Instr:                 Sheila Roberts
Office:              CRT 597,     229-4534
e-mail:              svrob@uwm.edu
Office hours:     by appointment.

Course Information:           MW 2:30 to 3:45pm.                    Curtin 468

Course Description

 This course is not designed to be so overly prescriptive regarding the presence in fiction of  first-person narrators that no useful analyses and discussions of closeness, confessionality, and distance may be generated.  First of all, there is no one model for the fully successful first-person narration.  For instance, a close third-person narration (whether dramatized or undramatized) is able to approach the intimacy of a first-person account, both at times laboring under the limitations of a single consciousness guiding the story/plot.  And it goes without saying that no matter the point-of-view an author chooses, there is always the “implied author” pulling the verbal strings of the “show” above and beyond the voices of the narrator-observers or narrator-agents.

In our reading of a selection of predominantly European novels, we will pay close attention to the combination of first-person narrator-observers and narrator-agents as well as to the subtle or importunate role of the “implied author.”  More importantly, we will discuss the effects and meanings generated in each text by the narrative strategies of closeness or distance, reliability or unreliability.  We will also interrogate the often-heard statement that “showing” is better than “telling” and, in the process, discover the author’s clear or obscure relationship toward his or her own writing and the audience to whom it is addressed.

Required Reading:
Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes;  Night by Edna O’Brien;  Gargoyles by Thomas Bernhard;  Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo;  Cat and Mouse by Gunther Grass;  Kafka: The Complete Short Stories;  In the Heart of the Country by J.M. Coetzee; and More Die of Heartbreak by Saul Bellow.

Grades will be apportioned in this way:
Three short essays (3 pp.) 30%;  Class presentation 20%; Mid-term and end-of-semester papers 25% each.

Attendance and class participation are required.