135032 PS Literary Theory (PS): The 'I' in Literature (2021W)

Who is speaking, if a text says "I"? Even though narratology seems to have a rather straightforward answer to this question, there are different contexts where "I" can mean different persons or 'instances' of the text, depending on whether we are looking at e.g. autobiography, essays, novels, poems or – increasingly in the past years – autofiction. The playful ways in which the first-person report and the different roles and levels of enunciation (narrator, author, etc.) can characterize any given text, makes the "I" an interesting case study for different theoretical approaches to literature, first and foremost text-oriented (narratology) and context-oriented theories (publication contexts, reception).
In class, we will have a closer look at narratology, but also study the ways that we as readers are often consciously disoriented and have to deal with paradox or conflicting information. The goal is to acquire a number of tools and methodologies during the semester that make it easier to deal with complex constructions of the "I" in autofiction, but can be applied to a wider range of different texts.