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The novelist and philosopher Jean Paul Sartre once described the experience of the contemporary as like looking out the back of a moving car: the present, glimpsed through the side windows, appears as a blur, but as one looks through the rear window the blur begins to take the forms we recognise as constituents of contemporary experience, now seen with the aid of perspective. To study the contemporary novel is to read for what the poet T.S. Eliot called the ‘pastness’ of the present, which involves reading for the ways in which the novel form has been, and will continue to be, used to question, critique, and imagine the contemporary.The course will look primarily at novels from the Twentieth Century, but will conclude with a look towards recent twenty-first century fiction.
In its investigation of the novels the course will also attend to the various critical contexts – modernism, Marxism, humanism, postmodernism, post-structuralism, feminism and post-colonialism – that have helped shaped the twentieth-century imagination.This course can be used towards an English major or minor. BA students who major in English would normally take at least two 100-level 15 point ENGL courses (which must include at least one of the following: ENGL117, ENGL102 or ENGL103), at least three 200-level 15 point ENGL courses, and at least two 300-level 30 point ENGL courses. Please see the BA regulations or a student advisor for more information.
In this course you will learn:an ability to consider both literary and cultural ways of reading a selection of twentieth-century fiction;familiarity with a range of major twentieth-century novels and appreciation of the conditions of each novel’s production;an understanding of the way twentieth-century historical and cultural movements have shaped literature and literary criticism;experience constructing critical arguments, with a focus on the comparative literary analysis essay
Any 30 points at 200 level from ENGL, orany 60 points at 200 level from the Schedule V of the BA.
Students must attend one activity from each section.
Paul Millar
Nicholas Wright
Because of the substantial reading load, students are strongly advised to read as many novels as possible before classes commence. Class discussions will proceed on the assumption that all students have read the text. Text books (in order of study):• Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)• Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945)• George Orwell, Nineteen-Eight Four (1949)• Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)• Don DeLillo, Mao II (1991)• Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (1997)• Zadie Smith, White Teeth (2000) Please note: Due to changes in the administration and structure of ENGL315 for 2021, two of the texts prescribed earlier (The House of Spirits and The God of Small Things) are no longer taught. In their place, we will be teaching Intensive Care and White Teeth. (Image: "Clockwork Orange eye scene" by Gwendal Uguen, licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.)
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Domestic fee $1,687.00
International fee $7,900.00
* All fees are inclusive of NZ GST or any equivalent overseas tax, and do not include any programme level discount or additional course-related expenses.
For further information see Humanities .