“Narrative: Causes and Constraints”
Comparative Literature 182
Winter Quarter, 2003
Haun Saussy
Office: Building 260, room 101. Telephone: 3-0439. Email: saussy@stanford.edu
Office hours: Tues-Weds., 10-11, or by appointment
Summary: Narrative, at once one of the main modes of literature and one of the main modes of understanding, is notoriously hard to delimit. Our attempt to learn more about narrative’s workings will pass through an examination of literary examples and theoretical texts, guided by such questions as: What are narrative’s necessary or typical features, how are they related, and what range of variations is included in the ground rules of the form? How do narratives survive rewriting, paraphrase, and even algebraic formulation? How is narrative related to a specific set of media, and how profoundly do changes in medium affect the narrativity of narrative? Are there narrative texts that fail to fulfill their category, or texts that are absolutely non-narratives?
In order to draw on a wider corpus of examples, each week a student will be asked to deliver a short presentation on an “outside” narrative or theoretical work. These presentations may offer overviews of narrative technique or close readings that illuminate a work by looking carefully at representative passages.
Requirements: One in-class presentation (see above) and a final paper, for which proposals are due on February 6. The paper, 15 to 20 pages long, will involve both close reading of a work or group of works, and some testing of theoretical models. Consult with me about possible topics.
Mieke Bal, Narratology: An Introduction to the Theory of Narrative, second edition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997)
Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, The Nature of Narrative (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966; new edition, 2003)
Cao Xueqin, The Story of the Stone, Part I: The Golden Days (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976)
Denis Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981)
Sigmund Freud, Three Case Histories (New York: Touchstone, 1997)
and a packet of readings. All texts are available from the Stanford Bookstore. Some further works are on reserve in Green Library.
Syllabus
Week One
January 7: Why study narrative?
Plato, Republic (selections); Aristotle, Poetics and Rhetoric (selections); Bal, Narratology, pp. 220-224.
January 9:
Introduction to the course. Problems and assumptions.
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths” from Ficciones (New York: Grove Press, 1963).
Presentation [Casey]: The Odyssey
Week Two
January 14: Vladimir Propp’s models and their progeny.
Roland Barthes, “Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narratives,” from A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982).
Presentation [Derek]: Claude Lévi-Strauss, “The Structural Study of Myth” (in Lévi-Strauss, Structural Anthropology I)
January 16:
Story of the Stone, chapters 1-5
Week Three
January 21:
Bal, Narratology, pp. 16-75
Presentation [Amanda]: Erich Auerbach, Mimesis
January 23:
Story of the Stone, chapters 6-11
Week Four
January 28:
Fredric Jameson. “Magical Narratives: Romance as Genre.” New Literary History 7:1 (1975), 135-163; also in Jameson, The Political Unconscious (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell U P, 1981). Available electronically through JSTOR (www.jstor.org), to which Stanford is a subscriber.
Presentation [Daniel]: Boris Shklovskii, Theory of Prose
January 30:
Diderot, Rameau’s Nephew
Week Five
February 4:
Bal, Narratology, pp. 78-174
Presentation [Jason]: William Faulkner, As I Lay Dying
February 6:
Story of the Stone, chapters 12-17
Rough proposal (1-2 pp.) of final papers due in class
Week Six
February 11:
Bal, Narratology, pp. 175-219
Presentation [Carol]: José Donoso, The Obscene Bird of Night
February 13: NO CLASS (we will make up during Dead Week)
Week Seven
February 18:
Story of the Stone, chapters 18-23
February 20:
Story of the Stone, chapters 23-26
Week Seven
February 18:
Visit from Rich Holeton, hypertext author. Suggested reading is accessible here (thanks to Rich for this info).
February 20:
Story of the Stone, chapters 18-23
Week Eight
February 25:
Scholes and Kellogg, “The Narrative Tradition” and “Meaning in Narrative,” from The Nature of Narrative
February 27:
Story of the Stone, chapters 23-26
Presentation [Clarissa]: Hayden White, Metahistory
Week Nine
March 4:
Martin Heidegger, “Da-sein as Understanding,” “Understanding and Interpretation,” and “Temporality and the Ontological Meaning of Care,” from Being and Time, tr. Joan Stambaugh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996).
Begin discussion of “Wolfman” case,
pp. 161-257 of Freud, Three Case
Histories
March 6:
Freud, Three Case Histories
Week Ten
March 11:
Freud, Three Case Histories
Presentation [Takushi]: Abraham and Torok, The Wolfman’s Magic Word
March 13:
Presentation [Haun]: Raymond Roussel, Impressions of
[tentatively scheduled for Friday, March 14, in late afternoon:]
Dead Week Makeup Session, with food and drink.
Conclusions and Returns. Presentations of paper projects. Come prepared to give a five-minute account of your paper, whatever state it’s in, and get feedback from the rest of the group.
Papers will be due on March 19 at