For the fifth week of TORCH Goes Digital, we focused on the theme of “Storytelling”. As Joan Didion once said, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live." From the captivating Lascaux cave drawings, to The New York Time's Modern Love column, storytelling has been an integral part of the human experience for millenia.
We cast an eye back to May 2019 to the People's Landscapes Lecture Series, where expert speakers explored how writers, artists and musicians have told stories about places. Many more stories of discovery and re-interpretation are featured in Trusted Source, our growing collection of short and easily understood articles about history, culture and the natural environment, developed in partnership with the National Trust. Such stories include Dr Allison Adler Kroll’s article on the Bloomsbury Group, and Dr Sarah Spooner’s exploration of Humphry Repton’s Red Books.
We also highlighted two Book at Lunchtime discussions centred around Prof Colin Burrow’s Imitating Authors and Prof Derek Attridge’s The Experience of Poetry. The former provides us with an original literary history of imitation and a fascinating account of how authors from the earliest stages of Western literature to the present day have imitated each other. The latter book ponders whether the experience of poetry—or a cultural practice we now call poetry—continuously available across the two-and-a-half millennia from the composition of the Homeric epics to the publication of Ben Jonson's Works and the death of Shakespeare in 1616?
On the evening of Thursday 23rd April, we had our third Big Tent, Live Events! live-streamed event with Prof Emma Smith (English Faculty, University of Oxford) and Erica Whyman OBE (Royal Shakespeare Company) speaking on "This is Shakespeare". The live-stream went extraordinarily well, with over 270 people tuning in to watch, and over 1,500 views since then.
