I hope you enjoyed Thursday’s holiday and have some good plans for Monday’s holiday as well. Remember that since Monday is a holiday, we do not have a discussion due Sunday night. Since Wednesday follows a Monday schedule, you’ll contribute to our online discussion by Tuesday night.
For this discussion, I want us to start thinking about our first formal assignment, Project #1. Read through the instructions and start brainstorming about what you might want to work on. Not sure yet? That’s fine, too. We haven’t finished reading all of the stories you might want to focus on. If you have questions, thoughts, or comments about the assignment, please use the commenting space on that page so we can read and reply to each other there. I am happy to revise the language of the assignment to make it clearer and more understandable.
Since a major aspect of this project is thinking about a story’s narrator and what affect the type of narrator has on the way we experience the story, let’s think about the narrator in “Young Goodman Brown” as well as the other stories we’ve read so far. If we look back at our list of different types of narrators, what do they offer us as readers as we enter and live in a given story world? Think about the definitions of the terms to help you understand what the narrator does and can’t do in a given story:
- first-person narrator
- second-person narrator
- third-person narrator
- third-person limited
- third-person omniscient
- third-person objective
I’d like us to add a few other terms to our list. They come from narratology, the study of narrative, and sound more technical than these other terms:
A narrative is heterodiegetic if the narrator is not a protagonist or if the narrator exists in a different sphere than the protagonist. Third-person narratives are most commonly associated with this term, but other narratives can be, such as you-narratives, they-narratives, and one-narratives.
A homodiegetic narrative is equivalent to a first-person narrative. If the narrator is the main protagonist, such as in an autobiography, that is called an autodiegetic narrative. That style of narration is different from a peripheral first-person narrator, in which a first-person narrator is a minor character. First-person narrators, whether homodiegetic or autodiegetic, are inherently limited in their perspective and are potentially untrustworthy.
These definitions come from Monika Fludernik’s An Introduction to Narratology, 2009, and draw on the work of Gerard Genette and Franz K. Stanzel.
To make them a little clearer, here are the building blocks of those words: diegesis refers to the story world. Hetero- means different; homo- means same; auto- means self. Therefore, we have someone different than the story world telling a heterodiegetic narrative, someone in the same story world telling a homodiegetic narrative, and even more specific than that, we can say that when the narrator in the story world is the protagonist, or main character, we have an autodiegetic narrative.
Getting back to our discussion here, what kind of narrator do we find in “Young Goodman Brown,” and what effect does that have on our experience in reading the story? What other narrative styles have we encountered in the other stories we have read, and how did those affect our reading experiences?
Hopefully you’ve gotten to know me a little bit just from our first class and from the syllabus and other materials on this site–our writing style says a lot about us–but allow me to introduce myself more fully. I’m a native New Yorker, and have lived in three of the five boroughs. I’m an assistant professor in the English Department at City Tech, with a Ph.D. in English and a certificate in Women’s Studies from the CUNY Graduate Center in midtown Manhattan. My undergraduate degree from Brown University is in both English and Biology. As a college student, this combination often confused people, and they would ask “What are you going to do, write science textbooks?” No, that was never an interest of mine. I do use a lot of science terminology and metaphors in my writing, both in my creative writing and in my scholarly work.
Here at City Tech, I’m involved in a number of interesting projects. I won’t list them all, but I’m currently one of the OpenLab co-directors, and am conducting research on interactive technology use in education. My scholarly work also focuses on narrative theory, gender and sexuality studies, and literature of the 20th century. Some of the stories we will read this semester are texts that I study in my own work. I’m active on the Undergraduate Research Committee, so let’s talk if you’re interested in conducting research. I tweet for the Literary Arts Festival, @CityTechLitFest, not only about our even each spring, but also other interesting things related to writing, reading, Brooklyn, and college. Follow me there!
Outside of work–if we can ever really separate the things we do into work and non-work categories–I’m an avid knitter and crocheter. I’ve been known to quilt. I love to cook. I want to learn how to use a letterpress. As you can see, I like to make things! It’s so satisfying to see a project through from start to finish, and to have a tangible object to show for it. I like to bring my love of making things into the classroom, creating projects that don’t just ask students to do what they’re used to doing but to make things, too.
I love to look at old maps and photographs of New York, and often incorporate them into my courses. Although I’m an amateur and don’t have fancy equipment, I love to take photographs when I travel, whether it’s to Iceland (a great trip I took this summer), to Chicago (where I’ll be visiting this spring for the annual conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, and hopefully to eat a Chicago-style hot dog for some good Chicago tourism but not Chicago-style pizza), or even just for a ride on the Staten Island Ferry (which I’ve done countless times) or a walk on the Brooklyn Bridge (which I often do on my way to or from work).
Now that you’ve gotten to know me a bit better, I look forward to getting to know all of you!