Narratology
I am currently Module Convenor for the core first-year module "Introduction to Narrative" at the University of Lincoln. Structured around Seymour Chatman's excellent and accessible text, Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (1978), the module gives students the conceptual terms required for an understanding of how narrative works – as well as considering narrative's relationship to ideology and the way in which it constructs our idea of ourselves and our social relationships.
In seminars we study the analysis, practice and enjoyment of narrative by asking three interrelated questions – what is narrative? how do narratives work? what is narrative for? Students consider a wide range of texts ancient and modern, literary and popular, visual as well as verbal, as examples of story telling, and consider a range of approaches provided by theories of narratology for the analysis of such coded structures. These approaches are used in the seminar sessions in relation to a range of examples in order to explore the rhetorical, formal, linguistic and allusive strategies which guide, create or evoke the readers’ responses.
I thoroughly enjoyed teaching this module in 2012, as evidenced by my increasingly elaborate handouts!:
Image by mararie under a CC BY-SA license.
Dr Caroline Edwards is Senior Lecturer in Modern & Contemporary Literature at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research and teaching specialisms are in 21st century literature and critical theory, science fiction and post-apocalyptic narratives, Marxist aesthetics, and utopianism.
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