Title: AMERICAN LITERATURE: 1960-PRESENT

PRQ:

Critic Eric Weinberger has written that among the “great American themes” in fiction are “social dislocation, the too-accelerated pace of our lives and the strained ties of families.”  This course will address those themes as dramatized in American fiction, poetry, and nonfiction produced since 1960. How do we come to a greater understanding of the human condition through language, imagination, narrative, form, content, and dramatization, and is that subject rendered meaningfully by contemporary writers?

Regular class attendance; attentive and thoughtful reading; twice-weekly formal reading responses; three in-class examinations.

 In The Bedroom, Andre Dubus;  Interpreter of Maladies, Jhumpa Lahiri;  The Hemophiliac’s Motorcycle, Tom Andrews;  Autobiography of a Face, Lucy Grealy;  Brothers And Keepers, John Edgar Wideman;  The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides;  The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Michael Chabon.