Time to get to work!

Used books are now showing up at my doorstep at a rate of two or three a day, meaning it's time to get cracking! I got my course assignments last week (got both classes that I'd hoped for), and now it's time to get organized and start reading! My hope is to work through these reading lists in order as best as I can, bumping books I've previously read to the bottom of the list - we'll see how much can be done before June! The only dilemma is when I'll allow myself the pleasure of re-reading A Passage to India . . .

So for, those of you keen on reading along, here are the marching orders:

7455 Fiction of Empire and the Breakup of Empire/Ms. Sabin/T, Th 2-4:45
Through close study of selected Victorian, modern, and contemporary texts, the seminar will examine continuities and ruptures between colonial and postcolonial fiction in English. Novels and short stories will be considered in relation to a variety of critical and theoretical controversies in current postcolonial studies. We will discuss the participation of the English novel in the construction and also the critique of imperialism, the ambiguous status of the English language in the turn against the colonialist mentality, and more recent questioning of the term “postcolonial” itself. This course moves fast, especially at the beginning. It will prove very important to have done a substantial amount of the primary reading before arrival, at least The Mystery of Edwin Drood, A Passage to India, The Inheritance of Loss, The Romantics, and A Bend in the River. Specific assignments in critical reading and a few films will accompany the primary texts during the course, along with photocopied extracts from some contemporary primary readings unavailable for purchase in print. (This course can be used to satisfy either a Group III or a Group V requirement; students should indicate their choice at the time of registration.)

Texts: Charles Dickens, The Mystery of Edwin Drood (Penguin); Rudyard Kipling, Selected Stories (Penguin); E.M. Forster, A Passage to India (Harvest); Pankaj Mishra, The Romantics (Anchor); Kiran Desai, The Inheritance of Loss (Grove); Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness (Norton Critical Ed.); Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (Anchor); V.S. Naipaul, A Bend in the River (Vintage); Ngugi wa Thiong’o, Weep Not, Child (Heinemann); Wole Soyinka, Aké: The Years of Childhood (Vintage); Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy (Longman).

7625 Religion and the Twentieth-Century American Novel/Ms. Hungerford/M-F 8:45-9:45
Beginning with Harold Frederic’s realist masterpiece The Damnation of Theron Ware (1896) and ending with the apocalyptic fiction of Cormac McCarthy (The Road [2006]), we will study a century’s worth of American novels for which religion is central to theme and narrative form. Our questions will include: How is literature imagined in religious terms? How does American religious history inflect the development of the American novel in the twentieth century? How is the Bible folded into fiction? How do Catholic and Jewish thought emerge in Protestant America? How is religious life imagined in the context of American pluralism? The course requires one short paper, one longer paper, and student presentations. The seminar will include brief introductions to a few authors not on the syllabus (Henry James, Flannery O’Connor, Jack Kerouac, Toni Morrison, Don DeLillo) to broaden the context and as a resource for further study.

Texts: Harold Frederic, The Damnation of Theron Ware, or Illumination (Penguin); William Faulkner, Light in August (Vintage); James Baldwin, Go Tell it on the Mountain (Dial); Saul Bellow, Seize the Day (Penguin); J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey (Back Bay); Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (HarperPerennial); Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (Picador); Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Vintage). A course reader including William James, Philip Roth, material from the Baldwin archive at Yale, and other prose and criticism will be available in Vermont. Please read Theron Ware and as much as possible of Light in August before you arrive.