21st Century American Fiction
Gareth Evans
Hutton Honors College
In this course, we will read seven 21st-century American novels. The novels we read vary in style and content, just as the authors vary in their race, ethnicity, gender, regional, and national background. All are concerned with the power of circumstance, however, and with the role difference, of, for example, class, gender, race, color and sexuality, play in shaping a person’s life. The first book we will read is part of the transnational turn that is a key trend in 21st-century American fiction. That book, Americanah,_ _is as much concerned with the country in which its author was born, Nigeria, as it is with the United States. After Adichie, we will read Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing. Part road novel, part prison narrative, part family tale, Ward’s novel offers a sometimes mythic account of African-American life. Our next read is Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown, which focuses on a bit part actor struggling against Asian and Asian-American stereotypes. Tess Gunty’s The Rabbit Hutch is set largely in a rundown section of a town that eerily resembles Notre Dame, Indiana. Taking place in a dilapidated building full of residents down on their luck, the novel rapidly shifts points of view. Barbara Kingsolver’s Flight Behavior is both a love story and a climate change novel about butterflies set in rundown rural Tennessee. Danielle Dutton’s Margaret the First focuses on the life of Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle. A novelist and the first woman to be invited to a meeting of the Royal Society—it would be 200 years before another woman was invited. A seventeenth-century celebrity, if that is the word, referred to as “Mad Madge” because of the clothes that she wore. If “MeToo” is still a movement then Margaret the First should be seen as one of its founding texts. We will end the class with a novel about the white working class, Daniel Woodrell’s Winter’s Bone, a family novel full of love, loyalty, crack, violence, and death. Range of method and content is one key to the class, then. I want us to think, too, however, about the connections between the books we read, our ability to connect, or otherwise, to the characters they portray, the different ways in which the novels explore their characters’ attempts to connect, and the connection between characters and the worlds in which they, and you, live. If you read the books in the way I want you to read them, you will put yourself in the heads of the writers you read, and the people you read about, however different they may be from you.
READINGS
- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah
- Jesmyn Ward, Sing, Unburied, Sing
- Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown
- Tess Gunty, The Rabbit Hutch
- Barbara Kingsolver, Flight Behavior
- Danielle Dutton, Margaret the First
- Daniel Woodrell, Winter’s Bone
NOTE: Please buy physical copies of the books. No e-books allowed.
Catalog Information: HON-H 234 LITERATURE OF TIME AND PLACE