ENG 201 - Introduction to Narrative

Border Writing: Displacement, Memory, and Narration
This course will explore narratives that emerged out of experiences of displacement and border crossing. We will examine how writers and filmmakers use different narrative forms, genres, and media to register the trauma of displacement and create, claim, and contest memory and belonging. How do narratives inhabit, cross, and transgress borders, while navigating social and political constraints? How do they reimagine and reanimate the past in the wake of disaster, displacement, and historical erasure? Situating the texts in the cultural and historical contexts, we will consider the making of collective and public memory as well as personal and individual memory, and place making through memory. We will cover a range of fiction and nonfiction genres including the memoir, testimony, the novel, the essay, the short story, science and speculative fiction, the graphic novel, narrative poetry, and film. Works originally not in English will be read in translation.

Fables of Warning: Rachel Carson’s Ecological Imagination
“We don’t usually think of the New Yorker as changing the world,” the biologist and science writer Rachel Carson’s editor told her when she first pitched an exposé of DDT and other chemical pesticides in 1958, “but this one time it might.” Published four years later as a book, Silent Spring (1962) became a bestseller, widely credited with launching the environmental movement by explaining the biological consequences of unchecked greed and unregulated industry. Yet Carson did more than inform her readers; a former English major, she used the power of the literary imagination to convey the complexity of ecological relationships, speculate about the risks of inaction, and envision an alternative future for biotic communities large and small. This course examines the literary traditions of Carson’s Silent Spring, from the Romantic poetry that inspired the title, to the fairy-tale style of the book’s allegorical first chapter, “A Fable for Tomorrow.” Drawing on the rhetoric of fact and fiction in Carson’s science writing, we analyze the function of the literary imagination in U.S. environmental writing, including toxic discourse, prophetic warning, journalistic exposé, literary naturalism, and the pastoral mode. From the muckraking journalism of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905) to the speculative fiction of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), which imagines a future dystopia set in the year 2024, readings explore the power and limits of writing that inspired collective action or legislative change.

Medieval Women Writers
Although the secular and religious cultures of medieval Europe were often flagrantly patriarchal, medieval women nonetheless produced a host of some of the richest and most interesting narratives of the period. In this course we will practice the basic tools of literary analysis by exploring writings such as the Carolingian noblewoman Dhuoda’s book of advice to her son; the closet dramas of the Saxon nun Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim; the enigmatic account of the canny and saintly Englishwoman Christina of Markyate; the impassioned love letters of Heloise of Argenteuil to her castrated husband; the mystical visions of the German abbess Hildegard of Bingen and of the English anchoress Julian of Norwich; the illustrated encyclopedia of Herrad of Landsberg; the erotic and often tragic Breton lais of Marie de France; the spiritual adventures and misadventures of Margery Kempe; and the protofeminist manifestos of Christine de Pisan. The course will begin with a review of the most relevant early Christian contexts for medieval women’s writing, including excerpts from the book of Genesis and the Psalms, the Gospel according to Luke, and the account of the martyrdom of Sts. Perpetua and Felicitas. We will also study aspects of the material culture these women and their colleagues used and produced: manuscript illumination, psalters, books of hours, textiles.

Unit(s): 1
Group Distribution Requirement(s): Distribution Group I
Instructional Method: Conference
Grading Mode: Letter grading (A-F)
Repeatable for Credit: May be taken up to 6 times for credit if different topics.
Notes:

Not all topics offered every year.
Review schedule of classes for availability.
Genre: Narrative/Fiction
Review descriptions for specific applicability to department requirements.
Medieval Women Writers: This course applies toward the department’s pre-1700 requirement.

Not offered: 2026-27
Group Distribution Learning Outcome(s):

Understand how arguments can be made, visions presented, or feelings or ideas conveyed through language or other modes of expression (symbols, movement, images, sounds, etc.).
Analyze and interpret texts, whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts.
Evaluate arguments made in or about texts (whether literary or philosophical, in English or a foreign language, or works of the visual or performing arts).