Critical issues: Faith and Fiction

Catalog description

This course seeks to acquaint students with the rich tradition of Catholic literature in the English language that has emerged after the Second World War. It will chronicle the movement of Catholics from their ethnic and religious enclaves to their better educated and integrated, more suburban existence in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. It will also examine the regional flavor of American Catholicism, contrasting fiction of the Northeast with the of the South, Midwest, and West. Some themes uniting the course will be sacramentality, embodiment, the search for truth and meaning, the reality of evil, forgiveness, and the inexhaustibility of grace. Expect to read works by Flannery O'Connor, Andre Dubus, Mary Gordon, Ron Hansen, Alice McDermott and Ann Patchett. CO: COM 101 .