This syllabus delineates the readings and assignments for an advanced undergraduate course on the history and theory of the novel taught in fall 2014 at the University of Georgia.

Unlike his earlier novels, J.M. Coetzee’s The Master of Petersburg, has not received the attention that it deserves from the critics. The novel, which is set in Russia not only draws on real aspects of Fyodor Dostoevsky’s life but also on certain events in the Russian author’s novels, specifically The Devils. Coetzee’s Dostoevsky is an aging a…[Read more]

This essay demonstrates that Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake goes beyond conventional wisdom about immigrant experiences in so far as it explores how the South Asian diaspora participates in transnational connections, shaping and transforming the notion of American identity in the contemporary global era. Lahiri’s novel offers us a striking acc…[Read more]

A reflection on the state of the archive in the state of post-theory.

In this essay, I follow debates about forms and sites of memorialization in post- Soviet Belarus. Begun during perestroika, the public discussions about Khatyn’ and Kuropaty eventually evolved into persistent attempts to realign the Soviet past along new narrative axes. Most prominently, this discursive reformatting of the socialist experience w…[Read more]

[from pp. 151-52:]

“Not only do we ourselves treat fictional characters as if they were capable of a broad variety of mental states (as real people are) to make sense of the story when we first read it; not only do we casually refer to these characters’ and the author’s mental states in our subsequent discussions with students; not only do we…[Read more]

Is There Tunisian Literature? Emergent Writing and Fractal Proliferation of Minor Voices.
The article presents the Tunisian literature from the non-local perspective of the global literary market and the circulation of translated literature. The minor status of the studied phenomenon becomes obvious even when the Tunisian literature is compared…[Read more]

This essay offers a critical reading of Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Lowland as a “neo-cosmopolitan fiction,” one which is invested in imagining a transnational and global community, in order to initiate a new analytical framework for South Asian diasporic literature. I argue that this critical framework not only challenges the notion of literary canon…[Read more]

This primer in “cognitive cultural studies” explores the cultural fantasy of perfect access to mind through body. It shows that different genres and media—movies, novels, classic Chinese operas, medieval ribald tales, musicals, paintings, documentaries, stand-up comedy, and photography—have different strategies for making us think that we have ju…[Read more]

Introduction to Modernism: Evolution of an Idea, which traces the emergence and coherence of the term “modernism”, and the field of modernist studies, from the late 1800s to the present.

In lieu of an abstract, here is the beginning of the chapter:

Ungleichzeitigkeit and global modernisms

Over the last twenty-five years, the modernist canon has been significantly revised as theoretical and empirical interventions have emphasised its transnational and globalised patterns of connection through a range of disciplinary…[Read more]

This article explores what Gershom Scholem has called Herbert Marcuse’s “unacknowledged ties to [his] Jewish heritage.” At the core of Marcuse’s vision of transformed, non-repressive social relations, I argue, is a struggle over time, which rests upon a distinctly Jewish approach to the twin questions of remembrance and redemption. One example…[Read more]