English 247 - Race, Suburbia, and the post-1945 U.S. Novel

This course aims to identify, analyze, and complicate the dominant narrative of U.S. suburbia vis-à-vis the postwar American novel. While the suburb may evoke a shared sense of tedium, U.S. fiction positions suburbia as "contested terrain," a battleground staging many of the key social, cultural, and political shifts of our contemporary age. Reading novels and short stories by writers like Toni Morrison, Hisaye Yamamoto, John Updike, Chang-Rae Lee and Celeste Ng, we assess the narrative construction of the suburb as a bastion of white domesticity, as well as the disruption of this narrative through struggles for racial integration. Enrollment limited to 30. (E)