ENGL 242: Reading Prose Fiction: Fables of Globalization
We have come to imagine the entire world as a stage for narrative action. From blockbuster films to social media, popular music to political crises, the entire planet is more than ever the backdrop for individual stories and experiences. While this is now a cliché of our globalized world, it is an even older cliché for writers who emerged from the colonial and/or post-colonial world. This includes immigrants, refugees and exiles but also those rooted in one place but who then insist that the rest of the world acknowledge that place as symbolic of everywhere else. In this class we will read works that deliberately stage and engage the problems and experiences of a globalized world in their fictions.