mediabox, 2026

In A Brief History of the Idea of Narrative, playwright, novelist, and lapsed academic Jason Rothery traces the evolving, interrelated, and sometimes circuitous ways in which we Homo sapiens are constantly reconsidering our answer to the question: “What is a story?”

In this breezy but wide-ranging investigation, we’ll delve into the sultry dance between narrative content (the story being told) and form (the media used to tell that story), the dawn of fancy theoretical frameworks claiming to have solved the mystery of creativity, and the act of storytelling itself in all its shifting, protean guises.

From novels to video games, traditional narrative arcs to Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey, Formalism to Structuralism, orality to print, and from the singers of Homeric epics to the players of new media texts such as Tetris and Bioshock, A Brief History of the Idea of Narrative is an insightful and invigorating testament to the astonishing mutability of narrative. Ultimately, the question isn’t really “What is a story?”, but what our answer to that question says about our world, and ourselves.