In this asynchronous online course, we will study four novels from 1945 to the present, to traces three major theoretical developments in the study of the novel during this period. Coursework will focuses on the relationship between writers and readers, innovations in the novel form, fiction’s engagement with history and politics, and the changing place of national literature in the world. The questions that will guide our work include: What does the “global” signify in considerations of the novel? What is the global novel’s relationship to the local and how does this relationship vary since 1945? How have identity politics that concerns itself with matters that include race, gender, sexuality, class, religion, and nationality shaped the global novel since 1945? Is the “global novel” different from “the novel in English,” and how might these alternative terms suggestively reshape the defining values of postcoloniality? Is the global novel the same as the postcolonial novel and world literature? What are the forces of canonization currently at work in organizing and defining the so-called “global novel”?

This course is also diversity intensive in its decentering of traditional western accounts of the novel, in order to attend to how nationality, race, gender, sexuality, and religion among non-white social and ethnic groups impact the global form the novel now takes. Being attentive to representative gender equity, we will study two novels written by women, Kincaid’s Annie John and Lalami’s Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits, and two novels written by men, Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and Hamid’s Exit West. The goal of this work is to highlight and then decenter how dominant discourses of the novel, that define it as an eighteenth century English phenomenon, imperialistically predominate in our studies of the genre. We will do this to think about how the novel continues to function today as a social and political literary form that works to engage and represent community on a local and global scale in increasingly complicated times.

The course is divided into six modules:

Defining Literary and Critical Contexts - The Novel (Week 1)

Defining Literary and Critical Contexts - World Literature (Week 2) 

Defining Literary and Critical Contexts - The Postcolonial Novel (Week 3)      

Defining Literary and Critical Contexts - The Global Novel (Week 4)

Differentiating Literary and Critical Contexts (Week 5-6)      

Critical Perspectives on the Global Novel (Week 7-8)

At the end of the course, students will be able to:

identify what makes a literary work a novel, a postcolonial novel, world literature, and a global novel.

demonstrate the differences among the postcolonial novel, world literature, and the global novel.

identify major themes in the postcolonial novel, world literature, and the global novel

discuss major themes in the postcolonial novel, world literature, and the global novel

summarize critical arguments about the global novel.

compare and contrast arguments about the global novel.

Assignments will include discussion board posts, short writing assignments such as reflections and abstracts, and group writing assignments.