English 494 - Globe and Planet in Contemporary Literature

This is a class about scale and scope, borders and boundaries. 

We will consider how contemporary writers represent phenomena that exceed the unit of the nation: particular attention will be paid to climate change and the environment, migration, immigration, and displacement, the idea of the “global city,” and the living legacies of colonialism, slavery, and diaspora. We will think about the formal, imaginative, and ethical challenges of thinking on a global scale. We will discuss how one can preserve awareness of local differences and historical contingencies when thinking on a global scale. We will examine the sorts of identities that get forged across borders. We will talk about what happens to setting when texts range across nations and even continents. And we will delve into critical and theoretical writings to find out what literary theorists are saying about these questions today.

Our readings will pair late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century fiction with critical and theoretical work drawn from ecocriticism and the environmental humanities, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, and so-called new global modernisms. 

This class will also emphasize the process and skills involved in upper-level literary analysis and research: we will experiment with a range of strategies for note-taking, making sense of dense texts, framing research questions, citing textual evidence (both primary and secondary), building robust arguments, and finding openings and opportunities to engage in ongoing critical debates and conversations.

Authors may include Teju Cole, Amitav Ghosh, Mohsin Hamid, and Jenny Offill.

Open to sophomores, juniors and seniors. Prerequisite: one prior English course. Limited to 18 students. Fall semester. Professor Abramson.

How to handle overenrollment: Preference given to junior and senior majors.

Students who enroll in this course will likely encounter and be expected to engage in the following intellectual skills, modes of learning, and assessment: Readings (both primary fictional works and secondary works of literary critical analysis), research, and written work. One essay will focus on close reading a primary text while the final essay will ask students to incorporate research/theory/secondary source. Emphasis on the building blocks of a literary-critical argument (framing research questions, weaving together sources and voices, finding openings for one’s own ideas in ongoing critical conversations and debates). Class participation will also be essential. For each class, students will be expected to bring a “passage of the day” they would like to discuss with their peers.