Tag: How do the stories that young people hear affect the ways in which they perceive their lives?
Dissertation: How Stories Affect The Way We Perceive Our Lives
by John Walker on Jun.08, 2010, under The Rest
I’ve had a few requests for me to publish my dissertation online. So I’m obliging. I’m sticking it up as a blog post, because heck, why not? But it is of course 10,000 words, so I apologise to your scrollbar.
It’s about the way stories affect the way we perceive our lives. It was written for a degree titled: Youth and Community Work & Applied Theology. So obviously it focuses on how story affects young people, and from a Christian perspective. However, I cover subjects like fairytale in some depth, and believe the principles apply to all ages. I wrote it five years ago, aged 27.
I’ve never read it. I don’t think even at the time, and certainly not in the five years since. Which may sound strange. Because I am such a colossal twit I started the whole thing, including doing the reading, a week and a half before it was due. So I didn’t really have time to read it from start to finish. The reason I got away with this act of extraordinary idiocy was because I was writing the culmination of years of thinking about the subject. I’m a bit frightened to read it now, since so much time has passed. In case you’re interested, it received a first, but only just. One of the markers wanted to bring it down to a 2.1 for various reasons, including my remarkable failure to reference the Proust quote in the bibliography. But luckily for me, for some reason they lost this fight.
I’m publishing it here under the catchily named Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.0 UK: England & Wales. This means that anyone can copy it, distribute it, and – um – perform it for free, including making any changes to it that they wish. The only conditions are that I am identified as the author, that it cannot be used for commercial purposes, and that if it is copied and changed the resulting document must also be published under the same license. Which seems fair.