The Stories We Tell
by Rex Nielson
Stories, some argue, are as fundamental to human existence as the air we breathe. Whether we notice them or not, stories both surround and permeate our lives, giving shape to our identity and behavior, our memories of the past and ambitions for the future. They are what bind us to each other and underlie human relationships in families, communities, nations, and across the globe. They seem to be always in the air, and they even flow like the wind, at times imperceptibly expanding to fill space and condition our environment. And every so often they hit us with the force of a gale, knocking us down or pushing us forward, bringing into focus all our awareness and attention.
Understanding the power of stories lies at the heart of our work in the humanities. Long before 1969, when Tzvetan Todorov[1] first introduced the term narratology and proposed a science of storytelling, poets and prophets and philosophers of every kind understood that the stories we tell bear deep and wide-ranging influence on our presence in the world. As Peter Brooks has crisply observed, telling stories is “one of the principal ways we organize our experience.” Paul Ricoeur famously argues in Time and Narrative (1983) that storytelling not only enables us to conceptualize time but is the very act that gives meaning to reality. The Mozambican novelist Mia Couto puts it this way:
Essa necessidade absoluta, como se fosse uma necessidade de comer e de beber, de viver numa história, de se produzir a fantasia, é algo absolutamente essencial pra que nós nos constituamos como criatura. Eu acho que isso tá inscrito, é como se fosse uma coisa genética. Nós somos criaturas de histórias. Somos feitos de células, de átomos, sim, mas de histórias.[2]
[This absolute need, like the need to eat and drink, to live in a story, to produce fantasy, is something absolutely essential for us to be able to constitute ourselves as creatures. I think it’s inscribed in us, as if it were something genetic. We are creatures of stories. We are made of cells, of atoms, yes, but also of stories.]
Scholars of the humanities and scientists of human behavior appear to agree on this point—perhaps no art or practice more completely sets us apart from the non-human world than our innate need and ability both to tell and to receive stories.
This 2025-2026 academic year, the BYU Humanities Center will give specific attention to the ways that stories educate, entertain, and inspire. Through the course of our programming, we will consider our need to tell stories and the complex ways that stories define our experience. We will learn from colleagues whose work focuses on story form and reception. We will examine story ownership (who gets to tell a particular story) and what moral and ethical consequences stem from both telling and hearing a story. We will likewise contemplate a variety of adjacent notions relating to the work of story translation, how AI may already be impacting our practices of story creation and consumption, how stories impact our pedagogical methods, as well as the role of storytelling in building faith. In sum, we will think together about how stories help us give meaning to our lives, and I invite you to join us this year in exploring the stories we tell.
[1] Tzvetan Todorov first used the term in his Grammaire du Décameron to describe Bocaccio’s narrative practice: “cet ouvrage reléve d’une science qui n’exist pas encore, disons la narratologie, la science du récit” [this work pertains to a science which does not yet exist—let us say narratology, the science of narrative] (10).
[2] Quote taken from an interview of Mia Couto by Kamille Viola, “As vozes femininas de Mia Couto,” Revista vertigem, 2015, n.p.