Course Rationale
This course reads three Nobel Laureates in Literature — Kazuo Ishiguro (2017), Han Kang (2024), and Toni Morrison (1993) — not as a survey of prize-winning fiction but as a sustained encounter with three writers who share a conviction that literary form is a moral instrument. Each writer has been recognized by the Swedish Academy in terms that point toward the course's central concern: Ishiguro for uncovering the abyss beneath the surface of the ordinary; Han Kang for her intense poetic prose that confronts historical traumas and exposes the fragility of human life; Morrison for her visionary force and poetic import, giving voice to an essential aspect of American reality.
What these citations share — beneath their different emphases — is a recognition that each writer has found a formal means of making visible what their surrounding culture has rendered invisible: the violence beneath institutional composure, the atrocity beneath official silence, the human weight of historical harm that a society has agreed not to fully see. The course reads this shared formal project through the analytical framework provided by Bruce Robbins' Atrocity: A Literary History (Stanford University Press, 2025), which argues that literature is one of the primary means by which human societies extend their capacity to recognize mass violence as a moral scandal requiring response.
The Nobel Lecture of each writer is assigned alongside their primary text. The lectures are not supplementary material. They are each writer's own account of what literature is for — what formal choices are necessary, what the act of writing toward atrocity costs, and what the writer believes passes between the text and the reader who holds it. Reading the lectures alongside the novels gives students direct access to three of the most precise contemporary statements about the social function of literary imagination.
This course uses Bruce Robbins' Atrocity: A Literary History (Stanford University Press, 2025) as its framing device. Robbins argues that atrocity is not a self-evident category — it is a historical construction, and literature is one of the primary means by which human societies have built and extended their capacity to recognize mass violence as a moral scandal requiring response. Central to his argument is the concept of the indignation-free zone: the cultural and narrative space in which devastating harm is done to people without producing the moral response that harm deserves. This zone is not maintained by exceptional cruelty. It is maintained by ordinary narrative choices — by the way a text frames its landscape, constructs its characters, distributes emotional weight, and positions its reader in relation to suffering.
Using Robbins as a framing device allows students to move beyond asking what happened in a literary text to asking a more precise and more demanding question: how is the violence being curated?
Four analytical questions organize every session:
Q1 — Environment: Does the novel imagine the environment as a stable backdrop masking structural violence — or does it represent the environment as an active participant in the atrocity? This question follows historical contextualization of each novel.
Q2 — Literary Style and Its Function: What is the novel's dominant formal and stylistic mode and what does that style do? The question is not whether the text makes you feel but what the feeling is doing — whether it breaks the indignation-free zone or aestheticizes the violence it represents, whether it produces indignation that generates understanding or produces pathos that contains it.
Q3 — Victim Legibility: Who is granted the status of a victim? Whose suffering is legible to a Western audience? This throws into relief a broader cross-cultural perspective for students in reading.
Q4 — The Political Work of Feeling: Instead of asking how do we feel for the character, Robbins asks what political work is this feeling doing? This is Robbins' advocacy of analysis over empathy.
A Note on Literary Reading
In this course you are not studying English. You are reading literature written in English. The difference matters entirely. The question is never what does this sentence mean but what does this sentence do — to you, right now, as you read it? The moment that stops you is more important than the moment you understand. Your discomfort is data. Feel before you analyze. Notice before you argue. 

1. 本校建議 A+ 比例上限為 20% ，非強制規定，授課教師可依課程要求調整，建議必修課程參考。
2. 本校採用等第制評定成績，學生成績評量辦法中的百分制分數區間與單科成績對照表僅供參考，授課教師可依等第定義調整分數區間。詳見學習評量專區 (連結)。