English 200 B: Narrative Experiments with Time

While all storytellers must represent time in a particular way, some experiment with narrative time in order to draw readers’ attention to time itself, rendering it suddenly strange and unstable. The narratives selected for this class attempt to wrestle with the unclockable dynamics of temporal experience, from the interplay between memory and anticipation to the sense of time racing or crawling. In Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, for instance, the disordering of linear time plays a central role in narrating the irrational violence of WWII. In Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” an interval of several seconds is stretched to span eight pages, allowing Bierce to unpack the minute impressions of a man’s consciousness as he prepares to be hanged. Such texts encourage us to ask, “To what ends do narratives challenge our assumptions about how time works?” And from a literary standpoint, “How is time involved in the ways we experience different forms of narrative, from short stories to films?”

Do note that this course fulfills the “W” requirement. In addition to the assigned reading, there will be several short, informal writing assignments which build toward two formal (5-7-page) essays.

Texts likely to include:

Short fiction: Ambrose Bierce, Tobias Wolff, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Jack Finney, Jennifer Egan, Haruki Murakami, Sherman Alexie

Novels: H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine, Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, and selections from Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine

Graphic Novel: Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

Films: Chris Marker’s La Jetée and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood