Reading & Composition

This is a course about the pleasure particular to reading and reflecting on literary texts, especially those short narrative texts known as tales. It is about learning to become the kind of reader capable of being seduced by a literary text: by its language, plot, sheer inventiveness – even by its ambiguity. This course will also serve as an introduction to world literature. We will read tales from around the world and across the ages: folk tales, epic tales, strange and fantastic tales, metaphysical parables, travel tales, tales of crime and detection, the realist short story, and postmodern metafictional narratives. We will discuss the differences between oral tales and written tales, and the ways in which oral structures are presented in many of the literary texts we will be reading. This is also a writing intensive course; while not everyone immediately associates writing with pleasure, we will approach writing as an activity of experimentation and discovery – never easy, sometimes frustrating, but truly exhilarating when we finally find the language to give form to our experience of a literary text, enabling us to communicate that experience to others.

Readings are likely to include selections from The Odyssey, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Chuang Tzu, A Thousand and One Nights, the Ramayana, The Decameron, various Romantic narrative poems, the Sunjata and Mwindo epics, short stories by Poe, Gogol, Diop, Borges, and Calvino, Kafka’s parables, Chamoiseau’s Solibo Magnificent, and Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard. We will complement our literary readings with theoretical essays by Vladimir Propp, Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Peter Brooks, Walter Ong, and others.