The Modernist Novel: Alienation and Narration

This course will examine how the modernist novel is not only about alienation—estrangement from others, the meaninglessness of existence, the divorce of private self from public life—but also incorporates alienation into its narrative structures. Through the close analysis of novels by European and Latin American authors (Kafka, Camus, Woolf, Onetti, Rulfo and Di Benedetto), we will consider alienation from a variety of angles: as a formal problem for narrative; as an existential situation; an experience of history and the past; and as a condition related to the uneven global economy.