This course explores the stories that are all around us and that shape our world: traditional literary narratives such as ballads, romances, and novels, and also the kind of stories we encounter in non-literary contexts such as journalism, movies, myths, jokes, legal judgments, travel writing, histories, songs, diaries, and biographies.
In this section of the course, we will examine a diverse range of literary texts from ancient to modern times and explore, through close readings, the various ways narrative responds to, reflects and shapes human experience. The primary objective of the course is to help students distinguish between impressionistic and critical reading and in so doing to build skills in analytical reading, thinking and writing. The course will attempt to develop students' competency with various methods of analysis, thus enabling students to pursue further studies in English as well as in other subjects.
Ann-Barbara Graff, Course Readerincluding Chaucer's The Nun's Priest's Tale
Alexander Pope, The Rape of the Lock(Dover)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner(Dover)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein(Broadview)
Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White(Oxford World's Classics); link to Wilkie Collins Website
Sigmund Freud, Dora: An Analysis of a Case of Hysteria(Collier)
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw(Penguin); link to Henry James website
Daphne Du Maurier, Rebecca(Random House or Avon)
Natalie Zemon Davis, The Return of Martin Guerre(Harvard UP)
William Faulkner, If I Forget Thee, Jerusalem(Vintage)
Jamaica Kincaid, The Autobiography of my Mother (Penguin)
As well students will view Orson Welles' Citizen Kane and several other films in the winter term, including Oliver! and Rebecca. Other films will be recommended or screened when available.
graff@dgp.utoronto.ca