Enchantment

This is an essay of mine, dating back to the early 1990s. I recently went back to it, to think again about the way storytelling puts meanings and feelings into places. In the most literal sense, storytelling is a process of 'enchantment' -- singing, saying, writing, chanting significance into a place.

The essay was first published in WORLD LITERATURE TODAY in 1993. An expanded version (the one that you can read in the attachment) then appeared in a book edited by Tony Barta, Screening the Past: Film and the Representation of History, London: Praeger, 1998.