WHAT IS THE NOVEL?

Feedback on your answers.

Be prepared to share your views.

ASPECTS OF NARRATIVE

• The first part of your course will be “Aspects of Narrative”.

• It consists of a number of challenging texts terminating in a single, two hour exam.

• You will be expected to read around the set texts.

ASPECTS OF NARRATIVE

• You will study two novels and two sets of poems.

• The first novel will be Charles Dickens, on which topic is your homework.

• The first poet we look at will be W. H. Auden.

• You will need to know all four texts very well.

ASPECTS OF NARRATIVE

• The goals of the course are to make you think about narrative. Although ‘Narrative’ is meant broadly, the topic can be thought of in terms of:

1. How the writer constructs the narrative

2. How the reader responds to narrative.

WHAT IS NARRATIVE?

• “Whilst narratology can be broadly defined as the study of narrative, it is perhaps best described as the structuralist study of narrative plots.”

– Penguin Dictionary of Critical Theory

SO NARRATIVE CAN BE SEEN AS THE STUDY OF PLOTS

• Plot is the “first principle,” the most important feature. 

• Aristotle defines plot as “the arrangement of the incidents”: i.e., not the story itself but the way the incidents are presented to the audience, the structure of the play.

• This is a start, but it is not quite enough. Think how many ways of describing an event there can be. You can use mime, words, pictures, writing and so on.

• So the “Aspects” part of the course really describes the very various things which happen when Plot is told.

“ABOUT SUFFERING THEY WERE NEVER

WRONG”

What questions do you have about this line?

MUSÉE DES BEAUX ARTS – W.H. AUDEN

About suffering they were never wrong,The Old Masters: how well they understoodIts human position; how it takes placeWhile someone else is eating or opening a window or justwalking dully along;How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waitingFor the miraculous birth, there always must beChildren who did not specially want it to happen, skatingOn a pond at the edge of the wood:They never forgotThat even the dreadful martyrdom must run its courseAnyhow in a corner, some untidy spotWhere the dogs go on with their doggylife and the torturer’s horseScratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns awayQuite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman mayHave heard the splash, the forsaken cry,But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shoneAs it had to on the white legs disappearing into the greenWater; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seenSomething amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

• In what sense is this a narrative?