Reading Narrative Theory

Catalog description

Narrative is a powerful category of analysis spanning genres, historical periods, media forms, and the distinction between the "fictional" and the "real." This course examines major narrative theorists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We will focus on literary examples, such as theories of the folktale and novel, and scholarship that interrogates the work of narrative in historiography, in cinema and television, and in extra-literary contexts (in the struggle of political campaigners to “control the narrative” or debates on narrative in gaming, medical research, law, and theory itself). Limited to 20 senior English concentrators. Others admitted by instructor permission only.