ENG 108

The Nature of Narrative I (Fiction)

Introduction
Lecture and Seminar
schedule
Monday Lecture
• Sections 181, 191, 201
• 8-10 EPH 204

Seminars:
• Section 181 – Wed. 10-11 VIC 305
• Section 191 – Fri. 12-1 VIC 305
• Section 201 – Wed. 11-12 POD 361
Lecture and Seminar
schedule
Wednesday Lecture
• Sections 081, 091, 101
• 8-10 KHW 061

Seminars:
• Section 081 – Mon. 9-10 VIC 210
• Section 091 – Fri. 11-12 VIC 106
• Section 101 – Mon. 10-11 VIC 300
Lecture and Seminar
schedule
Friday Lecture
• Sections 111, 121, 131, 141
• 8-10 RCC 201

Seminars:
• Section 111 – Tues. 11-12 VIC 200
• Section 121 – Mon. 9-10 VIC 305
• Section 131 – Thurs. 12-1 KHE 125
• Section 141 – Mon. 12-1 VIC 508
Required Reading
• William Shakespeare. Hamlet
• Mary Shelley. Frankenstein.
• Anne Carson. Autobiography of Red: A
Novel in Verse.
• DVD: Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are
Dead
– (Library or rental)
• Course package available for purchase at
the Ryerson Bookstore.
Evaluation/Assignments
1. Reading quizzes in lecture
10%
2. Seminar attendance & participation
10%
3. Essay I (Week 4 in Seminar)
10%
4. Edited Essay I (Week 7 in Seminar)
10%
5. Essay II (5 pages, Week 11)
30%
1. Reading Quizzes
• In lecture
• Multiple, ongoing
• Not announced ahead of time
• Cannot be written at a later date 
2. Seminar attendance &
participation
• Consistent, constructive
contributions to the class
• including completion of assigned
homework, quizzes, and tutorials
3. Essay I
• written in seminar in Week 4
• topic handed out ahead of time
4. Edited Essay I
• edited at home
• submitted to Blackboard in Week 7
• photocopy of original Essay I should
be resubmitted to the TA during the
seminar
5. Essay II
• 5 pages
• must include secondary sources
• questions provided by professor
• Due in Week 11
6. Final Exam
• comparative essay
• short answer questions (vocabulary
definitions)
• Sight poem with 3 questions
• December final exam period = Dec.
4-15
The Nature of Narrative
• What is the importance of narrative
(in our case, fictional narrative)?
• Why study it?
Course Description
• Life without stories? Inconceivable. The
moment we ask, “Who am I?” or
“Where did I come from?” narrative
steps in, giving shape to our identity
and experience. This foundational
course introduces students to fictional
forms across a variety of historical
periods and media in order to examine
the underlying mechanisms of
storytelling: narrative’s goals, inner
structures, strategies, and rhetorical
effects. Texts include stories, novels,
Course Description
• Life without stories? Inconceivable. The
moment we ask, “Who am I?” or
“Where did I come from?” narrative
steps in, giving shape to our identity
and experience.
Detailed Course Description
• This introductory course examines
the many ways that narrative defines
and structures our sense of who we
are, our interaction with each other,
and our perception of the world
around us.
The Nature of Narrative
“The self is given content, is
delineated and embodied, primarily
in narrative constructions or stories.”

Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and Self

The Nature of Narrative
“What, for example, is the relation
between language and the self, or
between one’s life story and the
subject of that story?”

Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and Self

The Nature of Narrative
“I’m in words, made of words, others’
words”

Samuel Beckett, The Unnamable

The Nature of Narrative
“The truth about stories is that’s all we
are. ‘You can’t understand the world
without telling a story,’ the
Anishnabe writer Gerald Vizenor tells
us. ‘There isn’t any centre to the
world but a story.’”

Thomas King, The Truth About Stories

The Nature of Narrative
“The truth about stories is that’s all we are.
The Nigerian storyteller Ben Okri says that
‘In a fractured age, when cynicism is god,
here is a possible heresy: we live by stories,
we also live in them. One way or another we
are living the stories planted in us early or
along the way, or we are also living the
stories we planted – knowingly or
unknowingly – in ourselves. We live stories
that either give our lives meaning or negate
it with meaninglessness. If we change the
stories we live by, quite possibly we change
our lives.’”

