Contemporary Novels | Chulalongkorn University

Announcements

! The Final Exam is on Tuesday, October 5, 2010 in room BRK 304 from 8:30 to 11:30 a.m. There will be two parts. Part I is identifications and explications. You should be able to identify passages by author and title, indicate who is speaking, who is being addressed and the location of the excerpt, and write a short but detailed explication of the text, making note of its language/style, themes, other remarkable characteristics, and significance in relation to the novel as a whole. Part II consists of two essays, one of which is about scholarship, history, and context so reviewing the critical handouts and supplementary readings should be useful. The other essay is thematic.

Course Outline

We meet Tuesdays 9–12.

There will be weekly one-page reading responses and a 7–10-page final paper, also student-led discussions and presentations.

Readings include:

John Updike, Rabbit Run (1960)

Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children (1980)

Margaret Atwood, Alias Grace (1996)

J. M. Coetzee, Disgrace (1999)

John Banville, The Sea (2005)

Amitav Ghosh, Sea of Poppies (2008)

Course packet/handouts

Syllabus (Word file)

Detailed schedule

Writing

What Is Plagiarism? (friendly explanation of plagiarism with examples from Georgetown University; make sure you read the entire article; you will be severely penalized for plagiarism in this course)
The UVic Writer's Guide (well-organized, easy to follow guide with examples)
The OWL at Purdue (Online Writing Lab, includes the writing process, grammar and mechanics, literary analysis and criticism, writing about poetry)
How to Evaluate the Information Sources You Find
Basic Steps in Writing a Literature Paper
Citation Styles Handbook: MLA
MLA Style FAQ
Paper Guidelines 1 and 2
Literary Criticism: Principles
Model Criticism (some essays by F. R. Leavis; a couple of obsolete links)
English Help

Suggested Reading

Bell, Bernard W. The Afro-American Novel and Its Tradition. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. (IIC American St. 813.009896 BA)

Elliott, Emory, ed. The Columbia History of the American Novel. New York: Columbia UP, 1991. (IIC American St. 813.009 CE)

Hale, Dorothy J. The Novel: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory, 1900–2000. Oxford: Blackwell, 2006. (CL 809.3 N834)

Hoffman, Michael, and Patrick Murphy, eds. Essentials of the Theory of Fiction. Duke.

Minter, David. A Cultural History of the American Novel: Henry James to William Faulkner. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.

Perkins, George, ed. The Theory of the American Novel. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970. (IIC American St. 808.3 PT)

Links

Literature Resources: 20th-21st Century (list of links)
Literary Resources: Twentieth-Century Literature (list of links)
American Literature: 20th Century (list of links to webpages on individual authors)
The American Novel
Journals

Student Essentials

MLA Handbook for Writers of Research Papers. 7th ed. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2009. (library has 6th ed.)

Roget's International Thesaurus. 6th ed. Ed. Barbara Ann Kipfer. New York: Harper, 2001. (7th ed. coming out in August)

Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary. 11th ed. Springfield, MA: Merriam-Webster, 2003.

Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 20 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.