T Th 1:00p-5:15p
Instructor: Jinyi Chu
The seminar invites you to look behind the scenes of storytelling and ask a deceptively simple question: who controls the story—the hero, or the voice that tells it? Reading short stories and poems by Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Lu Xun, Babel, Platonov, Nabokov, Camus, and Akhmatova alongside major thinkers such as Benjamin, Shklovsky, Eikhenbaum, Todorov, Auerbach, and Mandelstam, we explore moments when narrators misunderstand, distort, ironize, or distance themselves from their protagonists. Why does a narrator mock a “little man”? What happens when a madman tells his own story? How does form shape sympathy, irony, and judgment? Students learn how to identify narrative perspective, analyze voice and reliability, and understand how literary techniques—such as skaz, defamiliarization, and the fantastic—shape our sense of reality and heroism. By the end of the semester, students have read fiction not just for plot, but as a crafted structure of choices, tensions, and competing points of view—and develop their own analytical voice as a reader and storyteller. All readings and class discussions in English.