At the end of the course, students will possess
- in-depth understanding of narrativity, and narrative means like focalization, voice, character, plot, story, time, place, temporalization, in different media and adaptations;
- a good grasp of different genres like supernatural fiction, realist fiction, or documentary fiction;
- an ability to detect the importance of narrativity in social life;
- a high level of proficiency in applying the concepts established during the course in discussions, and in written work.
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In this course, we will focus on the narrative means that shape how readers can understand a fictional world. Whose perspectives are made accessible, how is language employed to depict events, locations, and characters? How does the story unfold, does it follow specific generic conventions, and how is our sense of time shaped in this unfolding? Is there a difference between the telling of an event and how it unravels? It is equally important to consider how narrativity plays out in different media, and how storytelling works in visual, aural, and haptic artistic works. Last, but not least, we will consider how adaptations shape our understanding of a work’s content and form.
These and other issues will guide us when we look at one of the most important tools that shape human perceptions, experiences, feelings, and knowledges: narrativity. After all, the most generic description of humankind might be its ability to tell stories. To establish a well-developed understanding of narrativity, we will look at a range of literary, theatrical, and visual works from the British, Austrian, and German traditions from the nineteenth and twentieth century.
The language of the course is English, but German-speaking students are very welcome to read Germanophone texts in the original version.
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