Seminar in Narrative Studies

ENGL 531-001 / Tuesdays 15:30–18:20 / HLG 320

Instructor

Pr. John Laudun / HLG 356 / TBA & by appt

Course Description

Stories feature prominently in our lives and in discourses about our lives. Children ask parents to tell them a story; we swap stories as adults in order to get to know each other; and, increasingly, doctors and lawyers describe the work they do in terms of stories. This seminar is designed to familiarize participants with the wide range of scholarship and science that treats stories. Our goal will be to refine our own working definition of narrative both to understand its nature but also, for those interested in creative projects, to refine our practice. It should be clear from this description that this seminar is open to a wide range of interests: creative, literary, folkloristic, rhetorical, and linguistic.

Course Objective

The objective of this seminar is to survey the breadth and depth of definitions of narrative both in scholarship and science but also in the larger world. A lot of fields use narrative either as an object of study or as part of their practice. Understanding the implications for both formal and working definitions, for sometimes the definitions are implicit in practice, is central to the work of the seminar. Given the variety of backgrounds of seminar participants, and the range of materials and experiences each will bring to the seminar, the principal goal of the seminar is for each participant to be able to frame their own ongoing projet within the larger context of narrative studies. That is, no one can know everything about a field as large and diverse as narrative studies, but you can create for yourself a map of reasonable fidelity such that should you encounter others interested in the study of narrative qua narrative, you can expect to move quickly from situating yourselves within the larger domain to a productive dialogue on those matters that interest you.

Course Texts

Three texts, one classical and two synthetic, are listed below. Much or our reading will be by PDF, either of classical texts available through our LMS or classical and contemporary texts available via one of the online databases or journals. My sincere advice is that you can, wherever possible, print the PDFs and read the articles on paper. Make notes. Scribble angry responses. Doodle when bored. Highlight in a wide variety of colors.

Required

Keen, Suzanne. 2003. Narrative Form. Palgrave.

Propp, Vladimir. 1968. Morphology of the Folktale. Tr. Laurence Scott. University of Texas Press.

Recommended/Optional

Herman, David. 2009. Basic Elements of Narrative. Wiley-Blackwell.

In addition to these texts, we will be reading a great deal from materials drawn from sources like JSTOR and Project Muse as well as other materials found online – either posted to arXiv or to personal, professional, or institutional sites.

Course Requirements

The weighting of grades will be as follows: participation in the seminar, which includes short in-seminar presentations and activities, makes up one half of a participant’s evaluation. The seminar paper process makes up the other half. (I stress the importance of process.)

Participation

Seminar participants are expected to comport themselves as, well, as if they were in a seminar:

A seminar is, generally, a form of academic instruction, either at an academic institution or offered by a commercial or professional organization. It has the function of bringing together small groups for recurring meetings, focusing each time on some particular subject, in which everyone present is requested to participate actively. This is often accomplished through an ongoing Socratic dialogue with a seminar leader or instructor, or through a more formal presentation of research. The idea behind the seminar system is to familiarize students more extensively with the methodology of their chosen subject and also to allow them to interact with examples of the practical problems that always occur during research work. It is essentially a place where assigned readings are discussed, questions can be raised and debates can be conducted. (Thank you, Wikipedia.)

Participation includes a wide variety of forms: active listening, thoughtful speaking, short presentations, involvement in in-class and out-of-class individual and group assignments. Some of these may include, as seems fitting for a seminar led by a folklorist, the occasional exploration of the world beyond campus in the form of observations you make in places like book stores, coffee shops, and other places where people gather to talk or read/write. There is no set list of assignments in this regard: this is something that must arise out of a sense of the seminar as a particular historical group of individuals. (Again, you would expect no less from a folklorist.)

Seminar Paper

In addition to the assumed active participation, which includes a number of projects and/or assignments as well as active listening and talking, this seminar also requires the preparation of a seminar paper ( >= 5000 words). We will step through the writing process with a series of deadlines for a research proposal, an annotated bibliography, and a series of body paragraphs. The idea behind this particular arrangement is that any project, like an essay, but also known as a daunting task, can be broken into smaller steps. Each of these steps can have its own deadline, and each is something you have done before, though perhaps informally, but each of them makes it possible to eat the proverbial elephant, writing one bite at a time. In the academy, productivity is everything, and establishing the mechanics of productivity is helpful. The idea is also to make it possible to explore the viability of a project a little at a time, so that should something not pan out – you hit a brick wall or you lose interest – there is still time to change course and pursue something else. The schedule is designed to give participants a series of deadlines that makes it possible to test the viability of an idea and to have time to expand nascent ideas into something of consequence that we call the seminar paper and we often imagine as leading to an article. That is, all the written assignments in this seminar are designed to match conventional scholarly outputs. (See the project description below for more information.)

