In this lecture Professor Hungerford discusses how the novels we read are shaped by legal and market constraints. She traces a history of censorship from the Comstock laws, to the policing of Joyce's Ulysses and Ginsberg's Howl, and shows how changes in publishing practices have tended to penalize more unusual, less profitable books. Hungerford also touches on the canon debates of the 80s and 90s (citing John Guillory and Toni Morrison), and the issues of intellectual property and internationalization raised by digital literature. Finally, she points to some ways that Philip Roth, despite his controversial representations of Judaism and of women, succeeds in tackling fundamental human concerns.
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
