Reading and discussion of the short story "Sesame" (in Tales from the Mountain) and of its polysemic title (a reference to a cereal and to rural wealth; an incantation formula with a cultural meaning; an intertextual dialogue with Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves). Notions of time (chronological/psychological); space (small villages' connections with tales and legends); characters (individual/collective); narrator, narration and language (simplicity and regionalisms); symbologies (the cave, spinning, weaving and knitting); themes (innocence and disillusion, learning, integration and community; reality/fantasy, local/global); and moral of the story (magic is in everyday life rather than in fiction/imagination).

Screening of a segment ("The Sorcerer's Apprentice") of Fantasia (1999, animation film) to discuss the concept of hybris, the connection between storytelling and magic and another representation of the idea that imagination isn't always better than reality. 

The figure and importance of the storyteller according to Walter Benjamin (excerpts from "The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov", 1936).