For most participants, writing a seminar paper in a course focused on intellectual history is fairly difficult: usually the moment of person synthesis, that ah-hah! moment, comes in the latter half of the term. That is not terrible timing for a seminar paper, but for attempting anything earlier, it does make things difficult. Based on past experience, I would like to propose that you begin with a research proposal with the following contents:

Single-spaced and citations in whatever formatting your prefer, but used consistently. (For the record, folklore studies uses Chicago B, which makes far more sense than MLA and has not changed in decades.)

Communications

If you must miss a class meeting, please make sure to contact someone from the course to verify what happened and where we are in the schedule. (If Teams is working, you may feel free to post there. Conversely, if you are checking Teams and you see someone has asked about something in class, please answer their question.)

Corpus (an option)

Hold for now:

In addition to (or over and against) scholarly/scientific considerations of narrative, the seminar will develop its own corpus of texts which we will use as a place to apply theories and models, as a vehicle for furthering/deepening our discussion about various theories and models, and as a well from which we can draw our own ideas. For more on the corpus, see below.

Because time is not infinite, each of you is constrained by a limit of 10,000 words: this can be one text or several. A further constraint is that we will need to balance our text between those items that are obviously or conventionally narrative and those which test boundaries.

My somewhat informed guess is that many of you already have possible sources, which could range as wildly from the tried and true of Project Gutenberg or An Archive of Our Own to sites and sources which I cannot imagine. Just in case, here are some lists drawn from rambling around the “intarwebs” that might help you when you get stuck:

Communications

As participants in a seminar, each of you is more a part of overall work than in other courses. Consider yourself co-facilitators, or at least peers: we are here to develop our own thinking but to do so alongside others doing the same. Often, it’s somebody else’s moment of synthesis that prompts your own or directs you to a new, different line of questioning. The use of an application like Teams is meant to provide us a venue to continue conversations and to encourage everyone to think of this as “us” and not “me and the teacher.” (Plus, I don’t know about you, but my email inbox feels like a dumpster fire that I just can’t seem to put out, so staying out of it is good for everyone.)

Using a group chat application – okay, Teams is more than that – also means that if you miss something, you can poll the group to catch you up. Or to follow up on a reference someone made in a discussion but you didn’t quite catch. And I encourage you to make as many of these kinds of interactions “whole group” as you are comfortable doing. Almost always, someone else has the same question or confusion and you may be the person who gives voice to their concern. You too can be a discursive hero.

Agenda

Our own interests, expertise, and discoveries will determine more clearly how we will actually spend our time. For those reasons, I prefer to establish an agenda for a course, with the proviso that how much we dwell on a topic or gloss it will affect the timing of matters. Thanks to the Mardi Gras holiday, our semester is broken neatly into two blocks of six weeks, with a final seminar held for participant presentations and discussion.

1. A Very Bayesian Beginning (J21)

Narrative and story get used a lot. For our first meeting, after we review the syllabus and introduce ourselves, we will discuss examples of the two that you bring in from out in the world. Each participant should bring in at least one quotation. To make it easier to share, please copy and paste them into a document that you can then print out and bring sufficient copies for all to have one. We will then sort the quotations/usages into groups of our own devising, based on similarities in emergent traits. Try to vary the nature of the examples: make at least one scholarly and/or formal; make one from a popular source – and not everyone can use Wikipedia! We will discuss the review of Brooks’ Seduced by Story (see Teams for a PDF version) and various videos in this seminar.

Stewart, Susan. 2022. Beware the ‘Storification’ of the Internet. The Atlantic (November 17). https://www.theatlantic.com/books/archive/2022/11/seduced-by-story-peter-brooks-book-review/672135/.

Sagmeister, Stefan. 2014. You Are Not a Storyteller. FITC. https://vimeo.com/98368484.

Connell, Richard. 1924. The Most Dangerous Game. Collier’s.

