Ambitions and Accomplishments of Contemp

One ambition of the so-called “big ambitious novel”—a genre often described as masculine—has been to introduce society's public or historical dimension into the novel, a genre which has often been seen (and not without reason) as better suited to representing private emotional and familial relationships. That was the complaint of critic James Wood about Zadie Smith’s debut novel White Teeth in 2000.  In Smith, it was arguably not just an ambition, but an accomplishment, and the same can be said of American fiction during the last two decades. The formal innovations it has required and the thematic impulses it has mobilized repay close critical attention. Giving them that attention, and figuring out the right sort of attention, is the primary goal of this seminar. Along with it, however, the seminar also aims to extend the list of this fiction’s forms and contents, connecting back to recent classics like Pynchon and Foster Wallace but also looking hard at recent fiction which seems to be breaking new ground, morally and politically, formally and tonally.