The End of the Family Romance?
Kinship, Governmentality, and the Post-Modern Novel

This course will explore notions of family and governmentality in the late twentieth century United States. Originally titled “new literary markets,” this course will now focus on one particular literary market of the post-WWII period: that of the family romance genre. We will begin with a short introduction to the genealogy of the “family romance” in American literary history. We will then turn to our project for this course, “re-reading the family romance,” in which we will pair a very few novels with some of the major theories of kinship, culture, and the state from this period. Together we will query how this genre has been read to mark changes in the political economy and representational media of family life at different moments in U.S. history, looking in particular at how the genre has been recycled in the post-modern and post-colonial era. We will pay particular attention to changing ideas about gender, race, and sexuality in our reading. Our shared discussion will focus on the late twentieth century and the United States, but students may pursue final projects in other areas as is deemed appropriate. Book list and course reader tba; you may email me with questions about likely content.