The Post-World War II European novel
C LIT 570 B (WITH ENGL 550A AND SLAV 490A)

Course Description: The post-World War II European novel. The course will focus on novels whose distinctive quality is their setting in a different, mostly past era. Readings will include most or all of the following texts: John Fowles’ The French
Lieutenant’s Woman, George Orwell’s 1984, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian, Meša Selimovic’s Death and the Dervish (one of the very few European novels engaging the Quran on a number of levels), Imre Kertesz’s Kadish for a Child Not Born, Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude, and Danilo Kiš’s The Tomb for Boris Davidovich, a collection of stories which we will look at in a dialogue with the novels of this course. We will examine how and why these novels choose a non-contemporary setting, and what they achieve by invoking the ancient, late pre-modern, Victorian, early twentieth-century, or relatively recent historical periods (such as the World War II or the 1960s), or else by creating a distopian image of future. While the course engages with some major theories of the novel (e.g., by Bakhtin), it will chiefly be centered on an in-depth study of the literary works.