17364

VS-Culture - Gender - Media: Unreliable Narration

Lukas Lammers

Kommentar

This course aims to provide insights into concepts and examples of unreliable narration across a variety of genres and media. Narrators wield enormous power: they build worlds and guide readers in numerous ways (not least morally and emotionally). But what if the narrator abuses this power to create and guide? What if the narrator does not tell the truth, or at least ‘bends it’? And what is the truth of/in fiction anyway? How would we be able to establish the fictional truth of a text? What makes us trust or distrust a narrator? In this course, we want to explore the phenomenon of unreliable narration and see how deep the rabbit hole goes. This will lead us to consider some fundamental questions about literature and interpretation and to read some fascinating texts.

We will start with William C. Booth’s classic definition of the term in his book The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) to discuss its insights and possible shortcomings. In the course of the semester, we will then explore alternative concepts of unreliability, including cognitive, rhetorical, and genre-based approaches. This will allow us to analyse techniques used by authors to create unreliable narrators in literature and film and examine the ways in which unreliable narration challenges traditional notions of truth and reality.

Close readings will be essential to our discussion. We will study two novels, extracts from several other novels, selected short fiction, as well as a few examples from film and discuss how far unreliability is bound up with notions of gender, race, class, and genre. What leads us to suspect that something is amiss? Is it the text itself? Is it more widely shared ‘frames’? What about texts narrated by machines?

Students wishing to participate must have completed the AM Surveying English Literatures. Assessment will be on the basis of short contributions to a Blackboard forum/wiki, a short presentation in class (‘aktive Teilnahme’) and a final essay of 4000 words to be submitted after the end of class. One of the core readings for this seminar is Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Students wishing to participate might want to acquire the book before the start of term (Recommended: Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. 1988. London: Faber and Faber, 2010).

Schließen