Leith, Sam. "GRAND THEFT AUTO, TWITTER and BEOWULF All Demonstrate that Stories will Never Die Daily." DAILY TELEGRAPH November 24, 2008.

The author Philip Pullman protested against what he saw as a decision to "relegate the whole activity of reading fiction to the status of a trivial and innocuous activity, like stamp collecting or playing with a Frisbee". I'm in agreement with him: reading fiction is not a trivial activity. Not only does narrative pleasure sugar the pill of learning in all sorts of areas, it is a good in and of itself. The old theory that there are only a handful of basic plots in all literature points to something. Storytelling is underpinned by myth. The characters in Beowulf, and in Henry James, and in Joel Schumacher's latest slam-bang movie extravaganza, all participate, with more or less elaborate variations, in archetype. One of the first people to look into this systematically was a Russian folklorist called Vladimir Propp, whose book The Morphology of the Folk Tale sought to distil a sort of universal genome of myth. He got pretty far with it. You don't have to be a crazed Jungian, a structural anthropologist, or a seven-basic-plots believer to agree that storytelling is something of universal importance in human experience, and something that exhibits deep and suggestive similarities across cultures. Myths, it has been said, are "good to think with". Storytelling is a way of trying out situations imaginatively, of preserving knowledge and social value, of attesting to a commonality of experience. Stories are central to how we think about the world: from the individual to the wide sweep of history. The ability to put yourself in another's shoes is the foundation-stone of all morality. And what is that but an imaginative process? Where do we learn it but in stories? . . . Read the rest here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/3563611/Grand-Theft-Auto%2C-Twitter-and-Beowulf-all-demonstrate-that-stories-will-never-die.html.