Teaching Narrative

The Introduction provides detailed summaries of the chapters that comprise the volume, and, before that, the Introduction discusses the teaching of narrative at university in terms of curricular stages, notions of enchantment and disenchantment, realism and modernism and, drawing on (among others) D. A. Miller and Peter Brooks, relations in narrative between closure and the narratable, and Freud’s Eros and Thanatos. The latter provides an opportunity to develop some ideas about how teaching, narrative and desire connect. There is detailed discussion of how students respond to the experience of reading narrative fiction (as opposed to reading poetry and watching drama) and of working with ‘conflicted’ nineteenth-century novels.

This chapter is about the experience of teaching narrative in the context of philosophical and social theories of time. Most critical writing about time and narrative is focused on the question of memory, but this chapter argues that expectation, anticipation and surprise are equally fruitful concepts for teaching narrative. It looks at the notion of ‘epochal temporality’, or the claim that different historical epochs have distinct and describable experiences of time, and asks what this might mean for an understanding of narrative time in the contemporary novel. It explores the idea that, in the historical present, there is a preoccupation with the unforeseeable, which differs significantly from predominant conceptions of time in the second half of the twentieth century. The chapter also aims to set out a range of useful narratological concepts, particularly related to the notion of narrative tense, which is useful for the description of time structures in so-called ‘epochal temporality’ and for the teaching of time experiments in contemporary fiction. The chapter is closely tied to a third-year undergraduate module in which students work on a range of modern novels.

Should we not reflect more on the ethical consequences of taking narratives of violent death, mutilation, pain and degradation—often with no sense of redemption—into a room full of impressionable young people? In the ancient world, Plato and Aristotle clashed over the issue of the moral effects of tragedy upon its readers and audiences. Having considered their arguments, I go on to discuss how effective (and ethical) modes of teaching tragedy may be where role play and distancing techniques are employed. I survey political critiques of the genre, including some contemporary claims that certain texts can cause psychological harm to students. I conclude that when we teach tragedy we are actually conducting a philosophical exploration into the nature of value itself in an open-eyed, honest way which can only be of benefit to us all.

This chapter examines the challenges and rewards peculiar to teaching comic narrative. Readers frequently respond to humor as trivial, so students who expect readings in university courses to be ‘important’ often fail to recognize when a text is also funny. Instead, they find these texts confusing: why do the characters behave so illogically and say such contradictory things? Recognizing humor can be even more difficult when a text’s comic elements depend on unfamiliar references, or when the subject matter is shocking. But jokes often provide the focal point for a text’s thematic components, and are often where apparently contradictory ideas are brought into productive conflict. Using examples from Tom Stoppard, Sterling Brown and Virginia Woolf, and drawing on theories of humor from Plato to Bergson, this chapter will examine ways to help students see how comic narratives construct substantive philosophical and political arguments.

This chapter will examine the teaching of crime narratives in the context of an undergraduate module on American Crime Fiction. My purpose is to elucidate how the study of crime fiction can be a way of helping students understand the politics of narrative form. As such it traces the progression of the module from the reading of Poe’s detective stories through the narrative disruptions of mid-century hardboiled crime fiction to more contemporary noir fiction by authors such as Sara Paretsky and Attica Locke. I will discuss how students become accustomed to historicizing shifts in the ways crime narratives are constructed.

Todorov’s classic essay on ‘The Typology of Detective Fiction’ serves as an accessible formalist introduction to the spectrum of crime narratives, distinguished by their various configurations of the relationship between fabula and sjuzhet. His essay helps students to begin asking narratological questions about their reading, but one of the objectives of the module is to encourage students to discover the limitations of Todorov’s ahistorical perspective. In discussing the transition from the classic ‘whodunit’ narrative structure to the disorientating and tangled narratives of Chandler and his successors, students find their own ways of recuperating some of the historical content of the form, which has been evacuated from purely Formalist analysis. Using Franco Moretti’s Marxist analysis of detective fiction as a corrective, we move into more sophisticated discussions of how readers undertake structural and functional analyses simultaneously, and thereby of how hardboiled and contemporary noir narratives represent entanglement with society and politics.