Thomas King, The Truth About Stories

The Nature of Narrative
“Our own existence cannot be separated
from the account we can give of
ourselves. It is in telling our stories that
we give ourselves an identity. We
recognize ourselves in the stories that
we tell about ourselves. It makes very
little difference whether these
stories are true or false, fiction as
well as verifiable history provides
us with an identity”

Paul Ricoeur, “History as Narrative and

The Nature of Narrative
“We find ourselves, collectively and
individually, embedded in an ongoing
history.”

Anthony Paul Kerby, Narrative and Self

The Nature of Narrative
“Our lives are ceaselessly intertwined
with narrative, with the stories that we
tell and hear told, those we dream or
imagine or would like to tell, all of which
are reworked in that story of our own
lives that we narrate to ourselves in an
episodic, sometimes semiconscious, but
virtually uninterrupted monologue.”

Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot

The Nature of Narrative
“To raise the question of the nature of
narrative is to invite reflection on the
very nature of culture and, possibly,
even on the nature of humanity
itself.”

Hayden White, “The Value of Narrativity in the

Representation of Reality.”
Narrative Modes
• Despite differences such as genre,
medium, historical context,
narratives depend on a dialogic
community
• Community
= storyteller + listener
= narrator + narratee
= writer + reader
= writer/director/actors + audience
Narrative Modes
• This community constitutes part of
the context of the narrative.
• What was its original intended
community or audience?
– What was the narrative’s original,
historical context?
• What is its current
community/context?
• How do we read a 17th-century text in
the 21st century? Same? Different?
Both?
Narrative Modes
Genre
• Latin genus (kind, sort)
• Shared genetic features
• Classification of texts
Narrative Modes
Genre
• Not static
– Northrop Frye: history of Western literatures
from mythic to increasingly realistic genres
– New and evolving genres
• The romance, the frame tale, and “The Rise
of the Novel”
• Film Noir and neo-Noir, suburban-Noir
• Epic and mock epic
– hybrid forms (eg. Autobiography of Red: A
Novel in Verse)
Narrative Modes
Genre
• Not just a method of classification but a
mode of production and reception,
interpretation
• “As changes occur in the ways that
societies perceive and understand the
world around them, corresponding
changes take place in the genres
employed by writers: literary kinds are
connected with ‘kinds of knowledge and
experience.’”
Narrative Modes
Genre
• “historically conditioned and subject to
change” (Frans de Bruyn, “Genre Criticism”)
• Ideologically loaded
• Traditional genres = historical, ideological
products of patriarchal society (Sandra Gilbert
and Susan Gubar)
• Consider Anne Carson’s subversive
approach to genre
Narrative Modes
Genre
• “offers the writer a set of interpretations,
frames, or fixes on the world” (Rosalie Colie,
The Resources of Kind)
• does genre offer the reader these same
resources?
Narrative Modes
Genre
• Baggage of expectation
• Example: Fairy tale
• If I tell you that we will begin the course by
reading a collection of fairy tales, what are
your expectations of the texts based on
that generic classification?
Narrative Modes
Genre
• “Generic assumptions play a key role in
establishing this ‘horizon of expectations.’
The concept of genre is built up through
the reception of a succession of related
texts, each of which varies, corrects,
alters, or simply reproduces the existing
literary and generic expectations of its
audience.”
(Frans de Bruyn, “Genre Criticism”)
Narrative Modes
Genre
• We will examine a succession of Little Red
Riding Hood narratives “each of which
varies, corrects, alters, or simply
reproduces the existing literary and
generic expectations of its audience.”
Narrative Modes
Why begin with Fairy Tales?
• Opportunity to deal with familiar
narrative (and not-so-familiar
versions of it)
• To highlight the intersection of oral
and written/print narrative traditions
• Other?
Folk Tales, Fairy Tales,
and Little Red Riding Hood

