English 220

Narrative, once floated loose from its instantiation in novels or myths or epic poems, is really not so much a literary form or structure as an epistemological category. Like the Kantian concepts of space and time, narrative may be taken not as a feature of our experience but as one of the abstract or "empty" categories within which we come to know the world, a contentless form that our perception imposes on the raw flux of reality, giving it, even as we perceive, the comprehensible order we call experience. This is not to make the conventional claim that we make up stories about the world to understand it, but the much more radical claim that the world comes to us in the shape of stories. -- W.C. Dowling, Jameson, Althusser, Marx

Until the recent reorganization of the English major, I taught one section of English 220 every year. 220 is the second of the two courses we require of all Rutgers English majors. Like 219, it is entitled Principles of Literary Study. English 220 is devoted to narrative -- that is, to stories as they get told in literary forms like epic, romance, the short story, and the novel. Many of the concepts students learn about in English 219 remain indispensable as one moves from lyric poetry to narrative.

For instance, I taught that it is essential to pay close attention to the narrator -- the storyteller whose "voice we hear speaking from the page" -- who is the exact equivalent of the speaker whose voice and consciousness students learn to analyze in English 219. In the same way, the narrator is always telling his or her story to an internal audience - an audience "inside" the work, projected by its discourse and belonging to its world -- in just the same way the speaker of Marvell's To His Coy Mistress is speaking to the lady he addresses at the beginning of the poem.

The section of 220 I taught followed directly from the "close reading" method taught in my 219. It was designed so that students who had learned to read Wyatt and Donne and Browning and T.S. Eliot with me would be able to move on to longer narrative works in a way that seemed natural and continuous with what they had already learned. But now there were certain central concepts from "narratology" that were covered as well.

We covered the usual topics studied in connection with narrative -- e.g., plot, character, setting -- while keeping in view the deeper principle expressed in the quote at the top of this page: the idea that narrative or "story" is really a category of human perception that also happens to be a literary category, so that in studying stories we are really moving towards something like an underlying "deep structure" of individual and collective human consciousness. The progress of the course was from "traditional" narrative that focuses on society and moral psychology (Austen) to modern narrative (Nabokov) that takes the "problem of consciousness" as its great subject.

We spent the first half of the course on two novels that embody "traditional" narrative form: Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Evelyn Waugh's Decline and Fall. This portion covered narrative voice, internal audience, the story/discourse distinction, emplotment as "narrative causality," the notion of genre, and psychological v. "objective" time.

The second half was spent on the "exploding of narrative form" in two novels by Vladimir Nabokov -- they are really "traditional" and "modernist" versions of the same story -- Pnin and Pale Fire. Our focus was on the way the "problem of consciousness" becomes the actual subject when traditional narrative modes are dismantled while "voice" is left intact.

This is Vladimir Nabokov, the tutelary spirit of this section of English 220. One of his narrators (Kinbote in Pale Fire) says about reading: "We are absurdly accustomed to the miracle of a few written signs being able to contain immortal imagery, involutions of thought, new worlds with live people, speaking, weeping, laughing.We take it for granted so simply that in a sense, by the very act of brutish routine acceptance, we undo the work of the ages. . . . What if we awake one day, all of us, and find ourselves utterly unable to read? I wish you to gasp not only at what you read but at the miracle of its being readable (so I used to tell my students)."

My now-vanished section of English 220 was created for the needs of students who had earlier taken English 219 with me. It was abolished in 205, in favor of a different course format. I'm leaving this page up in case old students visiting the site want to look back on our days of studying narrative together. Those classes remain, for me, a fond memory.

To the left: English 220, Rutgers University, spring semester 1997, a rather brilliant group of young people known to themselves, as no doubt they will be known to posterity, as the Metanarrativity Dream Team. Each appears to be gazing pleasantly towards the camera. Each is in fact lost in thought about the implications of Pnin's remarks on the "relativity of time" in Anna Karenina as they apply to the novel in which Pnin makes those remarks. Their professor, having noted the reflections in the window in the background, is wondering if he might by any chance have been the shadow of the waxwing slain by the false azure of the window pane. It is, in short, a typical and rewarding day in English 220.