ENGL 73.28 How We Live Now: Contemporary Hemispheric Fictions

This course explores contemporary hemispheric fiction and film’s attempts to represent how we live now: to map the economic and cultural changes of the last forty years, including the death of 1960s social movements and the shift to a new form of global capitalism. Throughout the course, we will consider the inter-Americanism of these works, exploring how these authors grapple with parallel and overlapping historical conditions, and attend particularly to questions of form and genre. We will consider how genres like chick lit and detective fiction might solicit readers to think and feel in ways that are in line with national and multinational economic imperatives, but also how authors have attempted to create new forms to describe and challenge contemporary conditions of work, war, debt, and depression. Authors may include Roberto Bolaño, Terry McMillan, Junot Diaz, Claudia Rankine, Alicia Gaspar de Alba, Karen Russell, Eden Robinson, and César Aira. 

Degree Requirement Attributes

Dist:LIT; WCult:W

The Timetable of Class Meetings contains the most up-to-date information about a course. It includes not only the meeting time and instructor, but also its official distributive and/or world culture designation. This information supersedes any information you may see elsewhere, to include what may appear in this ORC/Catalog or on a department/program website. Note that course attributes may change term to term therefore those in effect are those (only) during the term in which you enroll in the course.

Department-Specific Course Categories

Senior Seminar: Course Group III