LLSL2349

This seminar offers up the contemporary novel in the post-colonial period throughout what we might call the New World Atlantic, as one way to consider the formal, aesthetic, and conceptual features that characterize this body of literature. We will examine how the familiar questions of rupture, exile, dislocation, dispossession, migration, and the perpetual “shock of arrival” that preoccupy these works, echo, reformulate, and extend the centuries-long conundrum of citizenship and belonging that is the principal legacy of Western imperial enterprise.Among the novels that may be studied in the course are J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao, Chimamanda Adichie’s Half of a Yellow Sun, Edwidge Danticat’s The Farming of Bones, Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy, and Hanif Kureishi’s My Beautiful Laundrette (1985).