English 314 - Unreliability: Fantasies of Realism

Fiction abounds in narrators who alternately fascinate and frustrate our expectations as readers, arousing our interest or sympathy at the same time they draw attention to the fabricated nature of their own accounts. In this course we will engage with short stories, novellas, novels, and films, which challenge us to judge for ourselves what is real and what is not. Over the semester we will seek to develop answers to the following questions, regarding the tenuous authority of realist accounts: What makes a text feel realistic? What sorts of techniques do authors and narrators deploy to secure or shake our confidence in the world of the text? And what are the peculiar pleasures and problems of reading the accounts of so-called “unreliable narrators,” who consistently blur the line between the real and the fantastic? We will draw our case studies from some of literature’s most (in)famous unreliable narrators from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, including (but not limited to) Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Wakefield,” Herman Melville’s “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Charles W. Chesnutt’s “The Conjurer’s Revenge,” Gustave Flaubert’s “A Simple Soul,” Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and a selection of its controversial film adaptations, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild,” Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “Apollo,” Sarah Shun-lien Bynum’s “The Erlking,” and Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation.

Fall semester. CHI Fellow and Visiting Lecturer Kaisler.

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Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: Weekly readings and occasional film screenings; a range of in-class activities (mini-lectures, close readings of texts and films, small and large group discussions, mini-presentations, engagement with class visitors, such as guest lecturers); regular writing assignments (pre-class and in-class reading responses, textual analyses, and argument-driven essays). There will be two short critical essays and a final paper, but no quizzes or exams.