Changing the Narrative: What Stories Can We Tell Now?
Every previous major disaster in human history, from the Black Plague to the Great Depression, has elicited a reimagination of the world, a reinvention of collective life through culture. The COVID-19 pandemic is no exception. The arts and humanities — two areas of inquiry that focus on value and meaning — provide crucial resources for reconceptualizing our lives together during, and after, our current crisis.
The series (Re)making Sense: The Humanities and Pandemic Culture examines the utility of the arts and humanities for helping us navigate the ethical challenges and practical reinventions that lie before us. Top scholars, writers, and artists at UC Berkeley discuss how their disciplines, and the skills and abilities fostered by their fields, can help in our efforts to reimagine and rebuild.
In the second event of this series, Anthony Cascardi and Catherine Gallagher discuss Changing the Narrative: What Stories Can We Tell Now? Two decades ago, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard announced that in the postmodern era, the “grand narratives” that had shaped culture and ideas — Marxism, positivism, psychoanalysis — were dead. His statement has proven true, both inside and outside the university. Philosophical systems, canons of knowledge, even essential ideas of national history seem to have eroded over the past several decades.
Anthony Cascardi is dean of arts and humanities and the Sidney and Margaret Ancker Distinguished Professor of comparative literature, rhetoric, and Spanish. His book Cervantes, Literature, and the Discourse of Politics won the Renaissance Society’s Gordan Prize for best book of the year in Renaissance studies.
Catherine Gallagher is professor emerita of English. Her 2018 book Telling It Like It Wasn’t: The Counterfactual Imagination in History and Fiction examines narratives of events that never occurred — such as the South winning the Civil War, and JFK escaping assassination. The book won the Jacques Barzun Prize in Cultural History from the American Philosophical Society. Gallagher is a founding member of the Representations editorial board.