ABSTRACT
This chapter explores story that always coincided with an interest in cognition and memory. We have many ways of thinking of story from a biological sense. Once we bring an explicit long-term memory back into working memory, it becomes short-term memory again. We now know the general pattern of brain activity that causes short-term memory to become long-term memory. The more we rehearse, in our conscious mind, but also in our dreams and subconscious, the deeper the pathway, the more the memory is sustained. By the 1920s and 1930s the stories became increasingly written not as outsider celebrations of the ordinary by authors of the "Other" but by working-class men and women, storytellers who lived racial, class, and gender oppression themselves. Inherent in the individualism of citizen democracy is that every story matters. In practice, twentieth-century media culture also can be seen as the triumph of the ordinary person.
