Narrative, Film, and Synthesis

Why literature? Because selfhood is narrative. Culture is narrative. Meaning is something we make—and remake—through stories.

Frank Kermode’s The Sense of an Ending argues that we need endings to make sense of middles—that narrative structure isn’t just entertainment but a fundamental way humans organize experience and face mortality.

Watch one to three of the films. Each explores love, loss, and time in radically different registers. Call Me by Your Name gives us first love as sensory immersion. Her imagines intimacy with an AI—what it means to love something that grows beyond you. In the Mood for Love is about the love that doesn’t happen, the space between two people who almost touch.

What vision of the good life emerges from this course? How do heartbreak and happiness belong together?