The Post-World War II European novel
Prof. Gordana Crnkovic

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’ Lieutenant’s Woman>, George Orwell’s <1984>, Kazuo Ishiguro’s , Marguerite Yourcenar’s , Meša Selimović’s (one of the very few European novels engaging the on a number of levels), Imre Kertesz’s , Milan Kundera’s , Bohumil Hrabal’s , and Danilo Kiš’s , 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 briefly 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.

Reading List:

Kazuo Ishiguro: The Remains of the Day Bohumil Hrabal: Too Loud a Solitude
Mesa Selimovic: Death and the Dervish
John Fowles: The French Lieutenant's Woman
Danilo Kiš: A Tomb for Boris Davidovich: G. S. Morson and Caryl Emerson: Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics
Milan Kundera: The Unbearable Lightness of Being George Orwell: 1984