Department of English

In 2005, Japanese British author and Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro published Never Let Me Go, a short novel that would come to define his oeuvre and propel him into global stardom. The novel is aesthetically confounding: though a tale, on the surface, about human clones, it offers none of the fanciful worldbuilding or technological flights of science fiction. Instead, it reads like a classic, English bildungsroman—measured in tone, muted in feeling, and set against a world that looks very much like our own. This course begins in the narrative muddle to ask why “it is so hard for us to let go of Never Let Me Go.” If high school syllabi have treated the book as an ethical provocation and the film industry has turned it into a popular romance, we will strive to build out a more rigorous, historical frame. We’ll read across a wide range of theoretical sources to consider questions of imperial decline, technological innovation, race, labor, reproduction, and the status of art in the neoliberal, postwar order. We will also situate the novel within Ishiguro’s own literary career—beginning with his Japanese historical fiction and ending with his more overt excursions into fantasy and speculation—as well as the growing body of "Global Asias" literature more broadly. Throughout, Never Let Me Go will serve as a kind of barometer, helping us to gauge the emergence of our collective present.

Assignments will include short writing exercises, annotations, and class presentations. For the final assignment, students will have a choice between a research paper or a creative project. This course fulfills the Theory and Poetics, Difference and Diaspora, and 20th and 21st Century requirements.