This chapter analyzes Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall Trilogy as a case study for what historical fiction can contribute to our understanding of history. In particular, I will attend to what her novels reveal about the complex processes of historical and religious change that occurred during the Protestant Reformation, which marked its 500th anniversary in late 2017. Guided by my experience teaching Mantel’s fiction in courses on contemporary British fiction and historical fiction at a large regional university in the USA, I examine the ways that literature offers a unique perspective on major historical developments in religion and theology, especially by giving readers an opportunity to encounter, and indeed inhabit, religious interiority. By showing how new religious ideas and sensibilities develop, how they come into conflict with older viewpoints, and how they are by turns absorbed, adopted, challenged, resisted or rejected, Mantel discloses how religion is subject to the same historical contingencies as anything else. Far from being timeless and unchanging, it is contextual and more often than not syncretistic.

The Wolf Hall Trilogy offers students one example of how a writer can take even a period as thoroughly documented as the Tudor dynasty, or a movement as widely studied as the Protestant Reformation, and somehow defamiliarize them, or make them seem fresh. She does this in part by rendering central episodes in early modern history from a more intimate point of view. Like Leo Tolstoy, Mantel is less interested in the politics of the period than in what it felt like to live through it. As such, history becomes more than simply the ‘background’ to historical fiction; rather, it becomes part of the very method of historical fiction. In turn, students are invited to reflect on their own methods of reading and interpreting literature. Reading historical fiction necessarily involves us in multiple temporalities: the time period when the work is set, when it was written, and when we are reading it. Students may be led to reconsider their own beliefs, whether or not they are religious, in light of an earlier period of momentous historical change.

Having personally fallen victim to the romance of the archive, I love introducing students to primary sources that help them navigate the distant world of Victorian novels. Without contextual knowledge, they often find themselves puzzled or frustrated—why don’t ill-suited spouses just divorce each other? Why are aristocrats so clueless about the Stock Exchange? Hoping to improve upon conventional assignments, I tasked students with creating a wiki. To an online version of the novel, they attached their own essays, which they keyed to points of conflict or confusion in order to help future student readers understand the issues at stake. Students investigated the novelty of investment capitalism, attitudes towards Jews, the contested nature of the term ‘gentleman’, the history of medical reform, and domestic violence, among other topics.

Helping students to connect their academic research with their creative writing processes is often a challenge but when achieved, can provide valuable pathways between their personal experiences and the social world under study. The author identifies supporting this connection as a potentially powerful teaching and learning tool, helping undergraduates to make the leap from student to writer and researcher. This chapter will identify possible ways in which the writing and sharing of autobiographical narratives can inform and enhance pedagogy in creative writing workshops with undergraduate students. The author identifies autoethnography as an evolving methodology that values and legitimizes personal stories and evocative academic work, and can facilitate recovery from personal events that have been difficult or traumatic (Richardson and St Pierre 2005). The chapter will explore how the study of self-narrative can empower students to make explicit links between these personal experiences and their academic research. This chapter will be of interest to teachers and students carrying out research in education and to those trying to develop their own teaching practice to incorporate student-focused approaches to creative writing. The author suggests that an autoethnographic approach can contribute to an increased confidence in students’ sense of their place within the discipline of creative writing and the place of their discipline within the wider world.

This chapter will describe the inception, development and delivery of a popular first-year undergraduate narrative module. Designed partly as a module helping students in their transition from school and college work to undergraduate study, the module starts with fairy tales and folktales (drawing on Zipes, Bettelheim and Propp), myths (Frye, Eliade and Barthes), examines the central importance, as well as the potential coercions, of narrative in our culture (at one point the module brings together the ‘Alice’ books and Freud’s case study of Dora), and moves on to the analysis of short novels or novellas (by Melville, James, Conrad, Joyce, Mann, Mansfield, Rhys and detective stories) that highlight in their narrative techniques and issues—including the realist/modernist narrative ‘divide’—that we explore in narratological theory (Walter Benjamin and Peter Brooks among others). The module concludes with a debate around ‘Disneyfication’.