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 2023/24b: Special Topic: Out of Place: The Migrant Novel: This course might be considered a traveling companion to Post-Colonial Literature. Rather than tell stories of resistance and reclamation, the authors assembled here describe a life on the move. These are narratives of perpetual wandering whose heroes are the stateless and the homeless. Many of the most trenchant – and beautiful – novels written in English since 1945 not only make displacement the urgent theme of their narratives, but also the crucible of their experiment. In dislocation and confinement, exile and migration, language and perception are broken and remade.

Novels include: Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, Samuel Selvon’s The Lonely Londoners, Nadine Gordimer’s July’s People, Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion, Julia Otsuka’s The Buddha in the Attic, lé thi diem thúy’s The Gangster We Are All Looking For, Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West. Heesok Chang.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS