Instructor: Matthew Hart
This seminar asks how the study of very recent literature relates to literary scholarship in general. Are there stable critical values or methods that should apply to our study of J. M. Coetzee as much as Miguel de Cervantes? How might one combine an interest in the contemporary with historicist method? Does it make a difference—and, if so, what kind of difference—if the authors one studies are alive and still writing? What are the points of connection between academic scholarship and journalistic or para-academic criticism? Since her possible objects of study are so numerous and diverse, what is the specific expertise of the academic specialist in contemporary literature?
The first two seminar meetings focus on the question of how we define “the contemporary” as a temporal category and field of study. From that point, we take two main tracks. First, four clusters of classes, each dedicated to a major contemporary author: China Miéville, Maggie Nelson, W. G. Sebald, and Claudia Rankine. By sampling four literary oeuvres, three of them still in formation, we will explore (among other topics) issues of canon-formation, genre, identity, class, translation, and the relation between literary parts and wholes. Between each cluster, we will pause for classes focused on selected methodological problems of peculiar relevance to contemporary literature: the value of literary sociology; the problem and pleasure of working on and with living authors; and the possibility of doing literary criticism differently—that is, for different audiences and according to different values.
