What is modernity and what makes a novel modern? This course will pose and provide answers to this question through the study of novels from a variety of cultures and decades from the early twentieth to the early twenty-first centuries. A weekly lecture programme is supported by small group discussion using student-prepared close readings and other passages from the novels.
Including in our focus works from Europe, Asia and America, we will consider not only the stories novels tell about modernity but also the formal innovations of structure, style and voice novelists have made in their attempts to respond to a world undergoing rapid social, technological and political change.
Important foci and themes include the immigrant experience, loneliness and intimacy, and America as icon and agent of modernity. Our texts include examples of the graphic novel, the modernist novel, the twentieth-century bildungsroman, the thriller, the love story, the hybrid novel and the counterfactual or science fiction novel (so-called).