Parkes, Adam
TR 9:35 AM
Park Hall 139
Reading works written in the realist tradition together with experimental texts, this course will explore some of the ways in which novels and stories written in the twenty-first century engage with history – the history of the present, as well as the past. We will consider how far themes of class, money, status, family, and marriage continue to shape the English novel as a literary form, as well as discussing the aesthetic consequences of issues that loom large in the contemporary world: global finance, immigration, multiculturalism, the digital revolution, and climate change, as well as regional, national, and international identities. We will think, too, about how fiction strives to reshape these materials and sometimes to resist them. Another recurrent theme will be the twenty-first-century response to the artistic and cultural legacies of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A list of works to be studied follows below. Note that if you'd like to read ahead during the winter break, as I strongly suggest you do, first up will be McEwan's Atonement followed by Smith's On Beauty.
Rachel Cusk, Outline (Picador, 2016)
Tessa Hadley, Bad Dreams & Other Stories (Harper Perennial, 2022)
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go (Vintage, 2006)
Tom McCarthy, Remainder (Vintage, 2007)
Ian McEwan, Atonement (Anchor, 2003)
Zadie Smith, On Beauty (Penguin, 2006)
Lucy Wood, The Sing of the Shore (Harper Collins, 2018)