Stories & Storytelling: Introduction to Narrative

Study of the forms and functions of narrative through engagement with the modes of detection, confession, and digression. You will examine how storytelling takes place in various media and genres and across fiction and non-fiction, studying short stories, a novella, novels, a poem, films, scholarly essays, autobiography, and a psychoanalytic case history. Attention to cultural differences, historical shifts, and philosophical questions such as the writing of the self, the nature of memory, the experience of time, and the relationship of truth to fiction. Readings include  Doyle, Borges, Sophocles, Freud, Hitchcock, Augustine, Coleridge, McEwan, the compilers of The Arabian Nights, Diderot, Calvino, and Lispector.