Topics in Literary & Critical Theory
Topic: TIME & NARRATIVE
Class Information
Instructor: Ziser, Michael
CRN: 32161
Time: MW 3:10-4:30
Description
This advanced seminar will explore the slippery subject of time from a wide variety of perspectives in literature, media studies, philosophy, linguistics, and history. Starting with the science fiction of time travel, which gives us some concrete ways to think about the interaction of logic, story, history, biology, and time, we will turn to modern philosophical and literary experiments with duration and memory; attempts in narratology to develop a precise vocabulary for temporal phenomena; linguistic investigations of tense, aspect, and mood; analyses of the way that media technologies shape human experiences of time; questions of temporal scale; and the emergence of our sense of history from the technologically-mediated superimposition of specific moments. Should we stumble across a working prototype of a time machine, we will either split the profits evenly or engage in an epic no-holds-barred, winner-take-all contest across all time and space.
Class will meet on Zoom MW 3:10-4:30pm
Grading
Weekly Oral Discussion Participation: 20%
Weekly Discussion Writing: 25%
Class Leading: 5%
Research Jag: 5%
Extra Reading: 5%
Final Project Presentation: 5%
Final Project: 35%
Texts
From Eternity to Here, Sean Carroll
Four Quartets, T. S. Eliot
Exhalation , Ted Chiang
Mrs Dalloway, Virginia Woolf
Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes
Austerlitz, W. G. Sebald
The Man In The High Castle, Philip K. Dick
Last and First Men, Olaf Stapledon
The Time Machine, H. G. Wells
Arcadia, Tom Stoppard
A Brief History of the Philosophy of Time, Adrian Bardon