Narrative and narratives
designing and delivering a first-year undergraduate narrative module
pp. 191-209
in: Richard Jacobs (ed), Teaching narrative, Berlin, Springer, 2018Abstract
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".
