Sections offered FALL 2020:
#6537
|
GARETH EVANS |
MW 11:30am-12:45pm
|
WEB
|
CLASS NOTES: IUB GenEd A&H credit; COLL (CASE) A&H Breadth of Inquiry credit
Above class meets 100% Online with a combination of Synchronous and Asynchronous instruction. For more information visit https://fall2020.iu.edu/learning-modes
In this course, we will read seven 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 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. Our next read is Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, which focuses on a bit part actor struggling against Asian and Asian-American stereotypes. In Jenny Offill’s Weather, the novel’s narrator is a librarian with a husband, a gifted child, and a deadbeat brother. In addition to being a librarian, that narrator answers emailed questions about her former professor’s podcasts on climate change. In Weather, then, we turn from race to weather, in its literal and metaphorical senses. Next up is Andrew Sean Greer’s Pulitzer Prize winning Less, a satirical account of a gay male writer, about to turn 50, who is traveling the world from one minor literary event to another. He meets with much humiliation, and finally love, along the way. N.K. Jemisin’s The Fifth Season illustrates diversity in another way. The book is a science fiction novel, written by an African-American writer. The book won the Hugo Award, and while it is, in part, a post-apocalyptic account of a world destroyed by climate change, it also offers a prescient analysis of the catastrophic ways in which people respond to difference. We will end the class with a 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 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.
WRITING REQUIREMENTS
Two essays that are at least 1500 words long. 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 three of your 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.
Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown.
Jenny Offill, Weather.
Andrew Sean Greer, Less.
N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season.
Daniel Woodrell, Winter’s Bone.
NOTE: Please buy physical copies of the books. No e-books allowed.