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Dennis Yi Tenen
Associate Professor
Department of English and Comparative Literature
Co-Director, Center for Comparative Media
denten.github.io/ | dt2406@ | 415.215.3315

Course Description

This graduate course offers an in-depth exploration of contemporary narrative theory, examining how stories function across different genres, media, and cultural contexts. Students should expect significant engagement with scholarship on narrative, borrowing from research in literary studies, psychology, anthropology, sociology, philosophy, film and game studies. Topics covered include story, plot, schema, time, space, character, agency, setting, frame, event, and action while also addressing the role of narrative in shaping personal and collective identities.

Course Requirements & Grading

Students will be expected to read the approximate equivalent of three scholarly articles per week, to attend seminars weekly, to participate in the class discussion both in person and online, and to develop a research project that will culminate in a paper. Advanced students will have the option to integrate the course's themes with the subject matter of their expertise.

Grade breakdown:

• Class Participation 25%
• Weekly response online forum 25%
• Midterm project proposal 20%
• Final project 30%

University Policies

When in doubt, cite! Plagiarism is insulting to your fellow students, your instructors, and to the research community at large. It wastes my time and yours, and is, ultimately, not worth the risk. Consult Columbia’s guidelines at http://www.college.columbia.edu/academics/integrity or ask me for help early in the writing process. We will discuss the use appropriate of AI aids, such as ChatGPT and Copilot, in class.

Provisional Schedule & Reading List

Week 1: Narrative

• “An Introduction to the Analysis of Narrative” by Roland Barthes in New Literary History 6, 237–72.
• Cohn, Dorrit. "Signposts of Fictionality: A Narratological Perspective." Poetics Today, vol. 11, no. 4, 1990, pp. 775–804.
• “The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality” by Hayden White in Critical Inquiry 7:5-27.

Week 2: Plot

• Egan, Kieran. “What Is a Plot?” New Literary History, vol. 9, no. 3, 1978, pp. 455–73.
• "Repetition, Repression, and Return: Great Expectations and the Study of Plot" in New Literary History, Vol. 11, No. 3, On Narrative and Narratives: II (Spring, 1980), pp. 503-526 by Peter Brooks.
• Genette, Gerard, and Jonathan Culler. "Order" in Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Cornell University Press, 1983.

Week 3: Narrator

• Chapter 1, "Telling and Showing" and Chapter VI, "Types of Narration" from The Rhetoric of Fiction (1961) by Wayne C. Booth.
• Chapter 4, "Authors and Narrators" from Narratives and Narrators: A Philosophy of Stories (2010) by Gregory Currie.
• "New Wine in Old Bottles? Voice, Focalization, and New Writing" by Monika Fludernik in New Literary History, Vol. 32, No. 3, Voice and Human Experience (Summer, 2001), pp. 619-638.

Week 4: Schema

• Chapter IV "Some Peculiarities of Verbal Understanding in the Child between the Ages of Nine and Eleven" in The Language And Thought Of The Child (1923) by Jean Piaget.
• The Introduction to Scripts, Plans, Goals, and Understanding (1977) by Roger C. Schank, Robert P. Abelson.
• "Bedtime With Shaharazad" and "Human Meaning" in The Literary Mind (1996) by Mark Turner.

Explore: The Plot Genie Index (1934) by Wycliffe A. Hill.

Week 5: Time

• Chapter 3, "Games with Time" from Time and Narrative II by Paul Ricoeur.
• Chapter 1 "Timelines" and Chapter 4 "Calendar Times" from Inderjeet Mani, The Imagined Moment: Time, Narrative, and Computation (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010).
• Ryan, Marie-Laure. "Temporal Paradoxes in Narrative." Style 43, no. 2 (2009): 142–64.

Week 6: Space

• Chapter 1, "The House from Cellar to Garret" in The Poetics of Space (1958) by Gaston Bachelard.
• Chapter 4, "Body, Personal Relations, and Spatial Values" from Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience (1977) by Yi-Fu Tuan.
• “Toward a Computational Archaeology of Fictional Space” by Dennis Yi Tenen in New Literary History 49.1 (2018): 119–47.

Week 7: Event

• Chapter 2 "Story: Events" in Seymore Chatman's Story and Discourse (1978).
• Chapter 1 "The Importance of Events" and Chapter 4 "Language" in Event Cognition (21014) by Gabriel Radvansky and Jeffrey Zacks.
• Danto, Arthur C. “Narrative Sentences.” History and Theory 2, no. 2 (1962): 146–79.

Explore: "Literary Event Detection" in the Proceedings of the ACL (2019) by Matthew Sims, Jong Ho Park, and David Bamman.

Week 8: Setting

• Selections from Thought and Language (1934) by Lev Vygotsky.
• Chapters 1-3 from The Country and the City (1973) by Raymond Williams.
• Selections from Frame Analysis (1974) by Erving Goffman.

Optionally: selections from The Practice of Everyday Life (1980) by Michel de Certeau.

Week 9: Action

-“Action, Action Description, and Narration” by Teun van Dijk in New Literary History 6, 273–94.

• Selections from The Poetics of Prose (1971) by Tzvetan Todorov.
• Selections from The Art of Failure: An Essay on the Pain of Playing Video Games (2013) by Jesper Juul.

Week 10: Character

• Selections from Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction (1978) by Dorrit Cohn.
• Selections from Character and Person (2014) by John Frow.
• Selections from Flat Protagonists: A Theory of Novel Character (2016) by Marta Figlerowicz.

Week 11: Agency

• Selections from The Illusion of Conscious Will (2002) by Daniel Wegner.
• “Agency in Illness Narratives” by Lore Arduser in Narrative Inquiry 24:1-27.
• “Distributed Agency in the Novel” by Dennis Yi Tenen in New Literary History 54.1 (2022): 903-937.

Week 12: Perspective

• Selections from The Interpretation of Cultures (1973) by Clifford Geertz.
• Selections from The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (1988) by James Clifford.
• "Positioning between Structure and Performance" by Michael Bamberg in the Journal of Narrative and Life History 7 (1-4), 335-342

Week 13: Self, Identity

• "Small Stories as a New Perspective in Narrative and Identity Analysis" by Michael Bamberg and Alexandra Georgakopoulou.
• Selections from The Constitution of Selves (1996) by Marya Schechtman.
• Selections from The Redemptive Self: Stories Americans Live By (2006) by Dan P. McAdams.

Week 14: Body

• "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel" in The Dialogic Imagination (1981) by Mikhail Bakhtin.
• Selections from Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film (1978) by Seymour Chatman.
• "Story and Discourse in the Analysis of Narrative" by Jonathan Culler in The Pursuit of Signs (1981).
• Selections from Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative by David Herman.