In this class, we will read, watch, and play a wide variety of narrative media – from graphic novels, to internet fiction, to indie video games, to art cinema – as a way of learning more about how storytelling works (and occasionally doesn’t).
At each of our seminars, in addition to reading / watching / playing that week’s “main” text, we’ll be reading choice selections from various kinds of critical theory, such as narratology, psychoanalytic theory, and affect studies. These “secondary” readings will be short excerpts — no more than 10 pages each — and will serve to expand our understanding of different aspects of the texts, as well as supply you with material to draw from for your essays.
There will be two writing assignments over the course of our condensed semester: a short first essay, in which you’ll respond to some irksome or interesting aspect of one of our “main” texts, and a second, longer essay, in which you’ll make a pairing of a story and one of the secondary readings and create some manner of argument, interpretation, or exploration in a topic of your choosing.
My goal for this class is to help us experience more fully and with greater illumination the absolute swamp of storytelling that our contemporary media landscape immerses us in, and to provide us with new tools and vantage points with which to experience these narratives, and craft our own.
- Teacher: Andy Zuliani