2. The Shape of Stories (J28)

In European tradition prior to the twentieth century, there are really two accounts of dramatic structure or shape that were most prominent. The first is Aristotle’s notion of beginning, middle, and end that the plot of all tragedies must possess — note the qualification (which often gets overlooked)—put forth in his Poetics (335BCE):

A whole is what has a beginning and middle and end. A beginning is that which is not a necessary consequent of anything else but after which something else exists or happens as a natural result. An end on the contrary is that which is inevitably or, as a rule, the natural result of something else but from which nothing else follows; a middle follows something else and something follows from it. Well constructed plots must not therefore begin and end at random, but must embody the formulae we have stated.

Read: at least the first 6 pages of Aristotle’s Poetics, available as the translation above on Perseus. (The quotation is from 1450a.)

The next consideration that “shapes” our current thinking doesn’t occur until the end of the nineteenth century, when the German playwright Gustav Freytag argued in Die Technik des Dramas that dramatic structures occurred in five parts: introduction, rise, climax, return or fall, denouement or resolution (or catastrophe).

To see Freytag’s pyramid in action in 2025, check out “Freytag’s Pyramid and the importance of a game arc”.

While Freytag’s name is most associated with this particular shape of dramatic structures, it’s really Selden Lincoln Whitcomb’s The Study of a Novel (1905) whose shape we reference, with its triangular shape shifted noticeably to the right, mapping the length of the narrative to the base of triangle, and thus the climax of a narrative “further” into the telling. As the twentieth century developed, the notion of dramatic shape continued to gain adherents: see, for example, Percy Lubbock’s The Craft of Fiction (1921), and as a number of media industries developed, with an especial focus on “middle brow” works, the notion of a formula for crafting a successful novel or film became a part of the industrial landscape. (Painful to think of novels as part of an industry for some, but there you have it.)

The most famous version of this mid-century formula is, of course, the Hollywood formula, which, as TV Tropes notes, “follows three characters through three acts.” For a 15-minute version of the formula, listen to Lou Anders’ explanation on Writing Excuses from 2011. If there is no official handbook for the Hollywood formula, then it can also be glimpsed through all the ways that various artists, critics, and scholars seek to subvert or critique it. See, for example, Dancyger and Rush’s Alternative Scriptwriting: Beyond the Hollywood Formula (2013) or the derision of the formula in Duncan Cooper’s “Who killed Spartacus?”

Reedsy outlines 7 shapes, including those mentioned above and below and includes a discussion of the story circle, which most writers attribute to Dan Harmon, who suggests that it became more clear to him while working on Community. (I will leave it to your independent investigatory impulses to explore the connections between Harmon’s story circle and Joseph Campbell’s hero’s journey.)

Cooper, Duncan. 1991. WHO KILLED SPARTACUS? Cinéaste, 18(3): 18–27. http://www.jstor.org/stable/41687089.

We will explore the Hollywood formula using the following examples: Casablanca (1942), and Die Hard (1988) and the story circle using Star Wars: A New Hope (1977) — because Lucas helped revive Campbell, but feel free to bring examples of your own: there are pyramids and circles (and beats and whatever else) everywhere you turn.

Finally, Kurt Vonnegut once famously offered his own take on “the shape of stories,” which is captured in this famous lecture he gave at the Case College Scholars Program 4 February 2004: YouTube. Maya Eilam created an infographic of Vonnegut’s shapes. And there were a number of attempts to actualize Vonnegut’s theory computationally, including one from the UVM Story Lab:

Reagan, Andrew J, Lewis Mitchell, Dilan Kiley, Christopher M Danforth, and Peter Sheridan Dodds. 2016. “The Emotional Arcs of Stories Are Dominated By Six Basic Shapes.” EPJ Data Science 5 (1): 175. 10.1140/epjds/s13688-016-0093-1.

3 & 4. Narrative Form (F4 & 11)

Having tacked somewhat randomly through the great Sea of Narratology, and given ourselves time for books to come in, it is time to set a clearer course. Suzanne Keen’s Narrative Form is our guide for two seminars. For the first meeting, we will discuss major approaches and theorists, shapes, situation, and characters (Chapters 1-4). In our second seminar on Narrative Form, we will take up plot, timing, order, levels, worlds, and genres. If that list leaves you breathless, then you have some sense of the whirlwind nature of her tour (and some sense of just how much water there is in this sea). Words to work by: start reading as soon as you can and tackle one chapter in a sitting, and only one chapter. Digest the chapter’s contents before moving onto the next.

