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This research-centered course engages with the most recent scholarship of Ramón Saldívar and Mark McGurl on the narrative fiction of the so-called Program Era. Mark McGurl argues that U.S. American postwar fiction is the fiction of the academy, since an increasing number of prominent writers of fiction have received a formal training in academic creative writing programs (The Program Era, 2011). This professionalization of the production of fiction might be particularly effective in the field of the new ethnic literatures, as Ramón Saldívar points out. Possibly a new imaginary is on its way here – an imaginary that is developed by young so-called ethnic writers (Chicanos and Chicanas, African Americans, Native Americans, Asian Americans and Jewish Americans). These ethnic writers were born after the Civil Rights era, thus the battle for equal legal rights for them is, as Saldívar notes, “a matter of history” and not a matter of personal “memory” (Saldívar, “Postrace Aesthetic,” ALH 23.3 (2011): 518). Additionally, these writers were educated and trained in creative writing programs of U.S. American and Canadian universities, a novelty in the production of literature that might set recent North American literatures apart from literature produced elsewhere. In this course we will study the scholarly arguments of McGurl and Saldívar as well as the novels of Salvador Plascencia, Junot Díaz, Percival Everett, Sherman Alexie and Toni Morrison, exploring how a professionalized interest in issues of form and genre and a heightened interest in race and ethnicity as “doings” involving everyday individual agency (Markus/Moya Doing Race, 2010) matter in post-9/11 North American literary and cultural production and in scholarly inquiry.
Prospective participants are expected to purchase and read the following books prior to our first meeting: Percival Everett, Erasure, 2001, Salvador Plascencia, The People of Paper, 2005, Sherman Alexie, Flight, 2007. |
