This course is designed for creative writers and artists who are interested in the relation between oral narratives of personal experience and literary narrative, and who would like to use their skills to create reading texts for elementary school children.

The course will cover the study of the narrative as a linguistic structure, as a speech event, and as a technique for the transformation of reported events in conformity with cultural norms. It will integrate approaches to narrative from literary criticism, folklore, anthropology and psychology with a linguistic analysis based on syntactic and pragmatic features of narrative. The materials for the course will be drawn from dramatized narratives of personal experience, oral and written epic, extended narratives of short stories and novels, and narratives in therapeutic discourse.

For admission to the class, students should submit a personal narrative.