Stories to Live By

Catalog description

The stories we choose to tell about ourselves are crucial in defining our sense of possibility. How we understand our past (what constellations of cause and effect we craft from our history) helps us navigate the choices we have to make in the future. What stories have we learned already? What others are latent? This course offers a history of narratives of the self. When and how did self-consciousness in texts begin to manifest itself? To what end? And how does the process of narrating changes of the self alter our very understanding of it? Cutting across a wide range of disciplines—from literature to narrative theory and narrative therapy, from Bildungsroman to evolutionary theory—this course considers textual representations of interior space. Students will complete a narrative writing assignment and two analysis papers in order to both experiment with their own stories and learn to interpret others.