Unreliable Narrators

Among the first lessons of any introductory writing workshop is the importance of cultivating authorial authority; of not only charming your readers, but making them trust you. What to do, then, with our culture's seemingly boundless appetite for stories that do precisely the opposite? For narrators that are deluded? Deranged? Downright deceptive? In this course, we consider a broad range of unreliable narrators, asking ourselves how deploying this unstable narrative posture can reconfigure the meaning of our stories. Along the way, we also study the mechanics of this peculiar point of view and use what we learn to craft unreliable narrators of our own. Be warned: this course is not for the faint of heart. Participants should expect to confront a host of charged topics in the texts we study, from depictions of mental illness, to addiction, to child sexual abuse.