Overview

Description

CALENDAR DESCRIPTION:

Examines literary “classics”, variously defined, apprehending them both on their own terms and within larger critical conversations. May incorporate the comparative study of work in related artistic fields and engage relevant media trends. Includes attention to writing skills. Students with credit for ENGL 101W may not take this course for further credit. Writing/Breadth-Humanities.

COURSE DETAILS:

Adventures in Unreliable Narration

This class attempts to bridge the ways we tend to study English in high school with how we do it at a major research university.  Like the related notion of “dramatic irony,” the idea of the “unreliable narrator” is, on the surface, an easy enough, high-school-English-class concept.  Yet it’s also a foundational idea of literary modernism, the most difficult type of literature produced in the past century and a half, and of postmodernism as well.  Used well, it can raise difficult and even humbling philosophical, political, and religious questions not only about truth but also about power, about who gets to tell stories and who doesn’t.  The course begins with a couple of easy-seeming texts that are often taught naively in high school, revises those high school readings from a university perspective, and ends by tackling the most controversial masterpiece of the last half century, one nobody would teach in high school.  Since one theme of the readings (and the class) is who gets to tell stories and who doesn’t, the course also challenges the easy and rather colonial lingering Canadian association of “classic” with “written by a rich white person from the centre of the British Empire.”

COURSE-LEVEL EDUCATIONAL GOALS:

Students will develop university-level skills in reading and writing about literature.
Students will understand the major philosophical, political, and religious issues raised by first-person narration.
Students will develop a broader understanding of literary canon.
Students will develop an understanding of some of the ways in which literary history, specifically the evolution of literary forms, unfolds.

Grading

Materials

REQUIRED READING: