Introduction to Fiction (Honors) Ohio State

In this course, we will identify some of literary fiction’s defining characteristics, including its uses of narrative voices to tell stories, its manipulation of time to depict its subjects, and its emphasis on characters’ familial, sociopolitical, and erotic relationships. While we read and discuss some important, influential narratives about the supernatural – Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Henry James’ The Turn of the Screw, and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight as well a few minor works – we will also explore how these texts, like much other fiction, try to create particular reading experiences, as they push us to consider the nature and importance of literary imagination and the way fiction’s seductiveness is tied to other potentially dangerous attractions via

Required texts (available at campus-area bookstores):

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (Penguin)
Bram Stoker, Dracula (Penguin)
Henry James, Turn of the Screw and Other Stories (Bantam)
Stephenie Meyer, Twilight (Little, Brown)

I loved The Daily What's take:
1818: “I, the miserable and the abandoned, am an abortion, to be spurned at, and kicked, and trampled on.”
2005: “I sparkle like diamonds.”