5. Early Structuralism: Formalist Syntagms

Perhaps only lagging behind Claude Levi-Strauss’ “The Structural Study of Myth” as one of the most renown works of folk narrative study, Propp’s Morphology shaped much of the classical work in mythology to come later in the twentieth century and would, in fact, have a significant influence on early attempts to build computational models of narrative in the early twenty-first century. (More on this in the redux of the shape of stories later in the semester.)

Read: Propp, Vladimir. 1968. Morphology of the Folktale. Tr. Laurence Scott. University of Texas Press.

6. Early Structuralism: Paradigms

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1955. The Structural Study of Myth. Journal of American Folklore 68 (270): 428-44.

Lévi-Strauss’ approach was never operationalized, per se, but was rather adapted in various ways by European and American scholars. Combined with Jacques Lacan’s efforts at psychological structuralism and with the revolution in generative linguistics started by Noam Chomsky, textual structuralisms took on a variety of forms, some of which we will glimpse after the break.

Meanwhile, as they say, there was this ongoing method of breaking stories into plot points and then cataloguing the resulting structures into types. In this meeting, we familiarize ourselves with one way the idea of functions in folktales were operationalized, The Tale-Type Index and, later, its companion set of volumes, The Motif Index. With the readings in mind, we settle down to using the volumes to classify a number of tales.

There are no class meetings during Mardi Gras break. Enjoy!

Resources

The lists below are by no means comprehensive, only suggestive. If you find something that should be added here, please let me know.

Journals

Please note that the hyperlinks for JSTOR and Project Muse take you directly to the journal’s main page and not the home page of those two services.

The Journal of Narrative Theory appears to be the oldest journal focused specifically on narrative. Founded in 1971 as the Journal of Narrative Technique, JNT “has provided a forum for the theoretical exploration of narrative in all its forms. Building on this foundation, JNT publishes essays addressing the epistemological, global, historical, formal, and political dimensions of narrative from a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives.” JNT is available on-line through Project Muse.

Narrative is “the official journal of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. Narrative’s broad range of scholarship includes the English, American, and European novel, nonfiction narrative, film, and narrative as used in performance art.” The Society’s website is: http://narrative.georgetown.edu/. Online access to articles is available through Project Muse (2002-present). Issues prior to 2002 are available through JSTOR.

Storyworlds is a new, interdisciplinary journal of narrative theory. It features research on storytelling practices across a variety of media, including face-to-face interaction, literary writing, film and television, virtual environments, historiography, journalism, and graphic narratives, studied from perspectives developed in such fields as narratology, discourse analysis, jurisprudence, philosophy, cognitive and social psychology, Artificial Intelligence, medicine, and the study of organizations.” Current journal contents and contact information are available at http://storyworlds.osu.edu. The journal is available on-line on Project Muse.

In addition to these journals focused narrowly on narrative, there are journals that address narrative specifically but from a particular perspective. Obviously most, if not all, of the journals with which you are familiar in the fields of composition, folklore, or literary studies will include narrative as part of their purview, but you may also want to take a look at a few other journals that you, perhaps, would not normally encounter, such as Discourse Processes or Genre.

Special Issues

In Autumn 1980, Critical Inquiry 7(1) released a special issue entitled simply: On Narrative. (URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/i257724.) The table of contents reads like a who’s who of scholars from the era:

Front Matter: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343172

W. J. T. Mitchell, Editor’s Note: On Narrative (1-4): http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343173

Hayden White , The Value of Narrativity in the Representation of Reality (5-27): http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343174.

Roy Schafer, Narration in the Psychoanalytic Dialogue (29-53): http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343175.

Jacques Derrida and Avital Ronell , The Law of Genre (55-81): http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343176.

Frank Kermode, Secrets and Narrative Sequence (83-101): http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343177.

Nelson Goodman, Twisted Tales; Or, Story, Study, and Symphony (103-119): http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343178.

Seymour Chatman, What Novels Can Do That Films Can’t (And Vice Versa) (121-140): http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343179.

Victor Turner, Social Dramas and Stories about Them (141-168): http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343180.

