ENGLISH 205 - Introduction to Fiction

Institution:

Reed College

Subject:

Description:

Portraits of Ladies Full course for one semester. This course is designed as an introduction to the basic concepts of narrative theory as exemplified in 18th- and 19th-century British novels by Ann Radcliffe, Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Charlotte Bront , George Eliot, and Henry James. We will also focus specifically on the construction of gender, and will analyze how and why ideas of femininity and masculinity change in relation to authorial sensibilities that are by turn gothic, historic, and sentimental. Prerequisites: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2009-10. The American Short Story Full course for one semester. This course will examine the genre of the short story, especially its traditional and innovative narrative techniques, its various ways of constructing authorial point of view, its mode of plot compression and the relation of literary structure to temporality, and its range of styles from realism and naturalism to allegory, and to impressionism. Additionally, we will see how diverse American experience is represented through the form. Readings will be drawn from Hawthorne, Poe, Melville, James, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Langston Hughes, Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Malamud, Cheever, James Baldwin, Joanne Greenberg, Paley, Carver, Ozick, Bharati Mukherjee, Toni Cade Bambara, as well as a collection of Best Short Stories of 2004. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference. The Postwar and Contemporary Novel Full course for one semester. This course will introduce students to major North American novelists and their work from the immediate post-World War II years to the 1990s. As we discuss the assigned readings we will consider questions surrounding representations of race and gender, mass culture and consumerism, the Cold War and the nuclear age, civil rights, feminism, technocracy, the counterculture, American regionalisms, suburbia, linguistic experimentation, genre, postmodernism, globalization, and the conditions of urban experience. Novelists may include Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, Flannery O'Connor, Thomas Pynchon, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo, Leslie Marmon Silko, Philip Roth, Ishmael Reed, Cormac McCarthy, and Jonathan Franzen. We will also read selected critical and theoretical texts that define the issues that structure the course and watch selected films-such a s The Manchurian Candidate (1962)-that provide cultural contexts. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Conference. Not offered 2009-10.The Basics of the Novel Full course for one semester. This course serves as an introduction to the history of both the idea and the form of the English novel, beginning in the early 18th century and continuing through to the present day. We will look at short critical writings by major narrative scholars in conjunction with examples of the novel's various subgenres, including the gothic, the marriage plot, the Bildungsroman, the historical novel, the detective novel, the modernist novel, and the postmodern novel. The course will cover major novels by Daniel Defoe, Matthew Lewis, Jane Austen, Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, Virginia Woolf, and J.M. Coetzee. There will be numerous short writing assignments. Prerequisite: Humanities 110 or sophomore standing. Lecture-conference. Not offered 2009-10. The 19th-Century Novel: The Bildungsroman and the Courtship Novel Full course for one semester. This course examines the two dominant forms of the 19th-century novel, the Bildungsroman, or novel of formation, and the courtship novel. In examining these two forms we will discuss the nature and history of literary genres; narrators and narrative structure; the function of novelistic character; and the concept of realism. We will read a number of critical texts by major scholars of narrative to illuminate these discussions, along with major works by the following novelists: Walter Scott, Jane Austen, Honoré de Balzac

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.reed.edu

Phone Number:

(503) 771-1112

Regional Accreditation:

Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities

Calendar System:

Semester

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