Postgraduate Course: Acts of Story-Telling: Narrator, Text, Audience (ENLI11134)
Course Outline
| School | School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures |
College | College of Humanities and Social Science |
| Course type | Standard |
Availability | Not available to visiting students |
| Credit level (Normal year taken) | SCQF Level 11 (Postgraduate) |
Credits | 20 |
| Home subject area | English Literature |
Other subject area | None |
| Course website |
None |
Taught in Gaelic? | No |
| Course description | This course will challenge students to approach published works from the point of view of a practitioner and generate a discourse uniquely suited to analyzing fictional texts with an eye towards writing them. The course will deploy and foster such an analytic practice by examining fictional texts where the act of story-telling is explicitly incorporated into the narrative itself.
By approaching fictional texts as acts of story-telling, we will examine selected works with a particular emphasis on how the interplay between narrator and audience shapes the story. Analyzing the dynamic relationship between story-teller and audience in each text, students will grapple with the crucial and complex role narrative voice plays in propelling a plot, developing characters, engaging readers, and inscribing ¿meaning.¿ |
Entry Requirements (not applicable to Visiting Students)
| Pre-requisites |
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Co-requisites | |
| Prohibited Combinations | |
Other requirements | None |
| Additional Costs | None |
Course Delivery Information
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| Delivery period: 2012/13 Semester 1, Not available to visiting students (SS1)
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Learn enabled: Yes |
Quota: 30 |
| Location |
Activity |
Description |
Weeks |
Monday |
Tuesday |
Wednesday |
Thursday |
Friday |
| Central | Seminar | Room 2.01, 10 Buccleuch Place | 2-11 | | | | | 10:00 - 12:00 | | Central | Seminar | Room 1.02, 14 Buccleuch Place | 2-11 | | | | | 14:00 - 15:50 |
| First Class |
Week 2, Friday, 10:00 - 12:00, Zone: Central. Room 2.01, 10 Buccleuch Place, Friday 28th September 2012 |
| Additional information |
|
| No Exam Information |
Summary of Intended Learning Outcomes
| Students will acquire knowledge of a range of fictional texts in which story-telling is thematized as a practice. They will be able to locate and situate how point-of-view and narrative voice operate in a fictional text and analyze how the interplay between narrator and audience impacts other elements (plot, character, dialogue, setting, etc.). They will be able to demonstrate familiarity with critical and theoretical debates about what role the reader plays in generating ¿meaning¿ and gain an understanding of the different perspectives on prose fiction of reader, critic, and practitioner. They will have been encouraged to develop a self-critical creative practice through reflection on the relationship between reading critically and writing creatively. |
Assessment Information
| A 4,000 word essay written in response to one of the five questions put forth by the instructor, or a response to a question put forth by students themselves with prior approval from the instructor. |
Special Arrangements
| None |
Additional Information
| Academic description |
Not entered |
| Syllabus |
Schedule:
WEEK 1: Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness
WEEK 2: Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
WEEK 3: Edith Wharton: Ethan Frome
WEEK 4: James Salter: A Sport and A Pastime
WEEK 5: Toni Morrison: Jazz
WEEK 6: Louise Erdrich: Tracks
WEEK 7: John Fowles: The French Lieutenant's Woman
WEEK 8: Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
WEEK 9: Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities
WEEK 10: Clarice Lispector: The Hour of the Star
Additional readings, drawn from the texts listed below, will also be assigned. These assignments will take the form of theoretical and critical writings, but students are strongly urged to explore the additional ¿primary¿ texts (novels and films) listed below.
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| Transferable skills |
Not entered |
| Reading list |
Primary Texts:
Mark Twain: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Muriel Spark: The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Edith Wharton: Ethan Frome
James Salter: A Sport and A Pastime
Toni Morrison: Jazz
Louise Erdrich: Tracks
John Fowles: The French Lieutenant's Woman
Vladimir Nabokov: Lolita
Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities
Clarice Lispector: The Hour of the Star
Secondary Texts:
¿Adorno, Theodor W. Aesthetic Theory. Minneapolis, Minnesota UP: 1997.
¿Bachelard, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. Orion, 1964.
¿Calvino, Italo. Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Vintage, 1993.
¿Cixous, Hélène. Three Steps on the Ladder of Writing. New York, Columbia UP: 1994.
¿de Man, Paul. Allegories of Reading: Figural Language in Rosseau, Nietzsche, Rilke, and Proust. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.
¿Derrida, Jacques. The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translations: Texts and Discussions with Jacques Derrida, trans. Peggy Kamuf. New York: Schocken, 1986.
¿Felman, Shoshana and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
¿Psychoalanysis, and History. Routledge, 1992.
¿Felman, Shoshana. What Does A Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference.
¿Johns Hopkins, UP, 1993.
¿Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in this Class?: The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1980.
¿Gourevitch, Philip. The Paris Review Interviews. Canongate, 2009.
¿Hutcheon, Linda. Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox. Routledge, 1980.
¿James, Henry. The Letters of Henry James. Percy Lubbock, Ed. BiblioBazaar, 2009.
¿Johnson, Barbara. The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1980.
¿Laplanche, John. Essays on Otherness. Ed. John Fletcher. Routledge, 1999.
¿Lucy, Niall. Postmodern Literary Theory: An Anthology. Blackwell: Oxford, 2000.
¿Morrison, Toni. What Moves at the Margin. UP Mississippi, 2008.
¿Sand, Georges. The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters. Hard Press, 2006.
¿Strachey, James. ¿Some Unconscious Factors in Reading¿, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 2 (1930), pp. 130-43.
¿Watt, Ian. The Rise of the Novel. California UP, 1957.
¿Wharton, Edith. The Writing of Fiction. Scribner, 1924.
¿Zamora, Lois Parkingson and Wendy B. Faris, Eds. Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community. Duke UP, 1995.
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| Study Abroad |
Not entered |
| Study Pattern |
Not entered |
| Keywords | AoST |
Contacts
| Course organiser | Dr Allyson Stack
Tel: (0131 6)50 4290
Email: allyson.stack@ed.ac.uk |
Course secretary | Miss Sarah Harvey
Tel: (0131 6)51 1822
Email: Sarah.Harvey@ed.ac.uk |
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