Novel openings: understanding fiction through beginnings

The way a novel begins reveals how it thinks about the world. This course explores how openings define the terms of fiction: how to make a world, address a reader, and give narrative its charge of necessity. Through close readings from Jane Austen to Zadie Smith, we’ll ask how realism, modernism, and postmodernism each reimagine the act of beginning. Short excursions into narrative theory will guide us as we consider openings as both artistic experiments and philosophical propositions—moments when fiction pauses, before the story begins, to think about its own means of storytelling.