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 the 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 the strangely real fiction, millennial fiction characterizes itself by invoking strange worlds together with familiar life. In this seminar we will read intensively six novels. They are, in the order of my reading plan, The Sympathizer (2016), Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008), How to be Both (2015), Lincoln in the Bardo (2018), A Tale for the Time Being (2013) and Outline (2016).
Toward the end of the semester, the students are expected to familiarize themselves with major millennial novels and their complicated entanglement in social or natural ecologies. In addition, it is required that students conduct a research by placing the novel reading in the larger context of aesthetics.