"I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily --how calmly I can tell you the whole story."
Thus begins Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Tell-Tale Heart", a US-American literary classic. Told from the first-person point of view of a character on the brink of insanity, the story famously plays with notions of truth and imagination and leaves readers to figure out for themselves what might have happened, what to believe and what not.
Unreliable narrators are common storytelling vehicles and beg further investigation.They impact narrative space, agency, and power distribution within the narrative and beyond (Whose tale is told? Who tells it, and how?) and they test the boundaries of ordinary storytelling situations with a reliable teller, a clear message and a trusting audience.
In this class, we will first familiarize ourselves with narrative perspectives and their various effects before we will read a selection of North American unreliable narratives.
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23-ANG-AngBM2 Basismodul 2: Introduction to Literary and Cultural Studies | 2.3 Basisseminar: Genres, Authors, Periods | Study requirement
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- | Graded examination | Student information | |
23-LIT-LitP8 Englischsprachige Literaturen | Englischsprachige Literaturen in exemplarischen Lektüren 1 | Study requirement
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Englischsprachige Literaturen in exemplarischen Lektüren 2 | Study requirement
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Englischsprachige Literaturen: Traditionen, Gattungen, Motive | Study requirement
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Seminar mit Lektüreschwerpunkt | Study requirement
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