English - Free topic B: The Self and the World in Recent American Fiction

This 15 ECTS course is focused on the reading of twenty-first century novels. Students will read 6-8 novels for each section of the course. One half of the course (taught by Martyn Bone) will focus on contemporary transnational American fiction: twenty-first century novels that situate the United States at global scales (hemispheric, transatlantic, and transpacific), often with an emphasis on migration. The other half of the course (taught by Tina Lupton) will focus on recent US novels that raise questions of selfhood, identity, and gender. In both parts of the course, we will be looking at questions of how the formal developments of the novel relate to the changing identity of the nation, the state, and the self in today’s global world.