Outside the Nation State: The Global Novel

This course examines the recent emergence of novels in various parts of the globe that address a readership beyond their respective nations or regions of origins, sometimes even beyond the novelist's national language. To do so, we shall pursue a comparative investigation of the formal innovations allowing these works of fiction to move "outside" or "beyond" the modern nation states whose formation coincided with their own. We will bring such traditional theorists as Georg Lukàcs and Benedict Anderson to the task of asking how novels by Coetzee, Bolaño, Pamuk, Saviano, Whitehead and others attempt to produce alternative imagined communities. Consent of instructor is required.