This course provides theoretical basics and practical training in the analysis of narrative form. Discussions will be based on five 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 below will be read in chronological order. Texts: Honore de Balzac, Pere Goriot (Signet Classic or any edn); George Eliot, Silas Marner (any edn); Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary (Oxford Worlds Classics); Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway (Harvest); John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Woman (Signet); David Lodge, The Art of Fiction (Penguin). There will be a substantial course-reserve of critical essays. Several short assignments and a final exam/paper (last day of class).

The final grade will be determined as follows: 40% short assignments (graded pass/fail) and participation; 60% final exam or paper (to be determined).