This spring, I’m teaching a course on forms and fuctions of the contemporary novel, together with Natalya Bekhta.
We focus specifically on non-English texts from what can be considered continental European peripheries.
After two introductory classes, we discussed Joseph Ponthus’s novel À la ligne (On the Line) and most recently Marit Kapla’s Osebol.
Our next sessions will discuss Volodymyr Rafeyenko‘s Mondegreen, Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter, Olga Tokarczuk’s The House of Day, the House of Night, and Øyvind Rimbereid’s Solaris corrected..
Course introduction below:
How is the novel being transformed in the twenty-first century? And what new literary forms are being developed in European cultural peripheries? This course addresses these questions by offering a broad introduction to new formalism and contemporary theories of world literature, and through a series of diverse literary readings.
The focus of the literary readings is on literature beyond the current centres of the international literary field, especially literature from continental European peripheries: texts from Ukrainian and Polish contexts, from rural France and the Swedish smalltown. The texts will be read in excerpts in English translation.
The course will provide students with a thorough understanding of contemporary debates on literary form and world literature, and will enable to understand how new literature from beyond the centres is pushing the boundaries of the contemporary novel. The overall objective of the course is to help shape a better awareness of literature as an integral part of society and a key element of the way we construct notions of identity, memory, language, ethics, politics – and, in short, social reality.
Course title:
The future of the novel: New literary forms beyond the centres (KIE.KK.352 Englannin kielen ja kirjallisuuden erikoistumisjakso, 5 op)
More on the work of Natalya Bekhta:
https://research.tuni.fi/tampere-ias/research-fellows-2022-2024/natalya-bekhta/