32212
Seminar
WiSe 12/13: Telling vs. Showing: Narrative Authority in American Fiction
James Dorson
Comments
"Show, don't tell!" No literary cliché has been as widely used and abused as this popular injunction to aspiring writers. While the formulaic distinction between "telling" and "showing" is usually taken for granted, in this class we will uncover and examine the rich literary controversies that lay behind it. How has the difference been articulated in narrative theory? How has it been upheld and broken down? And what are the social implications of the changing functions and styles of narrative voice? We will approach these questions by first establishing a common theoretical groundwork through the reading of essays and book excerpts from Gérard Genette, Wayne Booth, Seymour Chatman, Dorit Cohn, Susan Lanser, and Mark McGurl. Then we will move on to discuss the problems of impersonal and personal narration in our reading of short stories and novels by Henry James, Stephen Crane, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Flannery O'Connor, Toni Morrison, and David Foster Wallace. This broad selection of (mostly) canonical texts will help us to further understand the role of authorial commentary or its absence, as well as its reliability or unreliability, in relation to the dominant literary trends in realism, naturalism, modernism, and postmodernism. While this class does have a strong theoretical component, its main focus will be on the training of our close reading skills in the analysis of the historically changing literary strategies used to convey or challenge (narrative) authority in fiction. close
16 Class schedule
Regular appointments
Tue, 2012-10-16 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2012-10-23 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2012-10-30 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2012-11-06 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2012-11-13 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2012-11-20 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2012-11-27 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2012-12-04 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2012-12-11 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2012-12-18 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2013-01-08 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2013-01-15 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2013-01-22 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2013-01-29 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2013-02-05 10:00 - 12:00
Tue, 2013-02-12 10:00 - 12:00