Syllabus
Syllabus
Week 1
Intro - Analogies and contrasts
Benjamin Zephaniah: Miss World
William Shakespeare: Sonnet 130
Jane Austen: Pride and Prejudice
Week 2
Roald Dahl: Edward the Conqueror Focus: narrative structure, narrator´s credibility
Week 3
Somerset Maugham: The Verger
Charles Johnson: Oxherding Tale
Focus: reading for instruction, a cautionary tale
Week 4
Julian Barnes: The Visitors (A History of the World in 10½ Chapters)
Focus: full and limited omniscience, altruism vs. self-interest
Weeks 5-6
Kurt Vonnegut: Who Am I This Time
Andre Dubus: The Fat Girl
Focus: analogies and contrasts, narrative authority
Week 7
Bernard Malamud: A Magic Barrel
Focus: interpretive role-playing, culture-specific reading
Week 8
John Steinbeck: The Murder
Focus: narrative ambiguity, Melting Pot vs Salad Bowl
Weeks 9-10
Kate Chopin: The Story of an Hour C.B. Divakaruni: Clothes
Focus: generic formulas in writing, Bildungsroman
Week 11
Charles Dickens: A Christmas Carol
Mark Twain: The Story of the Bad Boy Who Didn´t Come to Grief
H. C. Andersen: The Emperor´s New Clothes
Focus: cautionary tale, parable, hyperbole, narrative crescendo
Weeks 12-13
Charles Johnson: Menagerie, A Child´s Fable
George Orwell: Animal Farm (film + excerpts)
Focus: allegory, animal fable
Annotation
Course profile: This is a one-term course focused on close reading of Anglo-American literature, chiefly prose. Save for several exceptions, it explores the writings of contemporary authors. The criteria for selecting the seminar texts are their content, format and the language in which they are written, so that they are best suited for in-class close reading. The texts are analyzed through the prism of both traditional and modern critical methodology, fomented by what has become known as
RWCT (Reading and Writing for Critical Thinking) methodology.
