3.0

credits

Average Course Rating

We are constantly immersed in narratives or, as Roland Barthes said, narrative "is simply there like life itself. . . international, transhistorical, transcultural." As a bridge between experience and language, narrative informs the way we understand history, gender, politics, emotion, cognition and much more. Through reading a series of philosophical and literary texts, this course will provide a systematic understanding of how narratives are composed, how they are experienced, and eventually, how they evolve. The first part of this course will focus on building a foundation in the formal study of narrative, focusing on elements such as genre, plot, character, narrator and reader. We will start with a brief consideration of ancient approaches to literary narrative in Aristotle's Poetics and Plato's Republic. From there, we will engage with a wide range of readings in narrative theory. The second part of the course will focus on critical approaches to narrative, such as gender and narrative, social and political critique of narrative, narratives in the age of artificial intelligence, and conclude with the evolving concept of narrative in the Anthropocene.