Literary texts are amazingly flexible: they can travel through time and space within the span of a single sentence (e.g. “Bill Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. Bill has gone to sleep a senile widower and awakened on his wedding day.”) They can also make us, like Gulliver in his famous travels, feel very small or quite large. In other words, narratives create economies of scale, and they use these economies to condense or expand time and space in ways that have come to seem quite realistic, or at least understandable. This course will investigate how they accomplish these remarkable transformations, and so it will consider theories of narratology as one important component of this phenomenon. As well, it will look at why literary texts invoke economies of scale in order to critique, satirize, or to represent the extraordinary possibilities of the ordinary world. In order to understand why, we will consider a number of theorists, including geographers (e.g. David Harvey and others who have thought a good deal about scale), literary theorists (Susan Stewart, et al.), and philosophers (e.g. Edmund Burke on the sublime). Among the texts we will be reading are Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, Robert Irwin’s The Limits of Vision, Virginia Woolf’s Orlando, John McPhee’s Assembling California, Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, and maybe even Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughter House Five. Like other Honors seminars, this one will require some short writing assignments, an annotated bibliography, and a 20 page final project.