This is a course about how stories work, and how to read them effectively and critically. We encounter narratives every day, in gossip and jokes, news reports, in books and films and on the internet. Everyone is experienced in understanding and interpreting stories. This course gives you the chance to articulate, understand, and develop your skills as a consumer (and creator) of stories, through describing and analyzing the various elements of a narrative – such as narration, character, structure, genre, and point of view – in a number of different examples in English. The course will develop a critical vocabulary which students working in small groups can use, with increasing confidence, to discuss, analyze and report on written narrative texts of various length and complexity. Besides the target stories, there will be critical readings, with plenty of examples, in textual studies and in narratology (the poetics of stories). At the end of the course, all students should have the skills and confidence to give a productive and well-informed reading of any narrative, literary or non-literary, and some sense of the part that narrative plays in our understanding of the world we live in.

Assessment: 100% coursework.