This graduate seminar reads the following four novels closely for their representations of social change as end-of-century America struggles to cope with the backlash of its global ambitions, and with the transnational flows of capitalism. Aside from weekly discussions (50% of your grade), students will give an individual presentation for which they research two critics' analyses of this social transition for one of the readings below (10%). Also, students will present an abstract of their term paper ideas to the seminar for feedback The term paper is about 15 pages or so (40%). Since these novels are very recent, your analysis will rely less on other critics (which are so far scarce) but more on your own original connections between the texts and theory, between the text and your ideas, and between the texts and the social contexts One aim of the course is to discover to what degree contemporary fiction reveals the emerging social conditions of globalization, and also how these narratives construct an ideology of globalism Finally, yes you have to buy 4 books from overseas if they are not already in Taiwan. Any edition is OK. Critical and background materials on these authors and on globalization will be available in our department's reserve library and in a small photocopy packet.

·Empire Falls by Richard Russo
 

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for 2002 Richard Russo's most ambitious novel to date is also his most gracefully told. Sweeping in its social scope but also achingly personal and beautifully detailed, Empire Falls is a subtle drama about the plight of the working class in a decaying Northeast mill town. This is a portrait of what happens to communities when the capitalist system moves its production out of America, into developing countries in search of cheaper labor costs What happens to those workers left behind today? This novel was recently made into a movie mini-series by HBO, which we will have a chance to see also.

·Cosmopolis byDon DeLillo

High finance, terrorism and paranoia, and various new technologies, all are targets in DeLillo's darkly satirical latest. The story surveys a single April day in the year 2000 as experienced by 28-year-old billionaire financier Eric Packer, a risk-taking epicurean We first encounter Eric in his customized stretch limousine, where he "visits" with such functionaries as his sullen Czech security chief Torval, young-geek technical consultant Michael Chin, chief of finance Jane Melman, and sonorous "chief of theory" (actually an abstracted efficiency expert) Vija Kinski, among others. We learn that he's playing a dangerous investment game, "betting" on fluctuations in the value of the yen; that sexual encounters with his middle-aged mistress and Amazonian personal trainer don't ease a seemingly un-consummateable fixation on his wife, poet and heiress Elise Shifrin; and, in interpolated chapters, that a stalker plans to assassinate him. Meanwhile, the limo's progress is slowed by a presidential motorcade, violent protest demonstrations, a rap star's funeral procession, and a film crew at work in the streets. DeLillo assembles these quirky particulars expertlyóand he still writes better sentences than any other contemporary author DeLillo is often studied as a keen analyst of the postmodern condition.
 
 

·Tripmaster Monkey: His Fake Book by Maxine Hong Kingston

The Chinese-American (or ABC) protagonist of this challenging novel is a young bohemian artist fully engaged in the dynamic conflicts of 1960s California. His name is Wittman Ah Sing, an obvious literary allusion that you should be able to guess. The allusion also describes some of his character; other aspects of his character are suggested by the title: the trickster motif of the Chinese monkey king legend. This particular America is as real as any other, reflecting immigrant dilemmas, generational change, and multicultural fusions. The novel's narrative style is dense, fragmented, trippy, or wholly modernist. So sharpen up your advanced reading skills.
 

From the writer who invented the term "cyberspace." The first of William Gibson's usually futuristic sci-fi novels to be set in the present, Pattern Recognition is a masterful snapshot of modern consumer culture and hipster esoterica. Set in London, Tokyo, and Moscow, the story takes the reader on a tour of a global village inhabited by power-hungry marketeers, industrial saboteurs, high-end hackers, Russian mob bosses, Internet fan-boys, techno archeologists, washed-out spies, cultural documentarians, and our heroine Cayce Pollard -- a soothsaying "cool hunter" with an allergy to brand names. Pollard is among a cult-like group of Internet obsessives that strives to find meaning and patterns within a mysterious collection of video moments, merely called "the footage," let loose onto the Internet by an unknown source. Her hobby and work collide when a megalomaniac client hires her to track down whoever is behind the footage. Cayce's quest will take her in and out of harm's way in a high-stakes game that ultimately coincides with her desire to reconcile her father's disappearance during the September 11 attacks in New York.