This course provides theoretical basics and practical training in the analysis of narrative form. Discussions will be based on six major nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels. Students will work with key critical concepts associated with the poetics of the novel (story and plot, authorship and modes of narration, reliable and unreliable narrators, framing and embedding, point of view, methods of representing consciousness, irony, defamiliarization, metafiction, intertextuality). Please note: English 302B is an introduction to advanced literary studies, and the class is reading-intensive. The novels by Balzac, Eliot, and Flaubert (see below) must be read before the first meeting. Books: Honore de Balzac, Pere Goriot (Signet Classic); George Eliot, Adam Bede (Oxford World’s Classics); Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Oxford World’s Classics); Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Harvest); William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (Vintage); John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Signet); David Lodge, The Art of Fiction (Penguin). There will be a substantial pack of critical essays. Several short assignments and a final exam/paper (last day of class).