21st Century American Fiction and the Cultural Turn
- Autumn 2014
Additional Details:
As the title of this course implies, this is a course primarily about reading prose fiction, but there are many parts to this that will interrogate our process of reading. First, of course, we will develop our reading skills by engaging with a variety of texts, both literary and critical, throughout the quarter. We will be pushing ourselves out of traditional boundaries of fiction and expanding our critical thinking skills. As well, we will be attempting to answer why we read prose fiction, why it maintains cultural relevance, why one would study it, and what it provides to us as we make sense of our own lives. This will also engage us in the form of frequent writing assignments, as we begin to learn how to approach these texts as opportunities for cultural critique and cultural understanding, reading beyond the emotive experience of literature.
The texts for this course are contemporary and place the analysis of culture as their primary literary goal. These range from post-9/11 paranoia and our place in history in Gibson's Pattern Recognition to the difficulties of finding a place in a diasporic and fantastical world in Diaz's The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. In reading these texts, we will grow not only as readers and thinkers, but as empathetic citizens of a world that is always expanding in its variance and difficulty.
4. Book List –
Colson Whitehead, John Henry Days (2001), ISBN#: 978-0385498203
Jeffrey Eugenides, Middlesex (2002), ISBN#: 978-0312427733
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition (2003), ISBN#: 978-0425198681
Junot Diaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007), ISBN#: 978-1594483295
Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2011), ISBN#: 978-0307477477
Course Reader, available at Ave Copy Center