| Description
| "We humans are always entangled in stories," writes the German philosopher Wilhelm Schapp. It is from this entanglement that we draw our notions of right or wrong, success or failure, truth and lie. The categories by means of which we navigate our lives are narrative in nature. We tell each other stories not only in order to entertain ourselves, but also to claim a place within the communities of which we are a part and to define the place of these communities within the larger scheme of things.
One indicator of the fundamental character of story-telling is the fact that narratives travel so easily - while the semantic nuances of a poem or a novel are easily lost in the process of translating them into a different culture or a different medium, the underlying narrative forms appear to be not only more durable, but also indifferent to the distinction between fact and fiction. But what are the elements of a narrative that make it possible for us to identify, for example, both the movie
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