Who gets to tell a history?
Study narrative voice alongside archives and collective memory. Compare the evidence available to a reader and the people left outside the account.
Ways into the question
Begin with Murasaki Shikibu
How do rank and point of view shape a narrative?
Begin with Toni Morrison
How does a story make memory present without making it a simple record?
Begin with Jorge Luis Borges
How can a fictional reference change what a narrator seems to know?
Archives and silences
Whose experience is missing from a record?
Thinkers to read
Murasaki Shikibu
Narrative, poetry and relationships in the world of The Tale of Genji. Keep court titles, changing perspectives and translation choices visible.
Toni Morrison
Narrative memory, language and the afterlives of slavery. Distinguish a character’s recollection, a narrator’s arrangement and a historical claim.
Jorge Luis Borges
Stories that examine memory, authorship, infinity and imagined systems of knowledge. Track the narrator’s evidence and the status of invented references.
W. E. B. Du Bois
Sociology, history and literary arguments about race, citizenship and double consciousness. Read the framing of a passage alongside the evidence it uses.