Lecture (LEC)

• Above class meets with CMLT-C 313

When you think of a "hero," do you think about David defeating Goliath or Cinderella defeating her stepmother? What makes a character in a narrative a "hero"? Does a "hero" always win the final battle? Can the "hero" of a narrative be a "villain"? Do different genres of narrative have different types of heroes? How do narratives reflect the issues about conflict or leadership that concerned the communities that produced them? In this course, we will study famous narratives from antiquity to the modern world and from Asia, Africa, the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas, in order to explore the different techniques authors use in the story-telling process. We will read examples of folktale, fairy tale, myth, parable, epic, chivalric romance, frame tale, short story, and allegory, as well as different types of novels from the picaresque to the postmodern and postcolonial. We will also study the theories scholars have developed to describe such aspects of narrative as levels of narration, intertextuality, and metanarrative,