ENGL 5043 Seminar: Intimate Narratives

In this undergraduate seminar, we will explore the way that literature invites us into the intimate and sometimes messy emotional dynamics of human relationships. Focusing on intimate narratives ranging fromAs I Lay Dying toWhite Noise, The History of Love, and " Cat Person," we will consider how individual identity and interpersonal connections are shaped by the contexts of grief, consumerism, disaster, desire, aging, violence, gender, and domestic space. Along the way, we will analyze how narrative manipulates the reader's relationship to individual, romantic, and family dynamics through narrative structure, point of view, narrative voice, etc. How, in other words, do we as readers enter into the fictional and non-fictional worlds we access? Where are we located in the domestic scenes we observe? Whose perspective do we share, and why? This seminar will feature creative projects as well as traditional critical essay writing. In a series of in-class presentations, students will analyze film and television portrayals of intimate relationships. In final projects, each student will identify a literary, film or television narrative that addresses intimate relationships; after analyzing the way in which narrative shapes the construction of its fictional or nonfictional world, students will reimagine that portrayal of intimate dynamics from a different perspective, culminating in a short literary or video scene of their own creation. This class is open to all those fascinated by the way that stories, both literary and visual, probe the depths of human character and shape our assumptions about human relationships and family dynamics.