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Professor Amy Hungerford's first lecture on Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood addresses questions of faith and interpretation. She uses excerpts from O'Connor's copious correspondence to introduce the critical framework of O'Connor's Catholicism, but invites us to look beyond the question of redemption. What do characters see in this text, and what are they blind to? What do we see as readers, and how does methodology shape this vision?
In "The American Novel Since 1945" students will study a wide range of works from 1945 to the present. The course traces the formal and thematic developments of the novel in this period, focusing on the relationship between writers and readers, the conditions of publishing, innovations in the novel's form, fiction's engagement with history, and the changing place of literature in American culture. The reading list includes works by Richard Wright, Flannery O'Connor, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, J. D. Salinger, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth, Maxine Hong Kingston, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Cormac McCarthy, Philip Roth and Edward P. Jones. The course concludes with a contemporary novel chosen by the students in the class.
Lecture Transcript and Reading Assignment
