LIT 2024 - Spring 2026 - Ezeano

Stories can be sentimental. Hence, this course reads stories as a form charged with feelings and meanings. We will turn inward and study how stories evoke and manipulate emotional responses through narrative forms because significant to our approach is affect theory.

We will study ten emotions across a variety of global fiction. With the necessary readings, we will:

• explore how narrative forms and feelings create meanings.

• uncover how emotions are structured and disrupted within storytelling.

• unpack how authors manipulate feelings of discomfort, longing, or joy to challenge assumptions or reinforce ideologies.

Students will be tasked with writing stories that reflect these feelings. Tuesdays will be devoted to exploring the feelings in stories. Thursdays are shaped after a workshop-style format, where students will present and critique their stories, allowing for collaborative exploration of how the emotion and narrative techniques studied manifest in their own writing. Through this practice, students' understanding of literature will develop, and they will be stimulated to analyze the emotional landscapes of stories and their wider social implications.