Reading & Composition

In this course we’ll consider texts that dramatize the act of storytelling.  Each of the texts we’ll examine, whether an ancient epic or postcolonial novel, Renaissance drama or Romantic poem, fairy tale or work of literary theory, is interested in the act of communication between storyteller and listener, or writer and reader, that characterizes the sharing of a story.  We’ll think about what forms these stories take when they come to us on the page or the stage and consider what’s at stake in the choice to tell a story in a particular way.  We’ll look at the relationship between stories and physical spaces, narrative and the self, and speech and the written word; we’ll question the ethics and politics of telling or receiving a story; we’ll interrogate the interplay between stories, memories, and history; and we’ll consider what happens to stories when communication breaks down.  Most importantly, we’ll devote ourselves to the development of critical reading, basic research, and analytical writing skills, learning to become careful readers of stories of all types and to better shape the critical stories that we tell in writing our own interpretations of literary texts.

Course readings will be chosen from the following:

Texaco, Patrick Chamoiseau

Invisible Cities, Italo Calvino

The Storyteller, Mario Vargas Llosa

“Max Ferber,” W.G. Sebald

The Tempest, William Shakespeare

A course reader will include “The Storyteller” by Walter Benjamin, “Eckbert the Fair” by Ludwig Tieck, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, excerpts from The Thousand and One Nights and Homer’s Odyssey, and varied resources on writing and research.