Fall 2007 Courses

English 373-01: Contemporary American Literature: 9/11 and the Novel (James)

M/W/F 10:50-11:50am, Old Main 003

How do war, devastation and atrocity shape literature? Poems like T.S. Elliot's The Wasteland and novels and memoirs such as Irene Nemirovsky's Suite Francaise and Elie Weisel's Night are reflective visions of the world at war and man's inhumanity to man. But they also reflect an awareness shaped by these very conflicts, a point of view of the event wrought by the event itself.

In our lifetime, we've had our own atrocity to deal with: September 11, 2001. And as more and more books are written about that moment, we gain a perspective that no other generation will share, that of commentator to an event we experienced first hand. What then is the purpose of a novel about an event that we know (or think we know) inside out? This course will explore the works of this still burgeoning genre from Americans and non-Americans, while also looking at how writers from other eras depicted theirs. Among the works to be examined will be Jonathan Safran Foer's Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, Clair Messud's The Emperor's Children, John Updike's Terrorist, Ian McEwan's Saturday, Frederic Beigbeder's Windows on the World, Moshin Hamid's The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and others.

Fall 2007 Course Listings