Summer Seminar (Very) Contemporary American Fiction

This course reads some of the most vital work being done in American fiction to ask how we today experience or want to experience time. What kinds of temporal lags or leaps does fiction afford us? Why and whence this obsession with the now? How are questions of identity knitted to our histories present circumstances and hopes for the future? Each book is paired with a review or critical essay. Students complete a creative project exploring their own experience of time both in the course and out. Authors may include Ocean Vuong Jenny Offill Celeste Ng Paul Beatty Valeria Luiselli and others.