What does the structure of narratives tell us about the way human beings experience time and space? How do writers, painters, and film-makers work with time and space to create visual and textual narratives? Do they readily adopt models prevalent in their culture, or do they create their own representation of these categories, and thus challenge culturally established paradigms? Could we talk of politics of space and time in fictional narratives? How does the medium at the creator’s disposal – words for writers and images for painters and film-makers – influence the temporal and spatial order in visual and literary texts? How does the representation of time and space in artistic works mold the temporal and spatial experience of readers or viewers? How do narratives direct the attention on the one hand, to that which is fundamentally human in the way we perceive and handle time and space, and on the other, to that which is culturally specific and determined?

The purpose of this class is twofold. On the one hand, we will closely acquaint ourselves with existing critical approaches to narrative time and space. On the other hand, we will direct our efforts to coming up with new ways of viewing temporality and spatiality in fictional narratives. We will discuss examples of literary, cinematic, and painterly narratives that were created in different time periods and cultures ranging from antiquity to the present, and West to East. Theoretical texts written by literary critics, art historians and film theoreticians of different cultural backgrounds will provide us with a number of terms that help describe the organization of time and space in artistic works. We will talk about the ways in which concepts such as point of view or perspective, embedding, focalization and voice are useful in unraveling the temporal and spatial order of narrative works, and the ways in which these theoretical concepts fail to capture the complexity of the concrete artistic works at hand.

Narratives composed of multiple story lines on different levels – chain narratives and framed narratives -- are especially apt at providing answers to these questions. Criticism has discussed the representation of space in these types of narratives in terms of two major categories. Space is considered to be the background or setting in which the actions of characters occur. It is also defined by the various contexts within which different stories are told or visually represented to an audience. The time line in chain and frame narratives has been generally defined as the scheme, which orders the different stories according to criteria of before or after. In this class we will seek for new ways to define narrative space and time.

Course readings include the following primary texts: Old Testament: Exodus 3, Franz Kafka “A Country Doctor,” Dante “Inferno” from The Divine Comedy, Mary Shelley Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, Joseph Conrad Lord Jim, G. E. Lessing Nathan the Wise, and Thornton Wilder The Cabala. In addition, there is a course reader with theoretical texts by Northrop Frye, W J. T. Mitchell, Wolfgang Kemp, G. E. Lessing, Nelson Goodman, Paul Ricoeur, J. Hillis Miller and Benjamin Seymour.

Class assignments include weekly response papers, a mid-term and course portfolio.