English R1B

Reading & Composition: Alternate Narratives

Book List

Defoe, Daniel: Robinson Crusoe; Mitchell, David: Cloud Atlas; Pope, Alexander: Essay on Man & Other Poems; Twain, Mark: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Woolf, Virginia: To The Lighthouse

Description

The texts we will read this semester have generally been read as stories of self-discovery. Through class discussion and close reading analysis, we will uncover the hidden themes and formal structures which complicate how we understand these stories. In fact, the notions of character and narrative will themselves be challenged by characters who are not bound by the conventions of space and time we usually assign to our everyday experiences--they can see the dead, and the future.  In moving beyond our established reading practices and notions of what a character can experience we will be able to discover a different sense of the ‘real.’  How much of this narrative we can dig up, or how successful we are in overthrowing our ideas of what is possible, will help us to see how we become active participants in creating the story.