The World Novel in English

Catalog description

Studies in the novel, written in English, by writers outside of the United States and Great Britain. ENGL 486 The World Novel in English (3) (IL) This course examines the nature of the novel as written in English by writers outside of the United States and Great Britain. Such a study necessarily involves both an aesthetic and a political perspective, in that the tradition of the novel in these landscapes so often involves the aesthetic and political suppression of native literary forms and voices. Thus, this course looks at the novel as written both by the colonizer and by the colonized. It considers the politics of the aboriginal author writing in an adopted language, and the ways in which such an adoption bears upon related ethnic and gender matters; it also considers the sorts of artistic and political tensions that emerge in the work of writers who write in what might be called the dominant English tradition. This course also studies the work of what might be called the multi-cultural writer, or the writer perforce extracted from a native, non-English-speaking culture and placed within a larger, colonial, English-speaking culture. Matters of novelistic form, as they are related to ethnic and cultural identity, are also discussed. One intent of the course is to reveal the cultural, racial, and gender diversity that naturally adheres to these particular literary traditions.