4. AM Anglistik Lit III: Hybridity: International novels in English
This course will consider contemporary prose texts that blend various forms, narrative methods and generic features into strikingly new novels, written for an international market of English speakers. Hybrid in genre and with hybrid narrative styles they challenge their readers’ understanding and empathy. We will begin with the Canadian Sydney Padua and her graphic essay novel/comic, The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage (2015) a blend not only of various generic forms but a book that also includes historiography and a steampunk dystopia (and that is, above all, quite entertaining). Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake (2015), a crowdfunded British historical novel written in a simulacrum of Anglosaxon English, narrates the story of the rebellions against the Norman invasion, leaving readers with a puzzling open ending that questions their own acceptance of an unreliable narrator. It is also a very suspenseful novel with many surprising twists and turns. The Australian Dorothy Porter wrote her lesbian detective novel, The Monkey’s Mask (1994), in the form of a verse narrative: it, too, provides a great deal of suspense but also posits some fascinating questions as to the limits of poetic imagination. Finally, Khaled Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns (2008) blends fictional biography, historical drama, and contemporary political manifesto into a narrative of two Afghan women. Primary text knowledge will be tested in the course of the term; students should have read Padua’s text by the second week of the semester.
Texts:
Hosseini, Khaled. A Thousand Splendid Suns. London: Bloomsbury, 2008.
Kingsnorth, Paul. The Wake. London: Unbound, 2015.
Padua, Sydney. The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage: The (Mostly) True Story of the First Computer. London: Pantheon Graphic Novels, 2015.
Porter, Dorothy. The Monkey’s Mask. New York: Serpent’s Tail, 1997.
Further reading:
Smith, Matthew J.. Critical approaches to comics: theories and methods. New York: Routledge, 2012.
Schneider, Jost. Einführung in die Romananalyse. Darmstadt: WBG, 2010.
Frow, John. Genre. London: Routledge, 2006.
