ENGL 62.06 Dickens and Narrative Theory

Bleak House, David Copperfield, Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities, etc. Charles Dickens’s novels are “classics” today but were popular, experimental fictions in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, playing with literary form and distribution models. This colloquium reads Dickens’s work slowly, serially, as a way to understand and analyze key concepts in narrative theory, including narrative time and space, causality, characterization, focalization, diegesis, emplotment, narrative voice, and paratextuality. Alongside analyzing one of Dickens’s major novels, we will read texts by thinkers such as Mieke Bal, Roland Barthes, Peter Brooks, Dorrit Cohn, Gérard Genette, Caroline Levine, James Phelan, and Alex Woloch. We will also use case studies from film and television, including adaptations and streaming services, to better unpack narrative forms across media.

Degree Requirement Attributes

Dist:LIT; WCult:W

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Department-Specific Course Categories

English and Creative Writing