This section contains a list of the texts read in this class. For a more detailed breakdown of which texts are read for which sessions, please consult the calendar.
Required Texts
Coetzee, J. M. Disgrace. Reprint ed. New York, NY: Penguin Essential Editions, 2005. ISBN: 9780143036371.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. New York, NY: Vintage, 1990. ISBN: 9780679731726.
Amis, Martin. Money: A Suicide Note. New York, NY: Penguin Modern Classics, 1986. ISBN: 9780140077155.
McEwan, Ian. The Comfort of Strangers. New York, NY: Vintage International, 1997. ISBN: 9780099754916.
Martel, Yann. The Life of Pi. New York, NY: Harvest Books, 2003. ISBN: 9780156027328.
Doyle, Roddy. Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha. New York, NY: Penguin, 1995. ISBN: 9780140233902.
Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. New York, NY: Anchor Books, 1998. ISBN: 9780385490818.
Smith, Zadie. White Teeth. New York, NY: Vintage, 2001. ISBN: 9780375703867.
Readings to Consider
Begley, Jon. “Satirizing the Carnival of Postmodern Capitalism: The Transatlantic and Dialogic Structure of Martin Amis’s Money.” Contemporary Literature 45, no. 1 (2004): 79-105.
Bényei, Tamás. “The Passion of John Self: Allegory, Economy, and Expenditure in Martin Amis’s Money.” In Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond. Edited by Gavin Keulks. New York, NY: Palgrave, 2006, pp. 36-54. ISBN: 9780230008304.
Bethlehem, Louise. “‘A Primary Need as Strong as Hunger’: The Rhetoric of Urgency in South African Literary Culture under Apartheid.” Poetics Today 22, no. 2 (2001): 365-89.
Childs, Peter. “Zadie Smith: Searching for the Inescapable.” In Contemporary Novelists: British Fiction since 1970. London, UK: Palgrave, 2004. ISBN: 9781403911209.
Cole, Stewart. “Believing in Tigers: Anthropomorphism and Incredulity in Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.” Studies in Canadian Literature 29, no. 2 (2004): 22-36.
Cosgrove, Brian. “Roddy Doyle’s Backward Look: Tradition and Modernity in Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.” Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review 85, no. 339 (Autumn 1996): 231-42.
Deer, Glenn. “Rhetorical Strategies in The Handmaid’s Tale: Dystopia and the Paradoxes of Power.” English Studies in Canada 18, no. 2 (June 1992): 215-33.
Dwyer, June. “Yann Martel’s Life of Pi and the Evolution of the Shipwreck Narrative.” Modern Language Studies 35, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 9-21.
Forceville, Charles. “The Conspiracy in The Comfort of Strangers: Narration in the Novel and the Film.” Language and Literature 11, no. 2 (May 2002): 119-35.
Gardiner, Juliet. “Recuperating the Author: Consuming Fictions in the 1990s.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 94 (2000): 255-74. [On Martin Amis.]
Hammer, Stephanie Barbé. “The World as It Will Be? Female Satire and the Technology of Power in The Handmaid’s Tale.” Modern Language Studies 20, no. 2 (Spring 1990): 39-49.
Herron, Tom. “The Dog Man: Becoming Animal in Coetzee’s Disgrace.” Twentieth Century Literature 51, no. 4 (2005): 467-90.
Jolly, Rosemary. “Going to the Dogs: Humanity in J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, The Lives of Animals, and South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” In J. M. Coetzee and the Idea of the Public Intellectual. Edited by Jane Poyner. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2006, pp. 148-71. ISBN: 9780821416877.
McDonald, Peter D. “The Writer, the Critic, and the Censor: J. M. Coetzee and the Question of Literature.” Book History 7 (2004): 285-302.
McElroy, Ruth. “Whose Body, Whose Nation? Surrogate Motherhood and Its Representation.” European Journal of Cultural Studies 5.3 (2002): 325-42. [On The Handmaid’s Tale.]
McGlynn, Mary. “‘But I Keep on Thinking and I’ll Never Come to a Tidy Ending’: Roddy Doyle’s Useful Nostalgia.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 10, no. 1 (1999): 87-105.
Miner, Madonne. “‘Trust Me’: Reading the Romance Plot in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Twentieth Century Literature 37, no. 2 (Summer 1991): 148-68.
Parker, Emma. “Money Makes the Man: Gender and Sexuality in Martin Amis’s Money.” In Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond. Edited by Gavin Keulks. New York, NY: Palgrave, 2006, pp. 55-70. ISBN: 9780230008304.
Phelan, James, and Mary Patricia Martin. “The Lessons of ‘Weymouth’: Homodiegesis, Unreliability, Ethics, and The Remains of the Day.” In Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Edited by David Herman. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1999, pp. 88-109. ISBN: 9780814250242.
Ryan, Kiernan. “Sex, Violence and Complicity: Martin Amis and Ian McEwan.” In An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction: International Writing in English since 1970. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1999, pp. 203-18. ISBN: 9780745619576.
Seaboyer, Judith. “Sadism Demands a Story: Ian McEwan’s The Comfort of Strangers.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 45, no. 4 (1999): 957-86.
Stratton, Florence. “‘Hollow at the Core’: Deconstructing Yann Martel’s Life of Pi.” Studies in Canadian Literature 29, no. 2 (2004): 5-21.
Strongman, Luke. “Toward an Irish Literary Postmodernism: Roddy Doyle’s Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha.” Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 23, no. 1 (July 1997): 31-40.
Su, John. Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ISBN: 9780521854405. [Chapter 4 is on The Remains of the Day.]
Tew, Philip. “Martin Amis and Late-Twentieth-Century Working-Class Masculinity: Money and London Fields.” In Martin Amis: Postmodernism and Beyond. Edited by Gavin Keulks. New York, NY: Palgrave, 2006, pp. 71-86. ISBN: 9780230008304.
Thompson, Molly. “‘Happy Multicultural Land’? The Implications of an ‘Excess of Belonging’ in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” In Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Edited by Kadija Sesay. Hertford, England: Hansib, 2005, pp. 122-40. ISBN: 9781870518062.
Tomc, Sandra. “‘The Missionary Position’: Feminism and Nationalism in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Canadian Literature 138-139 (1993): 73-87.
Trimm, Ryan S. “Inside Job: Professionalism and Postimperial Communities in The Remains of the Day.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 16, no. 2 (2005): 135-61.
Walters, Tracey L. “‘We’re All English Now Mate Like It or Lump It’: The Black/Britishness of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth.” In Write Black, Write British: From Post Colonial to Black British Literature. Edited by Kadija Sesay. Hertford, England: Hansib, 2005, pp. 314-22. ISBN: 9781870518062.
