We’ve just added a LAH 350 “Our Lives in Fiction”, taught by our very own Dr. Carver!
Meets: T/TH 11-12:30, SZB 286
In this course we will explore the hypothesis that human beings have and continue to create and recreate themselves through the telling of stories. While we tell stories for many reasons–pleasure, escapism, will to power, and so forth–one of the principal reasons, or so the course posits, is to find out what is significant, what is praiseworthy, what is it we should value and why. As the infant Akhilleus sat on the lap of his tutor, Phoenix, “wet[ing] [his] shirt, hiccuping/wine-bubbles in distress,” the greatest of ancient Greek heroes was listening to stories “instruct[ing] [him] in these matters/to be a man of eloquence and action.” Years later, Phoenix will seek once again to guide the actions of his extraordinary charge by telling him a story. If you are like me, as a child and now an adult, you too heard and continue to hear stories; you too have sought and now continue to seek in these stories patterns of how to live. It is this educative function of story that we will be exploring. We will begin the course with two 20th-century coming of age novels, one about a young man, and one about a young woman. We will then turn back to read four great novels of our literary history.
Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote
Charles Dickens, Great Expectations
Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye
Grades will be based on the following: (1) regular class attendance, careful preparation of the readings, and active participation in the class; (2) short papers responding to the day’s reading; (3) timely submission of all work; and (4) a final examination, which will ask you to identify and tell the significance of selected passages from the semester’s reading.
Grades on writing will make up 35% of the grade; class participation will constitute 35%; and the final examination 30%.
The complete syllabus: LAH 350 Our Lives in Fiction