Course description

What is distinctive about post-millennial British and American fictions? This course will suggest it is the commitment to a world in crisis often demarcated by the 2001 attacks on New York's Twin Towers, and their legacy of war, terrorism, and counter-terrorism. The novels we will read address this cataclysm, along with other equally urgent issues from climate change to neo-liberalism and the growing schism between extreme wealth and extreme poverty, to the sociopolitical dynamics surrounding identity, national and gendered, and alterity. Each of the novels we will explore uses the art form in which it is embedded to engage with the past and the present in order to imagine into existence, against overwhelming odds, an ethical future. NOTE: Course offering may be cancelled unless a minimum of 20 students enrol.

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