This course is premised on the observation that it is about time we began to see the twenty-first century as a new period (rather than, say, part of a prolonged “contemporary”), and that the thematic and, perhaps more significantly, the formal and epistemological characteristics of the novel produced in the last two decades are crucial clues about such a paradigm shift.

For this semester, our discussion will be focused on these topics:

• How the nonhuman or the impersonal may assume a voice or narrative position in the novel, and how this device undermines the individualistic subjectivity that has long undergirded the novelistic architecture;
• How neoliberalism may have turned into a cultural logic and altered our affective, psychic, and cognitive life;
• How the sweeping power of digital media is creating new sensibilities and how such a change materializes in novelistic writing (and art as well) as an obsession with immediacy or absence of mediation;
• How the “return of realism” (and the waning of postmodernism) that critics have identified may be resonant with the intense attention turned to the “realism” of the objective world in critical theory;
• And how the overabundance of things presented directly in fiction and art today is a response (but may not be an effective solution) to the precarity of representation.