pictures, and tell stories, even now after all these years seems extraordinary. As opposed to the idea that the role of the University is to prepare students for the capitalist labour market, I have always seen my job as creating opportunities for students to explore their creative and critical imagination. So far, I have taught two short courses here in Brasil that continue my longstanding interest in narrative construction that formed the basis of several courses I used to run in Glasgow. The first Constructing Narrative Landscapes, asked students to select any aspect of everyday life - an event, social movement, object, building or person - and to develop a captioned illustrated story board using any combination of visual media. The results, as always when you open up the opportunity for students to explore their poetic imagination were fascinating. Some of the highlights were a board game about the textual and visual history of slavery, the story of a poisoned enchanted river in indigenous territories, and an A.I produced visual interpretation of some of the myths believed by fanatical Bolsonaristas. The second project, Architecture, Literature, and the City, drew on some of the essays in the volume I edited for Routledge and in particular Matteo Pericoli’s Laboratory for Literary Architecture. Each student was asked to select a work of Brasilian fiction. These included short stories, memoirs and classics like Macunaíma, a hero without character, by Mario de Andrade, O Cortiço, The Slum, by Aluísio de Azevedo and A Cidade Sitiada, The Besieged City, by the late modernist Clarice Lispector. They were then required to conduct a spatial analysis and make a three-dimensional model using recycled materials that represented the novel’s dominant chronotopic structure. As in all such projects the end-product is less important than the students’ educational journey and the dynamic conversations that take place as students transgress the boundaries between different disciplines and confront new areas of knowledge.