ENGL 380 - English Seminar

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2014/15b: The In-Between Novel. These novels have been called “barely disguised essays.” David Markson’s This is Not a Novel, J.M. Coetzee’s Elizabeth Costello, or Michel Houellebecq’s Whatever. But that description might also hold true of books like Renata Adler’s Speedboat, Elizabeth Hardwick’s Sleepless Nights, and the fiction of Lydia Davis or Susan Sontag. We read those books, and others like W.G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn and Teju Cole’s Open City. The idea behind grappling with this in-between form is to write, even if this appears a somewhat counterintuitive, more imaginative, and bravura, essays. For this purpose, we take guidance from David Shield’s anti-novel manifesto, Reality Hunger. Each student will make a class-presentation on one of the readings and will write a final essay about twenty double-spaced pages in length. Mr. Kumar.

One 2-hour period.