Paul Ricoeur, Narrative Time (169-190): http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343181

Ursula K. Le Guin, It Was a Dark and Stormy Night; Or, Why Are We Huddling about the Campfire? (191-199): http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343182

Afterthoughts on Narrative

Paul Hernadi, On the How, What, and Why of Narrative (201-203): http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343183

Robert Scholes, Language, Narrative, and Anti-Narrative (204-212): http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343184

Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Narrative Versions, Narrative Theories (213-236): http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343185.

In addition to the special issue of Critical Inquiry, there was also a special issue of Poetics published in 1986 (Volume 15, Numbers 1-2). (URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/0304422X/15/1-2):

Elisabeth Gülich, UtaM. Quasthoff, An interdisciplinary dialogue, 1-3. F.-J. Brüggemeier, Sounds of silents: History, narrative and life-recollections, 5-24.

Rainer Münz and Monika Pelz, Narration in social research, 25-41.

Peter M. Wiedemann, Don’t tell any stories: Theories and discoveries concerning story-telling in the therapeutic setting, 43-55.

D. Baacke, Narration and narrative analysis in education and educational science, 57-72.

P. Bange, Towards a pragmatic analysis of narratives in literature, 73-87. Christof Hardmeier, Old testament exegesis and linguistic narrative research, 89-109.

Christopher Habel, Stories – An artificial intelligence perspective (?), 111-125. Harvey Sacks, Some considerations of a story told in ordinary conversations, 127-138.

Wallace Chafe, Beyond bartlett: Narratives and remembering, 139-151.

Ruth Wodak, Tales from the Vienna woods: Sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic considerations of narrative analysis, 153-182.

Charlotte Linde, Private stories in public discourse: Narrative analysis in the social sciences, 183-202.

Wolf-Dieter Stempel, Everyday narrative as a prototype, 203-216. Elisabeth Gülich, Uta M. Quasthoff, Story-telling in conversation: Cognitive and interactive aspects, 217-241.

Books

Some of these texts are more central to the scholarly study of narrative; some are not. Make of the two categories what you will:

Primers

Bal, Mieke. 1985. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Tr. Christine van Boheemen. University of Toronto Press.

Bauman, Richard. 1986. Story, Performance, and Event. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Benveniste, Emile. 1971. Problems in General Linguistics. Tr. Mary Elizabeth Meek. Coral Gables: University of Miami Press.

Booth, Wayne. 1961. The Rhetoric of Fiction. University of Chicago Press. Chatman, Seymour. 1978. Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film. Cornell University Press.

Borges, Jorge Luis. 1962. Labyrinths: Selected Stories and Other Writings. Ed. Donald A. Yates and James E. Irby. New York: New Directions. “The Garden of Forking Paths” (19-29). Tr. Donald A. Yates.

Coles, Robert. 1989. The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination. Houghton Mifflin.

Goffman, Erving. 1981. Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

Onega, Susana and José Ángel García Landa. 1996. Narratology: An Introduction. Longman.

Prince, Gerald. 1987. A Dictionary of Narratology. University of Nebraska Press. More Central

Sternberg, Meir. 1978. Expositional Modes and Temporal Ordering in Fiction. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Less Central

Articles & Essays

Briggs, Charles and Richard Bauman. 1992. Genre, Intertextuality, and Social Power. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2(2): 131-172.

Clifford, James. 1986. On Ethnographic Allegory. In Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, 98-121. Ed. James Clifford and George Marcus. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Kramer, Mark and Wendy Call (ed). 2007. Telling True Stories: A Nonfiction Writers’ Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University. New York: Plume. Roemer, Michael. 199. Telling Stories: Postmodernism and the Invalidation of Traditional Narrative. Rowan and Littlefield.

Before Our Beginning

As noted elsewhere, prior to the twentieth century, interested commentators were more focused on narrative’s manifestations in various forms of discourse, as is the case with Aristotle’s concern with the nature of tragedy in the plays of his day. Aristotle’s Poetics are available in a number of locations: Project Perseus has an authoritative edition of Aristotle’s Poetics which is generously annotated but requires you to be online and Project Gutenberg has a variety of formats which can easily be downloaded for offline viewing.

Media

Nevins, Jake. 2018. In the golden age of television, can narrative podcasts compete? The Guardian (May 2018). Link.