The Global Novel

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

The novel might have always been global, emerging as it has alongside the massively expanding circulation of people, ideas, and commodities that characterise the past five hundred years of world history. But the past century has seen the rise of novels that are self-conscious about their global-ness, even as political and intellectual currents have tended towards focusing on the regional, linguistic, national, and other particularities of cultural production. This class will consider a range of modern and contemporary novels, critics, and theorists from around the globe and through them consider the relationships between specificity, particularity, generality, and universality in global literature. This will serve as an introduction to topics in transnational, postcolonial, world-literary, and global anglophone literary studies, and as an occasion to deepen those debates.