This course explores innovative 20/21C narratives as incitements to advance and revise narrative theory. Narratology is a field in its own right, but it also offers critical methods and analytical tools with broad applicability across literary studies — including feminist, queer, postcolonial, Marxist, and psychoanalytic criticism. This course has two complementary aims. First, it aims to provide a toolkit of narratological concepts and methods that students might use in their future research. Second, it explores the productive relationship between narrative theory and experimental narratives: how narrative theories are challenged and spurred by experimental literary practice (as well as by innovations in other media including film, comics and videogames). We will also explore key aspects of narrative, notably narrators and temporal structure, as ways through which narratives "argue" with pre-existing genres, power-structures and ways of seeing. Throughout the course we will attend closely to the wide-ranging scholarship on narrative theory and criticism. Like the narratives we will read, seminars will be conducted in the spirit of exploration and experiment. We will theorize and classify texts and techniques, but the pleasure and challenge will be in letting the narratives take us to the limits of theory.