Course Title: The Very True Confessions of Justified Sinners: Scotland’s Contemporary Fictions

Since its 1707 union with England, Scotland has functioned as something of an anomaly in Anglo-American political and cultural theory. In many ways its primary oddness derives from the fact that, unlike the many modern European nations which emerged out of the breakdown of the old dynastic orders from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, Scotland has remained a nation without a state and, for some, a culture without a coherent, continuous, and conscious tradition. Scholars such as Tom Nairn have read Scotland’s cultural legacy as a kind of Jekyll and Hyde syndrome, trapped somewhere between dueling myths of an ancestral highland past and an industrial working class modernity. Such a view situates Scottish cultural identity as stunted, backwards, or even non-existent in comparison to similar categories of Britishness or Englishness. However, the last 30 years have witnessed an enormous surge in Scottish writing, as well as writing about Scotland’s political, social, and cultural heritage that explicitly argues against indictments such as Nairn’s. Prose fiction, and especially the novel, has played a central role in this debate. One of the things this class will ask you to do is intervene in this debate (to a small extent) and to examine how various contemporary authors have used (and abused) narrative fiction as a means to imagine Scotland and, in so doing, to challenge the relationship between nation, narrative, and identity. Questions guiding the course will include how we come to link ideas of nation and identity to certain concepts (race, for example) through fiction, how these concepts are challenged or reworked by fiction writers, how language girds or subverts links between narrative and national identity, and to what extent we can view prose narrative as complicit with, or resistant to, narratives of national belonging.
We will cover a number of major authors from this period as a way to engage with the issues of nation and empire, social class, language, gender, race, and sexuality which continue to inform contemporary debates on Scottish (and British) identity. The first few weeks will be devoted to establishing a context in which to situate our later discussion of contemporary Scottish writing. In this period we will read selections from Walter Scott, J.M. Barrie, Hugh MacDiarmid, Lewis Grassic Gibbon, and William McIlvanney. Our main contemporary sources may include, but are not limited to work by Alasdair Gray, James Kelman, Janice Galloway, A.L. Kennedy, Irvine Welsh, Alan Warner, Jackie Kay, and Luke Sutherland. Though we will probably not have time during class, I also hope to hold at least two optional film screenings, probably of Trainspotting (Dir. Danny Boyle, 1996) and Morvern Callar (Dir. Lynn Ramsay, 2002).
Our class will focus first on the practice of close reading, and then upon the transference of our analytical success into well-crafted essays that make clear arguments based on evidence found in the text and other sources. Class time will be dedicated to comprehension, examination, close reading, and application of the texts we have read.
This course fulfills the University of Washington’s W-requirement and VLPA requirement. As such it will include 10-15 pages of graded, out-of-class writing, most likely in the form of two to three short papers. The course will also most likely include a presentation component, with the additional possibility of in-class quizzes, short writing assignments, etc.

Book List:
There will be a course pack +
Irvine Welsh, Trainspotting
Alan Warner, Morvern Callar
Jackie Kay, Trumpet
Luke Sutherland, Venus as a Boy (I may drop either Trumpet or Venus as a Boy).