Once I Metablog on Metafiction

Ron Richardson (and you if you want to read something with me!)
Metaclass on Metafiction
899-03: Self-Study
(really Special Study,
but self-study is more meta)
Guided by Dr. Geoffrey Green

SYLLABUS FOR METACLASS ON METAFICTION

I. Premodern Postmodernism

Due by February 5th:

Mahdi, Muhsin, Ed. The Arabian Nights. Tran. Husain Haddawy. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1990.
Description: No other book has so many interlocking frames: stories within stories within stories within stories. The Arabian Nights is about stories and the power tales have to preserve, extend and enrich life.
Read my writings about The Nights: Eros and the Arabesque: The Serial Proliferation of Life in The Arabian Nights and The Power of Stories to Change the World: Another Arabian Night.
Link to Amazon

Boccaccio, Giovanni. “Proem” and first three stories of the first day.The Decameron. Tran. John Payne. Project Gutenberg. 3 December 2007. Web. 1 February 2010.
Description: Another story about stories. In the time of the plague, a group of seven young women and three young men escape the horrors of the city by retiring to the country where they tell each other stories to help each other forget the plague, pass the time, entertain each other, and educate themselves. Boccaccio includes himself in the character of Dioneo and his lover in the character of Fiammetta.
Check out my post: The Decameron With and Without a Frame.
Online edition / Link to Amazon

Due by February 12th:

Chaucer, Geoffrey. “The Prologue and Tale of Sir Thopas” and “The Prologue and Tale of
Melibee.” Canterbury Tales. Ed. by D. Laing Purves. Project Gutenberg. 1 November 2000. Web. 6 February 2010.
Description: Yet another story about stories. In The Canterbury Tales, a character named Geoffrey Chaucer tells the worst tales in the book, first a romance about Sir Thopas with exaggerated rhythm and sophomoric rhymes, and then, when he is interrupted by the host, begins a boring and preachy story called “The Tale of Melibee,” loaded with pretentious quotes. Why does the author of the first truly great poem in the English language portray himself so badly?
Read my post: Chaucer: A Bad Poet and a Didactic Bore.
Online edition / Link to Amazon

Cervantes, Miguel. Don Quixote. 1605. Reread 19 metafictional passages. About 50 pages.
Description: Cervantes created a fictional author, a Moorish chronicler named Cide Hamete Benengeli, but mentions himself and other works of his in the books. In the second volume, Don Quixote is told of the publication of the first volume. Throughout there are references to technique and explanations of narrative choices.
List of metafictional passages: http://www.bookrags.com/notes/dq/TOP5.html

Due by March 4th (a revised deadline, since that was the date I actually finished the book. After all I am the teacher of this class, so I can fit the deadline to my reading, instead of the other way around. This parenthetical, by the way, exposes the artificiality of a syllabus, especially one made by a teacher for himself, so it is quite meta):

Sterne, Laurence. The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman. 1759-1769. 544 pgs.
Description: Tristram Shandy begins to tell the story of his life, but needs to digress to set up the scene of his conception, which in turn needs a digression to set that scene up and so on. Also very inventive typography. Laurence Sterne did it all long before there were any postmodernists on the scene.

Shklovsky, Viktor. “Sterne’s Tristram Shandy: Stylistic Commentary.” 1965. 38 pgs.
Description: A Russian formalist shows how Tristram Shandy is the most typical novel, because it lays bare the devices and conventions of  novels by breaking them. (Available on Google books)

Due by March 27th:

de Laclos, Pierre Choderlos. Les Liaisons Dangereuses. 1782. 448 pgs.
Description: Told through letters, which normally makes events seem as though they really happened, except there is a preface that announces the book is a novel (but leaving room for doubt). The introduction by the fictional editor(who is in turned controlled by another editor) tries to insist on the authenticity of the letters, but his editorial presence throughout the book makes us aware that editors are in fact writers that reshape the material, however true and unaltered they may claim the material is.

Lowrie, Joyce O. “Pretexts and Reflections: A Reflection upon Pre-Texts in Les Liaisons Dangereuses.” Modern Language Studies, Vol. 18, NO. 1. (Winter 1988), pp 150-164.

II. Modern and Postmodern and Postpostpostmodern

Due by April 3rd:

Lewis, Pericles. The Cambridge Introduction to Modernism. 2007.
Review to pg. 161. Read 161-247. 86 pgs.

Appignanesi, Richard and Chris Garratt. Introducing Postmodernism. 1995. 173 pgs.
(an excellent introductory book with comics and illustrations)

Due by April 17th:

Suess, Dr. And to Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street. 1937.
–. On Beyond Zebra. 1955.

Borges, Jorge Luis. “Pierre Mernard, Author of the Quixote.” 1941. Collected Fictions. 8 pgs.
–. “The Maker.” 1960. Collected Fictions. 35 pgs.
(Including mini-stories titled things like, “A Dialog about Diagog,” “The Plot, “A Parable of Cervantes and the Quixote,” and “Borges and I.”)

Salinger, J. D. “The Laughing Man.” Nine Stories. 1953. 18 pgs.

Due by April 24th:

Gass, William H. “Philosophy and the Form of Fiction.” Fiction and the Figures of Life.
Description: Essay in which Gass names “metafiction.” (Gass was also a writer of metafiction and one of his stories is on the summer extension.)

Alter, Robert. Partial Magic: The Novel as a Self-Conscious Genre. 1979. 264 pgs. (Chapters related to books we’ve read: Don Quixote, Tristram Shandy, Modernism.)

Due by May 7th:

The Arabian Nights. Ed. Muhsin Mahdi. Trans. Husain Haddawy. 518 pgs.