Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Staging Patti Smith: (Un)Reliable Stories, Identity, And The Audience-Text-Reader Relationship, Catherine Mckinnon

Catherine M McKinnon

Humans are the only animals that use stories to help make sense of the world. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan argues that ‘we lead our lives as stories, and our identity is constructed both by the stories we tell ourselves and others about ourselves and by the master narratives that consciously or unconsciously serve as models for ours’ (2002:11). An inquiry into how humans construct stories is also an inquiry into reliable and unreliable narration, into identity, and into the relationship between author, text and reader. It goes to the root of what it means to be human. In this paper these three …