ENG41670

Our understanding of the “contemporary” is informed by diverse narratives of globalization, neoliberalism, and late capitalism; how do we understand and digest the nature of embodied experience in this context?
This module focuses chiefly on developments in the American short around the turn of the twenty-first century. Within our set of contemporary texts, we will encounter a diverse group of writers and their experiments with popular forms, images, and expectations.
The course will employ primary and critical texts to build a collaborative discussion of the American literary and social moment, drawing on critical discourses around genre and form as well as around embodiment, medical humanities and care studies. We will concentrate on works by canonical contemporary authors that employ the images and structures of what is conventionally considered to be “genre” or “popular” fiction, looking particuarly at the genre of the illness narrative. It is particularly focused on the use of illness and the body/mind under duress in response to social, political, environmental and cultural circumstances.
For better and worse, we will encounter texts that are rarely fully critically digested or contextualized. Thus, the module will ask you for flexibility and creativity in pursuing the new, changing, and uncertain definitions of the present period and how we experience and understand it.