Sections offered SPRING 2020:
#30867 |
GARETH EVANS |
TR 11:15am-12:30pm |
HU 108 |
CLASS NOTES: COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit
Reading
Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah.
Edwidge Danticat, The Dew Breaker.
Yaa Gyasi, Homegoing.
Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist.
Aleksandar Hemon, The Lazarus Project.
Yiyun Li, The Vagrants.
Manfred Steger, Globalization: A Very Short Introduction.
By “Global American Novel,” I mean novels written by authors who were not born in America, but who wrote their novels while they lived in America. None of the novels we will read are set only in America, while the novels by Danticat and Li are set wholly in Haiti and China. Hamid no longer lives in the United States, Hemon moved to the United States as a young adult, and Adichie and Danticat spend considerable amounts of time in Nigeria and Haiti. That said, American born novelists have long written fiction set in other countries, and immigrant fiction also has a lengthy history in the United States. The 21st-century American fiction we will read is different from such fiction, however, because it does not obviously fit into a single national tradition. It raises questions, then, about how one should define the American novel, while also inviting us to look at the impact of globalization on world literature, and at the relationship, literary and political, between the United States and the home countries—Bosnia, China, Ghana, Haiti, Nigeria, and Pakistan—of the authors we will read. Writers circulate, it is clear, but how does the literature we will read circulate? Given the history of dictatorship in a number of the countries I listed, and given the role America has sometimes played in such countries, the novels we read necessarily raise questions about human rights. Every novel we read was written in English, and with the exception of Hemon, all of the authors we read were educated in America. We will also look, then, at whether such facts mean that English is now a global language. All the previous questions lead to one culminating question: How does one read the global American novel?