Contemporary Literature

Catalog description

This course focuses on literature of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and its aesthetic and ideological antecedents. Recent seminars have focused on the novel of globalization, and the new social realist novel through comparative analysis of Jonathan Franzen, *Freedom* (2010), which depicts a middle- American dysfunctional family, and Zadie Smith’s *White Teeth* (2000), which stirs together a postmodern fabulist style with a multinational and multiethnic cast of characters in London.