Sections offered FALL 2019:
#6920
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GARETH EVANS |
MW 11:15am-12:30pm
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HU 108
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CLASS NOTES: COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit; IUB GenEd A&H credit
In this course, we will read six 21st-century American novels. The novels we read vary in style and content, just as the authors vary in their race, ethnicity, gender, regional, and national background. All are concerned with the power of circumstance, however, and with the role that difference of, for example, class, gender, race, color and sexuality, plays in shaping a person’s life. The first book we will read is part of the transnational turn that is a key trend in 21st-century American fiction. That book, Americanah, is as much concerned with the country in which its author was born, Nigeria, as it is with the United States. We will move from Adichie to two novels by C.E. Morgan, All the Living and The Sport of Kings. All the Living takes place for the most part on a rundown Kentucky tobacco farm, and is concerned with the difficulties and intricacies of white working class life and love in rural America. The Sport of Kings, while in some sense about horse racing, is also a wide-ranging meditation on the role of gender, race, and class in the United States. After Morgan, we will read Tommy Orange’s There There, a book which culminates at a powwow in Oakland, but which also seeks to capture the complex nature of Native American identity. N.K. Jemisin is an African-American science fiction novelist, and we will read her The Fifth Season, a Hugo Award winning novel, which is partly a post-apocalyptic account of a world destroyed by climate change, but also a prescient analysis of the catastrophic ways in which people respond to difference. We will end the class with another novel about the white working class, Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone, a novel the New York Times book reviewer referred to as “hillbilly noir.”
Range of method is one key to the class, then. I want us to think, too, however, about the connections between the books we read, our ability to connect, or otherwise, to the characters they portray, the different ways in which the novels explore their characters’ attempts to connect, and the connection between characters and the worlds in which they, and you, live. If you read the books in the way I want you to read them, you will put yourself in the heads of the writers you read, and the people you read about, however different they may be from you.
WRITING REQUIREMENTS
Two 6-8 page essays. 65% of the final grade. Seven blog posts. Either three or four of your responses will comment on a book we are reading, while the other three or four will respond to two comments made by other students in the class. I will grade two of your comments and one of your responses to the comments. You will receive a checkmark for each of your other contributions to the Blog. The lowest grade you receive for a graded Blog assignment will not count towards your final grade. 35% of your final grade will be based on your Blog responses, and on your participation in class.
READING
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah.
Tommy Orange, There There.
C.E. Morgan, All the Living; The Sport of Kings.
N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season.
Daniel Woodrell, Winter’s Bone.