Sections offered FALL 2022:
#5813
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GARETH EVANS |
MW 11:30 AM–12:45 PM
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HU 108
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CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd A&H credit; COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit
Class meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html
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 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. After Adichie, we will read Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied Sing. Part road novel, part prison narrative, part family tale, Ward’s novel offers a sometimes mythic account of African-American life. Our next read is Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, which focuses on a bit part actor struggling against Asian and Asian-American stereotypes. Tommy Orange’s There There is a novel which culminates at a powwow in Oakland, but which also seeks to capture the complex nature of Native American identity. Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future is a sprawling work of science fiction which focuses on, and hints at a solution for, climate change. We will end the class with a novel about the white working class, Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone, a family novel full of love, loyalty, crack, violence, and death. Range of method and content 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.
READING
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah.
Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing.
Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown.
Tommy Orange, There There.
Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future.
Daniel Woodrell, Winter’s Bone.
NOTE: Please buy physical copies of the books. No e-books allowed.
WRITING REQUIREMENTS
Two essays that are at least 1500 words long. 60% of the final grade. You may revise the first essay you write if it receives a grade below B+. Six blog posts. Three of your responses will comment on a book we are reading, while the other four will respond to two comments made by other students in the class. 30% of your final grade will be based on your Blog responses. The remaining 10% of your grade will be based on class participation.