• Folk tradition and oral tradition

• Oral narrative rendered as a written
narrative
• Folklore vs. “literature”
• Folk tales vs. Fairy tales
Folk Tales, Fairy Tales,
and Little Red Riding Hood
Folk tales
• Popular, familiar
• Oral origin
• Anonymous – lack of a single, identifiable
author
• Told and retold, “handed down”
• Not “fixed” (in oral form)
– open to alterations in the individual telling
– can be “tailored” according to audience
Folk Tales, Fairy Tales,
and Little Red Riding Hood
Folk tales
• Repetitive structure
– Recurring elements, phrases, epithets
• Performed, communal or “public”
narrative
• Product of a specific culture, though its
appeal may cross cultural boundaries
• Often didactic (moral)
Folk Tales, Fairy Tales,
and Little Red Riding Hood
Fairy tales
• Some overlap with Folk culture
– Fairy tales are often the product of folk culture
but fairy tales are not folk tales
• Chief distinguishing features:
1.Single, identifiable author in their written form;
i.e., not anonymous folk tales
2.“synthetic, artificial, and elaborate in
comparison to the indigenous formation of the
folk tale that emanates from communities and
tends to be simple and anonymous”
Folk Tales, Fairy Tales,
and Little Red Riding Hood
Fairy tales
Also:
“the literary fairy tale is not an independent
genre but can only be understood and
defined by its relationship to the oral tales
as well as to the legend, novella, novel,
and other literary fairy tales that it uses,
adapts, and remodels during the narrative
conception of the author.“

Jack Zipes, "Introduction: Towards the Definition of the

Literary Fairy Tale." The Oxford Companion to Fairy
Tales.
Folk Tales, Fairy Tales,
and Little Red Riding Hood
Fairy tales
• From the French “contes des fées”
• Common emphasis on magic and the fantastic:
– Fairy godmothers, elves, witches, giants, trolls,
ogres, dragons and other monsters, talking mirrors,
talking wolves, etc.
• But these are not universally stories about
fairies
• intended audience: children (?)
• Purpose? Many possible:
– satire, adventure, morality, fantasy, etc.
(According to J. R. R. Tolkien, “On Fairy Stories”)
• “happily ever after” a recent addition
Folk Tales, Fairy Tales,
and Little Red Riding Hood
"My own definition of fairy tale goes something
like this: A fairy tale is a story-literary or folk-
that has a sense of the numinous, the feeling or
sensation of the supernatural or the mysterious.
But, and this is crucial, it is a story that happens
in the past tense, and a story that is not tied to
any specifics. If it happens "at the beginning of
the world," then it is a myth. A story that names
a specific "real" person is a legend (even if it
contains a magical occurrence). A story that
happens in the future is a fantasy. Fairy tales
are sometimes spiritual, but never religious.“

Marcia Lane, Picturing a Rose: A Way of Looking at Fairy

Tales.
Folk Tales, Fairy Tales,
and Little Red Riding Hood
Fairy tales
• Note that even when the oral is
rendered into written form, that
written “literary” text can be
reappropriated by oral tradition, and
be circulated as an oral narrative
Folk Tales, Fairy Tales,
and Little Red Riding Hood
• Concerted effort in the 17th century
to capture/fix/write down traditional
oral narratives in European cultures
• Consequences?
• Consequences of transforming oral narratives to
written narratives?
• “For Native storytellers, there is generally a
proper place and time to tell a story. Some stories
can be told any time. Some are only told in winter
when snow is on the ground or during certain
ceremonies or at specific moments in a season.
Others can only be told by particular individuals
or families. So when Native stories began
appearing in print, concern arose that the context
in which these stories had existed was in danger
of being destroyed and the stories themselves
were being compromised. The printed word, after
all, once set on a page, has no master, no voice,
no sense of time or place.” (Thomas King, The
Truth About Stories).
• Oral = public; written= private
Folk Tales, Fairy Tales,
and Little Red Riding Hood
• Are oral narratives de-contextualized
completely when rendered as written
narratives?
• Consider “The Story of Grandmother”
• Do Thomas King’s comments apply
here?
• What is the importance of historical
context to reading, interpretation,
analysis?
• Consider the idea of community or
dialogue between texts.
Folk Tales, Fairy Tales,
and Little Red Riding Hood
• How does the literary fairy tale
appropriate, regulate, and even do
violence to the oral folk tale? (Jack Zipes)
• What is revealed by the shifts in the
story that take place over time?
• What is significant about Perrault’s or
the Grimm Brothers’ retelling of the
older narrative? Or Carter’s? What do
these retellings reveal?
• What is significant about the fact that in
some versions, the “wolf” is not a wolf?
Folk Tales, Fairy Tales,
and Little Red Riding Hood
• How are the quotes at the beginning
of this introductory presentation
(regarding the role of stories in our
understanding of ourselves, others,
and the world we live in) relevant
here in a discussion of Little Red
Riding Hood?