Choose one of the options below and discuss one of the following readings:
Proust, Swann’s Way
Kafka, Metamorphosis
Woolf, A Room of One’s Own
Pirandello, Six Characters
Camus, The Guest
Borges, Garden of Forking Paths
Cortazar, House Taken Over
Option 1: Unreliable Narrators
Choose a text with an unreliable narrator and contrast the narrator’s version of what happens with your own reconstruction of events. Your reconstruction of the plot should be based on clues within the text such as contradictions within the narration or impossibilities that the narrator doesn’t account for.
What does the narrator leave out or misinterpret? How do we know?
What lines of text let us know that something is wrong or missing in the narrator’s version?
How does this lead us to understand the narrator as a character?
How does this change the reader’s interpretation of the story?
How does this change the way we think about the thinking process itself?

Option 2: Defamiliarization
Choose one text from the reading list for this course and describe how the author defamiliarizes the content. Define defamiliarization using quotations from the lecture slides or other scholarly source and then describe how the author of your choice does this in a given work of literature.
What would normal readers expect to find?
What in the text does might the reader find surprising or unfamiliar?
What conventional wisdom does the author defamiliarize?
How does the author’s depiction of a person, institution, society, object, etc. force the reader to reconsider it?
What descriptive terms seem unusual or inappropriate? Why?

Option 3: Theory of Mind
Discuss the use of theory-of-mind by characters and the effects it has on the plot and the reader’s interpretation of the story. This can also be used for non-fiction, such as Virginia Woolf’s “A Room of One’s Own.”
Describe how one person’s knowledge of another person’s thinking causes events in the plot.
Cite passages of dialogue that reveal the mental states of the characters.
Compare what one character thinks to what another character thinks he/she thinks.
Identify plot events that depend on one character misunderstanding another’s thinking.
You may include the author’s use of theory-of-mind, also.
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