Handbook

This course develops your skills in rigorous close reading of the formal elements of narrative fiction, enabling you to better understand and appreciate how fiction works.  What is a narrative? Do all narratives share formal features? How do authors construct their stories? How do readers recognize and make sense of these stories? You will learn the principles of narratology, and how it provides a poetics of fiction for critics and writers. You will gain in-depth knowledge of concepts such as free indirect discourse, perspective, unreliable narration, and the paratext. A number of recent theoretical approaches to narrative (feminist, cognitive, rhetorical) will be put into dialogue with each other and employed to anatomize novels that have provoked controversy or ethical debates amongst readers.