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Jul 11, 2025
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2024-2025 Undergraduate Hill Book
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ENG 100/146 - Telling It Slant: Unreliable Narrators in American Literature3 Credits
Offered periodically
Should we trust the narrators of the literature we read? Why or why not? What about the “speakers” in poetry or the characters on stage in a play? In these works of fictions, moreover, is there a way to assess the reliability or unreliability of the voices telling us the story? How do these issues affect our experience of reading literature? This course uses these questions to examine a diverse set of texts: selections from Emily Dickinson’s poetry; Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno; Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw; Nella Larson’s Passing; a play by Anna Deavere Smith; as well as short stories by Sherman Alexie, Kate Chopin, Junot Díaz, and Toni Morrison. Along with exploring these works, we will also read and discuss relevant secondary and theoretical work (from Wayne Booth, Peter Rabinowitz, and others) that can shed light on the challenges-and pleasures-of negotiating reliable and unreliable voices in literature.
Core Curriculum Attribute(s): Language, Arts, and Humanities
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