In recent years, the term global Anglophone has achieved some purchase in critical grounds previously occupied by postcolonial and world literary theories and scholarship. As Nasia Anam suggest, “there is room to consider that twenty-first century literature, in form and content, is developing in a manner that stretches beyond what the term ‘postcolonial’ and even ‘World Literature’ may be able to encompass as literary genres”(4). Anam suggests further that “we may hazard to view the Global Anglophone as a rubric that allows us to think beyond the temporally and geographically bound political concerns of Postcolonial Literature. It may also provide us a means of thinking beyond the presumption of discrete, extractable literary traditions that seems to mark many discussions of World Literature.” But she also concedes, “it is fair to say that the term Global Anglophone entered into literary critical discourse foremost as a problematic substitute for established disciplinary terms like postcolonial and World Literature —both of which are politically fraught in their own right and have inspired innumerable published and oral debates in the past thirty years.” Yogita Goyal echoes this concern to note that academia is at best ambivalent about this term that seems to have emerged from the pages of job postings, rather than from the actual critical work of scholars. Indeed the global Anglophone is also seen by some theorists as an apolitical version of the postcolonial, and moreover, a dangerous way to think about literary form. Nonetheless, as academic satellites like journal special issues, the MLA job list, and course offerings demonstrate, the term persists, is gaining ground, and may be here to stay.

In this seminar we will explore the emergence of global Anglophone literature, as a category for contemporary literature in English, and its antecedents in postcolonialism and world literature. Our work will include getting a firm grasp on what each of these three different terms – global Anglophone, World literature, and postcolonial literature – is meant to delineate; the different global forces that impacted their formations; and how we can use these various ideas to think about the contemporary novel in English as a narrative object that can contain global perspectives. This seminar thus explores contemporary global Anglophone fiction, as it is mediated and shaped by the related forces of capital and prestige such as literary prizes, creative writing programs, and academic canonization. The novels selected are ones that have won or are/were finalists for major literary prizes such as the Man Booker, the Pulitzer, and the National Book Award. To get a sense of each author's writing in focused and detailed ways, as well as the ways their writing reflects shifts in the literary critical landscape, we will be reading two texts each, by four different authors.

Course work will center around crafting a cluster/clusters of essays for Post 45 Contemporaries. Students should thus expect to write both an essay and a cluster pitch, and a 3000 word essay that fits into the cluster(s) formed over the course of the semester. You can find the call for papers for Post 45 Contemporaries here.