1
Spring 2011 Chao-ming Chen
14:10-17:00 Wed. Office: Room #911 (研究大樓)
季陶樓340304 Office Hours:
by appointment
email: (O)29393091, ext 88174
(H)86619047
American Popular Fiction: Oral Tradition and Narrative Theory
Purposes:
To study American popular fiction is to study parts of popular culture; written popular narratives can tell us much about who we are and the society in which we live for storytelling in these narratives usually adapt to changing economic, social and political conditions. It is the story itself and the way how it is told that help us to shape the contours of the world and our position in the world.
This course takes American popular fiction as a specific field of cultural production and narrative experiment. It will examine how American popular fiction helps to construct American “self” and how this self is immersed in a postmodern culture. It is also an inquiry into the way of storytelling, the dynamics of oral tradition and the power of the narrative to identify the magic of American popular fiction. Students will analyze various definitive features of this field: popular fiction’s relations to “literature” and “culture”, oral tradition, gender and sexuality, power and transgression, and some other narrative issues. The course is built around a number of genres: suspense, detective fiction, popular romance, science fiction, and horror.
Texts:
Anne Rice. Interview with a Vampire.
Dean Koontz, From the Corner of His Eye
Isaac Asimov. I, Robot
Michael Crichton. Timeline
Nicholas Sparks. Message in a Bottle
Paul Auster, New York Trilogy
Stephen King. The Dark Half
James Patterson, The 5th Horseman
Scott McCracken. Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction.
Bob Ashley. The Study of Popular Fiction: A Source Book.
John Miles Foley. Teaching Oral Traditions.
Jerry Palmer. Potboilers: Methods, Concepts and Case Studies in Popular Fiction.
Walter J. Ong. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.
Some photocopied handouts
Requirements:
1. Class attendance
2. One oral report (20-minutes with a written paper)
3. Mid-term and final papers (one 5-page critical paper and one 12-page research paper)
4. Some worksheets (questions or issues about the works)
Class schedule:
March 23 Introduction to the course
Introduction to the genre (Popular Fiction)
Stephen King: “The Man in Black”
30 Reading the Popular Fiction
Pulp, pp. 1-45
Source Book, pp. 1-38
Potboilers, pp. 1-130
30 Gothic Horror: Pulp, pp. 128-53
Stephen King, The Dark Half (Oral Report #1)
Some articles about King
Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection
April 6 Gothic Horror: The Dark Half
Teaching Oral Tradition, pp. 75-150
13 Theory 1: Source Book, Mass society theory (Oral Report #2)
Romance: Pulp, pp. 75-101
Becoming a Woman Through Romance, pp. 1-30
Nicholas Sparks, Message in a Bottle
20 Romance: Reading the Romance, pp. 19-45, pp. 186-208
Nicholas Sparks, Message in a Bottle (Oral Report #3)
27 Theory 2: Source Book, Formula, Genre and Structuralist
Analysis (Oral Report #4)
Science Fiction: Pulp, pp. 102-28 and handouts
Peter Brooks, “Reading for the Plot”
Isaac Asimov, I Robot
May 4 Science Fiction: Michael Crichton, Timeline
(Oral Report #5)
Orality and Literacy (I)
11 Science Fiction: Timeline
Orality and Literacy (II)
Science Fiction after 1900, pp. 1-36
Mid-term paper due
18 Thriller and Crime: Dean Koontz, From the Corner of His Eye
Potboilers, pp. 131-53
Bloody Murder, pp. 162-97
25 Thriller and suspense: James Patterson, The 5th Horseman
Bakhtin, Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel
(Oral Report #7)
June 1 Detective Fiction:
Paul Auster, New York Trilogy (Oral Report #8)
Detecting Texts, pp. 117-53, pp. 247-69
Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, pp. 42-52
8 Theory 3: Source Book, Post-structuralism and deconstruction
(Oral Report #9)
Vampire Tradition: History of Vampire Novels
Our Vampires, Ourselves and handouts
Anne Rice, Interview with a Vampire
15 Anne Rice, Interview with a Vampire (Oral Report #10)
Pulp, Transgression and utopianism, pp. 154-83
. 23 Roundup: Folklore and Oral Tradition in Popular Literature
Folklore and Literature, pp. 7-40
July 4 Final Paper Due
Folkloristic thinking about genre and classification may be generally characterized as (1) atomistic, insofar as most efforts at genre definition have approached each genre in its own terms, often attempting to infuse a degree of definitional rigor into categories for which lay terms are already available (for example, fairy tale and legend); (2) ideal typological, in that generic categories are constructed in normative terms as mutually exclusive constellations of criterial attributes that define pure types; and (3) item-oriented, in that genre definitions and classification systems are built upon a dominant conception of folklore as consisting of certain classes of cultural objects, largely textual (like folktale, ballad, proverb, or riddle) or susceptible to scholarly entextualization (like customs or superstitions) that are viewed as empirical tokens of ideal types.
Richard Bauman, ed. Folklore, Cultural Performances, and
Popular Entertainments, p. 55
Selected Bibliography
Auberbach, Nina. Our Vampires, Ourselves. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1995.
Bakhtin, M.M. The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Ed. Michael Holoquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holoquist. Austin: U of Texas P, 1981.
Bauman, Richard, ed. Folk, Cultural Performances, and Popular Entertainments. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.
Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Post-Modern Science Fiction. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.
Bull, J. A. The Framework of Fiction: Socio-cultural Approaches to the Novel. London: Macmillan, 1988.
Christian-Smith, Linda K. Becoming a Woman through Romance. New York: Routledge, 1990.
Cohn, Jan. Romance and the Erotics of Property: Mass-market Fiction for Women. Durham: Duke UP, 1988.
Hoffman, Michael and Patrick D. Murphy, ed. Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.
London Brooks. Science Fiction after 1900: From the Steam Man to the Stars. New York: Routledge, 2002.
Merivale, Patricia and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. eds. Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detetive Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press, 1999.
Most, Glenn W. The Poetics of Murder: Detective Fiction and Literary Theory.
Radway, Janice A. Reading the Romance: Women, Patriarch, and Popular Literature. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984.
Rosenberg, Bruce A. Folklore and Literature: Rival Siblings. Knoxville: U of Tennessee Press, 1991.
Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder: From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel. New York: Penguin, 1985.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.
Underwood, Tim and Chuck Miller, ed. Kingdom of Fear: The World of Stephen King. New York: Signet, 1986.
Full-text database: The Gale Group
http://galenet,galegroup.com/
Oral Report Sign-up Sheet
(Your name, phone number, email address)
#1 (Sept. 30) Stephen King: ______
#2 (Oct. 14) Theory 1: ______
#3 (Oct. 21) Sparks: ______
#4 (Oct. 28) Theory 2: ______
#5 (Nov. 4) Bradbury: ______
#6 (Nov. 18) Crichton: ______
#7 (Nov. 25) Bakhtin: ______
#8 (Dec. 9) Auster: ______
#9 (Dec. 16) Theory 3: ______
#10 (Dec. 30) Rice: ______