Writing Character Narration in Response to Literature: Narratives, Narrators, and Rhetorical Narratology

• In Event: Situating Students: Four Approaches to Critical Engagement With Children's and Young Adult Literature

Abstract

Exploring rhetorical narratology’s concern with character narration (Phelan, 2005), this presentation examines students writing imaginative first-person narrative texts in response to their reading and discussion of the Tennessee Williams’ play, A Streetcar Named Desire (1947). Drawing on extensive audio and written data from a diverse 12th Grade ELA classroom in Western Canada as part of an ongoing interactional sociolinguistic study of literary talk, it focuses on student-generated narrative prose which imagines the thoughts and feelings of central characters while balancing the conventions of fiction’s Narrative Function and Disclosure Function. This presentation concludes with suggestions for further inquiry into the craft of reading and responding to and with first-person narrative forms in the ELA classroom.

Author

• Robert Jean LeBlanc, University of Lethbridge