Module Information
Module Identifier
ENM0320
Module Title
NARRATOLOGY AND POETICS
Academic Year
2012/2013
Co-ordinator
Semester
Intended for use in future years
Other Staff
Course Delivery
| Delivery Type | Delivery length / details |
|---|---|
| Seminars / Tutorials | Tutorial. 2 hours every other week for Semester One |
Assessment
| Assessment Type | Assessment length / details | Proportion |
|---|---|---|
| Semester Assessment | One piece of written work (5,000 words), which will focus upon a critical engagement with a theoretical essay from an imaginative perspective. Essay: | |
| Supplementary Assessment | Resubmit any failed elements and/or make good any missing elements. Where this involves re-submission of work, a new topic must be selected. |
Learning Outcomes
On completion of this module, students should be able to:
1. write systematically and theoretically about elements of writing, such as plot, perspective, poetic form;
2. demonstrate sustained creative engagement with the areas of narratological and poetic theory;
3. show that they have developed an area of personal specialism within this body of work, by the development of a creative engagement with an area of theory accompanied by a critical explication.
Content
The key aim of the module is to encourage students to think systematically about elements of writing, seeing composition as a series of choices from within a finite set of options concerning such elements as plot, viewpoint, and poetic form. The module will be in two sections, with three sessions on narratology, followed by two on poetics. The emphasis will be on the practical analysis of selected literary works, from a practitioner's point-of-view rather than that of the literary critic.
_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.
_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.
Notes
This module is at CQFW Level 7