English Department - University Of Pennsylvania

English 592.940
Fictions of the Global: Contemporary Fiction and Cinema
Rita Barnard profile

R 5:30-8:40 Evening Screenings W 5:30-8
Fulfills Sector 6: 20th Century Literature of the English Standard Major
Fulfills Elective Seminar of the English Standard Major

In this course, we will explore the various ways in which the increasingly global cultural exchanges that shape our contemporary world have affected narrative form. Novels and films no longer reflect a single national experience or contribute to a single tradition: indeed, some of the most compelling texts produced in recent years are ones that evoke a world in which migration, diaspora, transnational cultural consumption are defining experiences. At stake in many of the contemporary masterpieces we will study in this course, are profound questions about the global distribution of economic, cultural, and political power. We will ask not only how texts are produced and consumed in a transnational cultural marketplace, but also how fiction and cinema may help us understand our present world, riven as it is by inequalities based on race, gender, environment, and unequal access to the benefits (and ills) of modernity. An important theme in the texts we will study is the contemporary metropolis, especially the “Third World” metropolis: a focus which brings into play questions of consumerist desire, style, crime, and the spatiality of poverty and privilege. We will study at least six major novels and six major films. The former may include: Evelyn Waugh’s Black Mischief, Doris Lessing’s Hunger, Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood, Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses, Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, Michelle Cliff’s No Telephone To Heaven, Athol Fugard’s Tsotsi Jessica Hagedorn’s Dogeaters, Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, David Mitchell’s Ghostwritten, and John Le Carre’s The Constant Gardener. Films may include: Moolade, Tsotsi, In Darkest Hollywood, Dirty Pretty Things, Salaam Bombay, Touki Bouki, The Harder They Come, Life and Debt, Salu,t Cousin!, Mystery Train, Coming to America, and Lost in Translation. Discussions will also engage with a number of theoretical texts on globalization and global modernity, which will be made available electronically. DVDs will be made available for private viewing before class. Requirements: in-class presentations and a final paper of about 15 pages. (Students may write to Professor Barnard for a final list of texts in April 2007).

updated 2007-06-29