Week 1 (Sept. 1) - Structuralism

• Ferdinand de Saussure, "from Course in General Linguistics" (Natalie's desk)
• Roland Barthes, "Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives" (Natalie's desk)

Week 2 (Sept. 8) - The Narrative Construction of Reality

• Jerome Bruner, "The Narrative Construction of Reality" (Natalie's desk)
• Hayden White, "The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality" (Natalie's desk)
• Roy Schafer, "Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue" (Natalie's desk)
• Michel de Certeau, "Story Time" (Natalie's desk)

Week 3 (Sept. 15) - Poststructuralism

• Roland Barthes, S/Z
   

Week 4 (Sept. 22) - Plot

• Aristotle, from The Poetics, Pts. II, VI-XI, XV-XVI (Natalie's desk)
• E. M. Foster, "Story and Plot" (Narrative Dynamics)
• Vladimir Propp, "Fairy-Tale Transformations" (Narrative Dynamics)
• Boris Tomashevsky, "Story, Plot, and Motivation" (Narrative Dynamics)
• James Phelan, "Narrative Progression" (Narrative Dynamics)
• R. S. Crane, "The Concept of Plot and the Plot of Tom Jones" (Narrative Dynamics)
• Robert Caserio, from Plot, Story, and the Novel, Ch. 3, "Plot and the Point of Reversal: Dickens and Poe" (Natalie's desk)
• Nancy K. Miller, "Emphasis Added: Plots and Plausibilities in Women's Fiction" (Narrative Dynamics)

Week 5 (Sept. 29) - Genre

• Northrop Frye, from Anatomy of Criticism, from Fables of Identity, and from The Secular Scripture (Theory of the Novel, pp. 5-13, 122-43)
• Claudio Guillén, from Literature as System (Theory of the Novel, pp. 34-50)
• Robert Scholes, "An Approach through Genre" (Natalie's desk)
• Franco Moretti, "On Literary Evolution," in Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary Forms (Natalie's desk)
• Tom Gunning, from D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film, Ch. 1, "Theory and History: Narrative Discourse and the Narrator System"

Week 6 (Oct. 6) - Rise of the Novel
 

• Ian Watt, from The Rise of the Novel (Theory of the Novel, pp. 363-81, 441-66)
• Michael McKeon, "Generic Transformation and Social Change: Rethinking the Rise of the Novel" (Theory of the Novel, pp. 382-99)
• Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller" (Theory of the Novel, pp. 77-99)
• Nancy Armstrong, from Desire and Domestic Fiction (Theory of the Novel, pp. 467-75)
• Susan Sniader Lanser, "Toward a Feminist Poetics of Narrative Voice" (Natalie's desk) 

Week 7 (Oct. 13) - Desire in Narrative

• Peter Brooks, "Narrative Desire" (Narrative Dynamics) and "Freud's Masterplot: A Model for Narrative" (Natalie's desk)
• Teresa de Lauretis, "Desire in Narrative" (Natalie's desk)
• Susan Winnett, "Coming Unstrung: Women, Men, Narrative, and Principles of Pleasure" (Narrative Dynamics)
• Jay Clayton, "Theories of Desire" (The Pleasures of Babel)

October 20 - Fall Break (no class)

October 24-25 - Ohio State Narrative Theory Conference

The class will attend a conference in Columbus, Ohio. Class will be canceled on October 27 so that students can catch up from their weekend at Ohio State University.

The conference "Contemporary Narrative Theory: The State of the Field" presents papers by many of the leading figures in narrative theory today.

October 27 - (no class)

Week 8 (Nov. 3) - Psychoanalysis and Narrative

• Edgar Allen Poe, "The Purloined Letter" (Muller and Richardson, Ch. 1)
• Jacques Lacan, "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'" (Muller and Richardson, Ch. 2)
• Recommended: Shoshana Felman, "On Reading Poetry: Reflections on the Limits and Possibilities of Psychoanalytic Approaches" (Muller and Richardson, Ch. 7)
• Jacques Derrida, "The Purveyor of Truth" (Muller and Richardson, Ch 9)
• Recommended: Barbara Johnson: "The Frame of Reference: Poe, Lacan, Derrida" (Muller and Richardson, Ch 10)
 

Week 9 (Nov. 10) - The Story of Deconstruction

• Jacques Derrida, "The Parergon" (Narrative Dynamics)
• J. Hillis Miller, from Ariadne's Thread: Story Lines, Ch. 1 (Natalie's desk)
• Edward Said, "Beginnings" (Narrative Dynamics) and sections from "A Meditation on Beginnings" and "The Novel as Beginning Intention" (Natalie's desk)
• Jay Clayton, "The Story of Deconstruction" (The Pleasures of Babel)

Week 10 (Nov. 17) - Narrative as Socially Symbolic

• Fredric Jameson, The Poltical Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act

(Thanksgiving Break - November 22-30)
 

Week 11 (Dec. 1) - Endings

• Frank Kermode, from The Sense of an Ending, Ch. 1; from Ch. 2 (pp. 43-64); and Ch. 5 (Natalie's desk)
• D. A. Miller, "Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel" (Narrative Dynamics)
• Rachel Blau DuPlessis, "Endings and Contraditions" (Narrative Dynamics)
• Peter Rabinowitz, "Reading Beginnings and Endings" (Narrative Dynamics)
   

Week 12 (Dec. 8) - Beginnings

• Presentation of seminar papers

• Ten short annotations posted to the Narrative Theory database
• Conference proposal
• Rough draft of research paper presented to the seminar on December 8
• Final draft research paper - due December 15
• Class participation