ENGL 257 - The Novel in English after 1945

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

The novel in English as it has developed in Africa, America, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean, Great Britain, India, Ireland, and elsewhere.

Topic for 2020/21b: Special Topic: Out of Place: Novels of Dislocation. “The splinter in your eye is the best magnifying glass.” – Theodor Adorno

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, everyone in this classroom can attest to an experience of modernity once spared the privileged: banishment from old familiar places, the spaces once securely inhabited and freely traversed. Many of the most trenchant – and beautiful – novels written in English since 1945 not only make dislocation the urgent theme of their narratives, but also the crucible of their experiment. In displacement and confinement, exile and migration, language and perception are broken and remade. Texts might include: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pnin, V. S. Naipaul’s The Mimic Men, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers, Joy Kagawa’s Obasan, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Amitava Kumar’s Immigrant, Montana. We supplement these novels with postcolonial and critical theory: Adorno, Brathwaite, Kristeva, Derrida, Deleuze and Guattari, Bhabha, Said. Heesok Chang.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS