COLT 10.25 Story and Storytellers
This is a course about point of view (PoV) in written and filmed stories, mostly fictional ones. Every story is inflected by the contexts of its telling. It’s not always easy to determine who the narrator is, let alone how that shapes the story. Sometimes narrators are reliable, sometimes they’re not, and sometimes they only seem reliable. Short background readings in narratology and rhetoric, psychoanalysis, literary and film criticism, and journalism will help us ask (along with Samuel Beckett), “What does it matter who is speaking?” This question will frame our investigation of other inquiries such as: who tells this story? How do we know? What difference does it make? How would the story look if told by a different storyteller or in different circumstances? Along the way, we will examine the role of the medium (written, filmed, audio) and genre (e.g. detective novel, autobiography). Adaptations from written texts to the screen sometimes involve changes in PoV, and these are particularly illuminating. We will also write some stories and variations of our own.
Instructor
Higgins