By which I do not mean Adam (“So God created Man in his own image”—Genesis) nor Neil Armstrong (“the first person to set foot upon the Moon”—Wikipedia) but the grammatical construction that begins with the letter “I” and then sets about to tell a story. We’ll call that story “fiction” whether it’s true or not, and we will spend the quarter examining those fictions that build themselves around their very own narrator. And let us subject that first person to an exotic or dangerous environment that will test the resilience and durability of the self—a bit of what you might expect from the Biblical Adam or Neil Armstrong if either of those gents had to account for himself. In effect, the first person almost always encounters new worlds. We will examine the structure and style, the exterior world and the turbulent interiors that constitute fiction by Joseph Conrad, Henry James, George Orwell and Alan Sillitoe. Lecture, discussion, short essays.

Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (1898)
Joseph Conrad, “Youth” (1902); Heart of Darkness (1902), and “The Secret Sharer” (1912)
George Orwell, “Shooting an Elephant” (1936) and selections from The Road to Wigan Pier (1937)
Alan Sillitoe, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959)