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 2024/25b: Special Topic: Dystopian Fiction: This semester we read novels that re-envision their respective Nows as imminent dystopias, beginning with Yevgeny Zamyatin’s Z, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Other dystopian fictions of hard and soft power, police state and bio-political governance, the approach of catastrophe and post-apocalypse, include: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor, J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, and Ling Ma’s Severance: A Novel. Spoiler alert: an enduring (and needless to say, urgent) message of these texts is not only be to caution us about the forms of totalitarian power but also the inadequacy of a liberal democratic opposition based on fact-checking and defending institutions. Beyond these negative lessons, what do these imaginary dystopias have to teach us about organizing fictions beyond the freedom of the Individual? Is there such a thing as a leftist creative paranoia? Heesok Chang.

Two 75-minute periods.

Course Format: CLS