INTRODUCTION TO NARRATIVE

An introduction to narrative through texts that themselves foreground acts of storytelling and thus teach us how to read them. Readings range across periods and cultures - from fifth-century BCE Athens to late twentieth-century Brazil - and include short stories, novellas, novels, a ballad, film and a psychoanalytic case history. Texts by Conan Doyle, Sophocles, Melville, Hitchcock, Augustine, Coleridge, Freud, McEwan, the tellers and compilers of the The Arabian Nights, Diderot, Flaubert, and Lispector. Emphasis on close reading and hands-on experience in analyzing texts.