Module Identifier | ENM0320 | ||
Module Title | NARRATOLOGY AND POETICS | ||
Academic Year | 2002/2003 | ||
Co-ordinator | Dr Timothy S Woods | ||
Semester | Semester 1 | ||
Other staff | Dr Peter T Barry, Dr Timothy S Woods | ||
Course delivery | Seminars / Tutorials | Tutorial. 2 hours every other week for Semester One | |
Assessment | Semester Assessment | Essay: One piece of written work (5,000 words), which will focus upon a critical engagement with a theoretical essay from an imaginative perspective. |
1. Plot Repertoires
The idea of plot repertoires will be introduced using the early structuralist work on folk narratives by Vladimir Propp and
Alexander Greimas. Students will be asked to consider any corpus of tales known to them in these terms (for example, sea tales
by Joseph Conrad, stories for children such as the "William" books, or romantic stories by a specific author or from a specific
series).
2. Points-of-View
This session will introduce such notions as the implied reader (from Wayne Booth), the narratee (from Gerald Prince), and the
heterodiegetic narrator (from Gerard Genette), and investigate their usefulness in practical analysis.
3. Meta-Fictions
This session will focus on the practice of "narratorial self-conciousness", especially in modernist fiction, exploring the possibilities
and the limitations of the "text which is known to itself". The question asked will be whether a text can undercut the illusion of
its own realism with impunity.
4. Modernist Poetics
This session essentially asks the same questions as the previous one, but of poetry rather than prose. It will experiment with
transposing a "unified/linear" poem to a fragmented, spatial, free-verse format.
5. Postmodernist Poetics
This session asks, firstly, if there exists a distinctive poetics which can be termed "postmodernist". A number of candidates for
this category will be looked at, including brief video extracts of poets performing their own work.