Courses

Upcoming Classes

2024 Nixon Institute: June 17th-28th

Teaching to Retell: Fairytale, Folklore, Epic, and Myth
Leah Hampton

In this course we will explore how cultures recycle and retell stories, particularly from folklore and inherited/oral narrative. We will read from a variety of periods and locales: texts will include The Arabian Nights, updated translations of the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Andersen (and their predecessors/influencers), some Homer and/or Shakespeare, and scholarly work from Jack Zipes and major American folklorists. Students can use this course to develop and update their teaching plans for major texts and common readings.

Narrative and Narrative Theory
Erin James

This course examines theories of narrative to consider a basic question: what are stories and how do they work? We’ll begin our examination with foundational texts in classical narratology that consider such story staples as narration, perspective, and chronologies. We’ll then branch out to consider new, or postclassical, theories of narrative that push the boundaries of our understanding of narrative and the effects it can have. Our examination will survey additional structures of narrative, including spatialization and worldbuilding. We’ll also survey recent work in cognitive science that studies the effects that stories have on the real-life attitudes, values, and behaviors of readers, political narrative theory (such as feminist and postcolonial narratology) that considers how narratives uphold and subvert dominant cultural ideologies, and rhetorical narrative theory and its claim that all narratives have important ethical stakes. By the end of this course, you’ll be able to discuss, analyze, and (if you choose) produce narrative in more precise terms and have a better understanding of the structures of stories, their purposes, and their effects. No experience with narrative theory is required for this course, and final projects can include a long-form analytical essay, an original narrative, or a set of lesson plans that foreground narratological concepts and techniques.

Past Nixon Institute Classes

• 2023: Film Television Literacy; Against Amnesia: Teaching and Learning with Literature
• 2022: Multimodal Composition Theory and Application; Reading Hemingway
• 2021: Rhetoric and Composition Pedagogy Workshop; Young Adult Literature in a Time of Upheaval
• 2020: African American Poetry; Thinking Feeling: Emotions in Literature, Teaching, and the World
• 2019: Greek and Roman Mythology; Creative Writing Pedagogy
• 2018: Literature of the American West; The Victorian Uncanny
• 2017: Fairness and Assessment; Women and Poetry
• 2016: Language, Literary Form, and Environment; Black Lives Matter
• 2015: Freeing the Verse: Teaching Poetry to High School Students; American Literary Nonfiction
• 2014: Caribbean Literature