Once upon a time a group of academics analyzed storytelling – and they’re still at it. Historians, literary scholars, folklorists, psychologists, medievalists, theater scholars, and performers gather once a month at New York University to discuss storytelling and its role in society. Professors and students tackle issues such as the nature of oral and written narratives and the persuasiveness of stories.

Two French professors at NYU, Evelyn “Timmie” Birge Vitz and Nancy Regalado, and one of their colleagues in the history department, Martha Hodes, organize this remarkable workshop sponsored by the NYU Humanities Council. The group’s fifth meeting will take place on February 4 and consist of a day of graduate student roundtables. At its sixth meeting on March 4, two panel discussions will focus on storytelling in the Middle Ages.

In December, the chosen topic was “Storytelling in American History.” In the morning session, Ms. Hodes spoke on skin color and memory in the context of family stories in the 19th century. She discussed the mutable nature of perception of color in the present as well as the past. Ms. Hodes is currently writing a book about a family whose racial and national boundaries range between the British West Indies, New England, and the South.

The session also offered remarks by Rutgers law professor David Dante Troutt.

An earlier workshop explored the relation of storytelling to law and medicine, and how stories can aid in healing and conflict resolution. A law professor at NYU, Peggy Cooper-Davis, moderated one session in her field. Cognitive psychologist and NYU law school professor Jerome Bruner gave the principal address.

Mr. Bruner expressed his concerns that details that make stories powerful are often ruled inadmissible in court. Law stories are highly ritualized, he said, and focus on the act rather than the context of the act. Law narratives are terse and to the point, he added.

For facts to ring true, Mr. Bruner said, they must to have narrative coherence. Law stories told before a court of law, he said, “are obsessed with the peripeteia,” or the turn of events, that has upended the ordinary state of affairs.

Another law professor from NYU, Anthony Amsterdam, spoke next. When he opened his talk, he joked that trying to comment on Mr. Bruner’s words was like “trying to polish a moving Ferris wheel with a Kleenex dipped in Windex.”

“What makes law stories unique?” Mr. Amsterdam asked. They are characterized by four C’s – “constrained, combative, closed, and compulsive.” If all storytellers may be said to be liars, legal storytellers are constrained liars, he said. The litigants are constrained by facts and legal rules. If there is a knife in his client’s back, the court will look at fingerprints on the knife or will consider “feckless fumbling at the fingerprint lab.” But the law limits what the court will look at to such a small part “so you can purport to talk knowledgeably” about it. Operationally, law stories respect what is called the elements of a crime, he said.

Law stories are combative by nature, Mr. Amsterdam said. There is a winner and a loser, and the stories are close ended: They point to a single conclusion designed to leave no doubts. Given the high stakes at a trial, lawyers’ arguments and judicial briefs are designed to explain a result ordained by, rather than fall prey to, “frail, fallible human judgment.”

Later that day, an afternoon session considered the link between medicine and storytelling. The principal speaker was Dr. Rita Charon, director of the program in narrative medicine and a professor of clinical medicine at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. She said physicians, nurses, and their colleagues had to listen for, hope to elicit, and invite “the story of the person who comes to us in trouble.” An open question such as, “What brought you to the clinic today?” may or may not draw out the patient’s story. The standard barrage of written questions may not in fact be the most productive way for a doctor to spend the first hour with the patient, Dr. Charon said. Once, while encouraging one patient to speak up about his problems, the patient responded to Dr. Charon’s inquisitiveness with, “You mean, you want me to talk?”

“When people become ill, they become storytellers,” Dr. Charon said. She spoke of the therapeutic potential of narrative in medicine, in particular of attentive listening. “The site of clinical telling,” namely, the office containing two people, one suffering and the other empathetically listening, was another area she touched on. After allowing a patient to express himself or herself, the doctor or clinician generally makes notes on a medical chart or private journal. Dr. Charon supports, as one approach, an alternative collaborative practice where both the patient and the doctor together write a narrative record for future use.

The director of Columbia University’s Oral History Research Office, Mary Marshall Clark, spoke movingly about the “September 11, 2001, Oral History Memory and Narrative Project,” which is gathering a wide range of accounts of persons both directly and indirectly affected by the tragedy of September 11. She spoke of “entering the life story of the teller.”