Seminars on Special Themes: Coetzee, Ishiguro, Sebald

This seminar will undertake close readings of works by three masters of the contemporary novel.  Their narrative engagements with the watershed events of the Twentieth Century will draw our attention to matters of collective and national memory, dislocation, migrancy, bare life, human rights, dignity, the human and post-human, loss, reconciliation, forgiveness.  The narrative innovations introduced by these authors re-calibrate interiority and advance an ethics of reading.