Everything is a Story: Creative Interactions in Anglo-American Studies.

Abstract

This volume mirrors the intellectual exchange that took place in the 39th APEAA (Portuguese Association for Anglo-American Studies) International Conference at the University of Évora in 2018. Using interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary approaches, the essays in this volume show that the concept of “story,” associated with an art form, may help cross disciplinary borders, especially those between literature and other areas of knowledge. This critical perspective also aims at showing that interdisciplinarity should be more than a fashionable word used across academic studies. It is a creative, assimilative and accepting approach. It allows deviations and original interactions. It opposes strict patterns that can create borders between different fields of study, such as Literary Studies, Cultural Studies, Translation Studies, Film and Theatre Studies, Linguistics, Philosophy, and the Arts. Interdisciplinarity gives creative freedom. It ends artificial and conventional barriers that separate one form of knowledge from another. Stories connect knowledge to life, and, for this reason, they are at once multi- and interdisciplinary. Cross-disciplinary exchanges such as this can be very stimulating and help us to discover many possible parallels, corresponding ideas and plots everywhere and in every research area, which may lead us to conclude that EVERYTHING IS A STORY.