English 159-1 - Spring, 2013

Topics in the Novel

Topic: Ways of Worldmaking

Class Information

Instructor: Jerng, Mark
CRN: 42464
Time: MWF 1:10-2:00
Location: 101 Olson

Description

One of the most fundamental things that narratives do is to immerse the reader into its narrative world. It prompts readers toward building the structure, inhabitants, and spatiotemporal situation of narrative worlds, such that we come to know how a given character will act, what the operative rules are governing specific social or ethical situations, how time and space operate in the narrative, and what, for example, “love” or “pain” might mean within the specific storyworld created by the words on the page.
Critics of the novel have historically called this ‘escapism,’ but we will analyze it as the most fundamental requirement of narrative sense-making. This course explores narrative’s worldmaking strategies and the ways in which novels allow or do not allow the reader to use information from the “given world” in order to understand the storyworld. We will analyze how these strategies shed light on how we build the worlds around us and in everyday discourse. Specific contexts for analyzing ways of worldmaking include the construction and contestation around how slavery impacts and shapes the world – from social bonds and interactions to understandings of genealogy, causality, debt, and reproduction; how narratives mediate the space between past and future worlds as they collide as possible ways of making sense of a history of the present; how novels engage with and defamiliarize the formation of our senses of ordinary worlds. Throughout we will engage with specific concepts from narrative theory, including discourse versus story, focalization, deictic shifts, possible-worlds theory, temporality, and spatialization.

Grading

Class participation and attendance 15%
Response Paper on Story Openings 10%
Response Paper on a concept from narrative theory 10%
Paper #1 due Friday April 15th 20%
Paper #2 due Friday May 20th 25%
Final Exam 20%

Texts

Uncle Tom\'s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe
Lion\'s Blood, Steven Barnes
Wild Seed, Octavia Butler
Disgrace, J.M. Coetzee
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Floating World, Cynthia Kadohata
When The Emperor Was Divine, Julie Otsuka