Reading & Composition

In this course we’ll consider texts that reflect on and interrogate the act of storytelling in which they and their characters are engaged.  Each of the texts we’ll examine, whether a fairy tale or work of literary theory, Renaissance drama or Romantic poem, graphic novel or novel of ideas, 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 space, 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 relationship between stories, memory, history, and trauma; and we’ll consider what happens to stories when language reaches its limits and communication break 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.

 Required texts:

 The Tempest, William Shakespeare

Embassytown, China Miéville

Texaco, Patrick Chamoiseau

Maus, Art Spiegelman

“Max Ferber,” The Emigrants, W.G. Sebald

A course reader will include the following: “Eckbert the Fair” by Ludwig Tieck, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Storyteller” by Walter Benjamin, critical articles on selected primary texts that will serve as models for our own writing, and optional readings on writing and research.