"Writers aspire to be more than storytellers" - Michael Schmidt

Amazon

Research Professor Su-kyung Hwang of Chung-Ang University has asked me to present a paper at an upcoming conference:

[We will] have the international conference on the 12th and 13th of December. The big theme of the conference is going to be "STORYTELLING" and I'll let you know further details when I have them. We welcome various research topics related to storytelling and most of the time schedule thirty minutes for each presentation (twenty minutes to deliver the paper, and ten minutes for open discussion) although it has not been fixed yet. We hope that you can come and present a paper for us.

I'm certainly happy to try to get something worked up, and I came upon an interesting remark just yesterday Michael Schmidt's literary critical magnum opus, The Novel: A Biography:

Writers aspire to be more than storytellers: they play with and against the rules. The "reality" of fiction is unlike the reality of linear narrative and unlike the complex intersecting realities of daily life . . . . Art entails artifice, and in form a novel must be true to itself, an instance of itself, its first artistic purpose. Its consistency, its coherence within the conventions it proposes and within which it operates, are paramount. (Schmidt, The Novel, page 814)

Perhaps I can work up something on that . . .