The Novel after the Age of Literature

What is the value of literature today, amid dire predictions about its waning cultural authority and shrinking popularity? In this seminar, we'll explore this question by studying major variants of the contemporary novel that are responding to the cultural, social, and economic forces restructuring literary culture, while also learning about the corporations, institutions, and readers who mediate their production, circulation, and reception. 

Based on the novel's relative social prevalence from the 1800s on in Britain and America, literary scholars have often ascribed grand effects to the fonn: it has shaped modern ideas about the self, organized people's sense of national belonging, and even fueled protests that prompted political change. Can we say as much today? Access to traditional literary culture, while it has always been exclusive based on race, gender, and class, appears to be contracting due to the ongoing erosion of its socioeconomic suppmts: affordable education, well-funded publishing, secure paid work, and ample leisure time. Meanwhile, novels exist in an increasingly crowded media field that includes television, film, video games, and social media, all of which may be said to have a greater hold on our limited attention. How has the novel adapted to these conditions? How should we adapt our understanding of the novel in response? 

This course begins with two cases from the British tradition to explore ideas about the form and function of the novel across what scholars have called the period of"literary dominance": Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Ian McEwan's Saturday (2005). The changing form and function of the novel will then be examined through analysis of four major trends in twenty-first­century literary culture: the rise of hybrid literary-genre fiction (Colson Whitehead and Emily St. John Mandel); the feminization of literary work (Colleen Hoover and Delia Owens); the proliferation of autofiction (Ocean Vuong and Patricia Lockwood); and evolutions in the metaliterary novel (Isabel Waidner and Ruth Ozeki). Through class discussion, literary-critical writing, and a literary-sociological project, where students will analyze the way readers talk about novels online, this course develops interdisciplinary approaches to illuminate the many forms that novels and novel-reading (including via audiobook) are taking today.