If one reads millennial fiction, for one thing to be found, it often goes strange like Kazuo Ishiguro’s clone story. As some millennial novels either conform to the tradition of realism or modernism or belong to fantasy, others mix traditional realism with fantasy or fabulation (distinct tale-telling) to create strangely real worlds. Such a tendency toward the strangely real needs to be explained. A common filament among the millennial novels we will explore in this course is that the novelists amplify aesthetically speculative approaches, or strange world-making, to map how humans may be reexamined in the larger views of shifting ecologies, social or natural. This seminar will investigate this new style of writing in contemporary fiction.

The emerging genres such as speculative fiction and New Weird, together with the twentieth-century genres of metafiction and magic realism, are just some attempts to map the fast-growing body of world-making literature to which the primary classification distinguishing fantasy from realism cannot do justice. We will study those novels that blend traditional realism with self-conscious fantasy or fabulation. In this chosen kind, which I call strangely real fiction, millennial fiction characterizes itself by invoking strange worlds and familiar life. In this seminar, we will read four novels. They are, in the order of the reading plan, The Sympathizer (2016), The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008), Outline (2016), and The Book of Form and Emptiness (2021).

Toward the end of the semester, the students are expected to familiarize themselves with some significant millennial novels and their complicated entanglement in social or natural ecologies. In addition, it is required that students conduct research by placing the novel reading in the larger context of aesthetics.