Instructor: Weissman
Wed 9:30 AM – 12:20 PM
This seminar is an introduction to narrative theory, designed to help you attain a better understanding of what narrative is, how it functions, and how it may be analyzed through a variety of approaches. We will also address how narrative theory has developed over time, in conjunction with other theories.
While we will primarily concern ourselves with literary fiction, we will also consider how narrative theory has been applied to a variety of texts and media, such as poetry, comics, film, television, social media, and digital media. Beyond reading narrative theory, we will apply it to a range of texts.
Our survey will begin with Aristotle’s Poetics and turn to Wayne Booth’s The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961), which introduced the concepts of the unreliable narrator and the implied author, and to Gerard Genette’s Narrative Discourse (1980) before engaging with more recent “postclassical” narratologies. Readings are likely to include James Phelan’s Somebody Telling Somebody Else: A Rhetorical Poetics of Narrative (2017), Marie-Laure Ryan’s A New Anatomy of Storyworlds (2022), Lisa Zunshine’s The Secret Life of Literature, and selections from the volumes Digital Narrative Spaces (2022), Ethnic American Literatures and Critical Race Narratology (2023), and The Palgrave Handbook of Feminist, Queer and Trans* Narrative Studies (2025).