Theme: Why Read Fiction?

Description: Why read fiction? It’s a simple question, but one maybe worth asking since you’ve decided to make the credits for this course a part of the degree that certifies the quality of your education. In discussing our course texts, we will keep in our sights the various ways different perspectives approach prose fiction and the value of reading it. In addition to these questions, our in-class work will often introduce terms from the field of narratology—the area of research that describes and theorizes features of narrative forms; this additional vocabulary is meant to help you talk about the features of these works as crafted pieces. Whether the Harry Potter series is all you’ve ever read cover-to-cover or whether you consider yourself quite the bookworm, this course should help you consider—and then complicate—your own sense of how and why you engage works of fiction. Readings are likely to include primary works by Jane Austen, Jules Verne, Charles W. Chesnutt, Jorge Luis Borges, and Ruth Ozeki, as well as occasional critical arguments. The coursework will engage these texts with various papers and a reflective final project to complete the “W” component of the course credit.