Fiction in a Time of Turbulence
Tash Aw
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How can fiction capture the turbulence of our times? Can the world of fiction make sense of the complex causes of anger arising from socio-political change? Whether in Revolutionary China or rural France today, fiction writers have always attempted to depict the individual struggling to understand social change and carve out their place in a world of shifting boundaries, often in opposition to political regimes.
In this seminar we will thinking about how writers from different times and places have reacted to upheaval in different ways and examining the space where personal storytelling and political intent intertwine. We shall also be thinking about how the personal circumstances of those writers influence their respective writing, in order to gain clues as to how our own individual conditions interact with our writing.
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Writers we will be reading include:
Chinua Achebe, James Baldwin, Albert Camus, Violette Leduc, Lao She, Édouard Louis, Lu Xun, Ma Jian, Pramoedya Ananta Toer, Tayeb Salih, Ayu Utami, Alice Walker, Yu Hua, Zhang Ailing, Émile Zola
close16 Class schedule
Regular appointments