“On the other hand, stories must rely on a literary canon, history, culture, etc., to uphold their believability.”

Hmmmm, so, you are implying stories depend on textuality to “uphold believability “This is a thought that I’d like to examine.  Why would the idea that textuality brings believability to a story –be so?  It is true that western cultures predominantly preach the believability and reliability of the written word over the spoken word, for all sorts of interesting reasons that we will explore through-out this course. However, there are cultures for which the spoken word carries far more weight in terms of believability because the spoken word has a witness. And, interestingly, in western cultures there is an exception to this notion found in our court rooms. Spoken testimony under special circumstances, the court room for example, is considered highly believable.

Thanks for the thought- provoking idea that the spoken word relies on the written word to uphold believability. Thinking about why this seems ‘logical’ or even ‘common sense’ is important in the process of unlearning and learning to listen. We are, all of us, dominated by one narrative or another, but we are able to ‘step into the intersections’ and see where the ‘other’ narratives lead and equally able to learn new ways of seeing and believing in the world.

Your concluding statement is equally thought provoking:

“Yet as one is hard-pressed to give up one form for the other, this duality serves no larger purpose, both forms work together and to separate one from the other seems counterproductive in terms of simple communication.”

I would say along with others, the purpose served was a colonizing purpose: to subjugate a people. We will discuss this further, for now I simply want to point out one of many colonizing strategies that we will examine in literature and the stories we tell ourselves.