Index#: 03737
Will Count Towards English MAJOR
Will Count Towards English MINOR
The book review is one of the most popular forms of contemporary writing. Once largely restricted to “serious” magazines like the New York Review of Books and Times Literary Supplement, the genre has proliferated in recent years, now appearing in a range of venues including fanzines, blog posts, and Good Reads. In this course, students will learn how to write a book review, both through exposure to various examples of the genre and through exercises designed to build the critical skills necessary to evaluate the work of others. During the semester, we will read contemporary fiction and produce analysis of that fiction geared toward an intelligent general audience. Writers studied may include Don DeLillo, Toni Morrison, Roberto Bolaño, and Elena Ferrante alongside reviews of their works by prominent literary critics. Although the main focus will be on fiction, we will also produce reviews on film and nonfiction.
About Professor Lawrence
Jeffrey Lawrence’s research and teaching focus on 20th- and 21st-century American literature and culture and Latin American/Hemispheric Studies. His first book, Anxieties of Experience: The Literatures of the Americas from Whitman to Bolaño (Oxford, 2018), offers a new interpretation of US and Latin American literature from the nineteenth century to the present. Revisiting longstanding debates in the hemisphere about whether the source of authority for New World literature derives from an author's first-hand contact with American places and peoples or from a creative (mis)reading of existing traditions, the book charts a widening gap in how modern US and Latin American writers defined their literary authority. In the process, it traces the development of two distinct literary strains in the Americas: the "US literature of experience" and the "Latin American literature of the reader." Reinterpreting a range of canonical works from Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grassto Roberto Bolaño's 2666, Anxieties of Experience shows how this hemispheric literary divide fueled a series of anxieties, misunderstandings, and "misencounters" between US and Latin American authors. In the wake of recent calls to rethink the "common grounds" approach to literature across the Americas, the book advocates a comparative approach that highlights the distinct logics of production and legitimation in the US and Latin American literary fields. Anxieties of Experience closes by exploring the convergence of the literature of experience and the literature of the reader in the first decades of the twenty-first century, arguing that the post-Bolaño moment has produced the strongest signs of a truly reciprocal literature of the Americas in more than a hundred years.