This paper argues that the ideas people hold about teaching literary genres are out-of-date, that fictions of the imagination have been taken over by the media, which turn everything into entertainment and do not allow reflection. Student narratives are suggested as a way of incorporating personal narrative as a literary genre in order to create opposition to the prevalence of media. The student narrative genre is considered in this paper as an appropriate one for beginning the process of critical engagement between experience and culture. Several examples of student narratives are included to illustrate this thesis. (MKM)