English 138 - Winter, 2012

British Literature 1945-Present

Class Information

Instructor: Marx, John
CRN: 53856
Time: TR 1:40-3:00
Location: 217 Olson

Description

This course is about contemporary British fiction and its investment in a global past. The course considers recent novels that look around the world to explain what "multiculture" means today in Britain. Fiction discovers precedent for what the scholar Paul Gilroy calls “English conviviality” in settings as diverse as a nineteenth-century ship crossing the Indian Ocean and a London boarding house during the Blitz.

The course begins with Smith’s sweeping (recent) historical novel, which tracks two families (and many other characters besides) from World War II to the present. In so doing, Smith broaches a whole series of questions about what it means to tell the story of multicultural Britain. This novel will set up our discussion of Gilroy’s scholarly account of what the end of British Empire and the bombing of London in World War II mean to English culture now.

Although this is clearly a course centered on the relationship between English fiction and British Empire, we will throughout have an eye on problems of literary and social comparison. For instance, Levy’s novel will help us think about how stories about racism differ in the UK and in the US, while novels by Hollinghurst and Gurnah and Ghosh raise the question of what multiculture meant in the imperial era.

Although everything we’ll read is invested in figuring out how to remember the past, most of our readings will also weigh in on the challenges of imagining the future. Smith’s novel in particular is interested in forecasting what comes next for a country the critic Kobena Mercer describes as “this strange space that constitutes our common postcolonial home, in Little England’s green and not always so pleasant land.”

Grading

Grading will be based upon two argument papers, midterm and final exams, as well as class participation.

Texts

White Teeth, Smith, Zadie
Small Island, Levy, Andrea
Sea of Poppies, Ghosh, Amitav
The Swimming-Pool Library, Hollinghurst, Alan
The Icarus Girl, Oyeyemi, Helen
Desertion, Gurnah, Abdulrazak