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This course will examine how the development of narrative theory since the 1960s has influenced the study of the novel. At stake are a number of fundamental questions about how we understand the relationship of literature to society and politics. The development of the novel as a literary genre runs parallel to the formation of bourgeois society. But narrative, as Roland Barthes describes it, "is present in myth, legend, fable, tale, novella, epic, history, traged .... narrative is international, transhistorical, transcultural; it is simply there, like life itself." How can transcultural models of narrative be employed to understand the culturally specific concerns and techniques of the novel? How is the culturally-situated content of a novel affected by its narrative structure? What are the ideological and critical implications of maintaining--or dismantling--distinctions between fictional narrative and historical or journalistic narrative? In what sense was the development of the semiotic study of narrative also an attack on popular and realist fiction? Do experimental or avant-gardist novels escape the ideological implications of bourgeois narrative? We will read a selection of theoretical works as well as a novel or two (to be chosen b y the class at the beginning of the semester) that will serve as case studies for class discussion.
COURSE FORMAT: Lecture
Level: UGRD Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: HA ENGL Grading Mode: Student Option
Prerequisites: NONE Links to Web Resources For This Course.
Last Updated on MAR-19-2002
Copyright Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459