NEW YORK UNIVERSITY
The Novel Today Spring 2025 LITR1-CE 9270 Wednesday: 1:00 PM- 2:40 PM; Thursday 10:00 AM-11:40 AM; Thursday: 1:00 PM- 2:40 PM Margaret Boe Birns
Discuss major new work by today’s top writers, including emerging novelists, award-winners, and established favorites, all of whom are central to today's cultural conversation. We will investigate a variety of inventive narrative strategies, explore the psychology of numerous fascinating characters, and examine important topics within a context of changing times, changing lives and a changing world. We will explore; vulnerable people and a parrot in pandemic New York; betrayal, revolution and Somerset Maugham in 1920s Penang; a far-right reactionary government in the south of Ireland; a mysterious man, a mysterious forest, and a mysterious nightfall; a historical novel set in the aftermath of the civil war centered on a strange man called Night Watch; the return of the complex and enigmatic Eilis Lacey, now in Long Island but with her heart still In Ireland; an autobiographical. three generation saga about a “pied noir” family left without a homeland after Algerian independence; two sisters and a big bear on San Juan Island; teenage sisters, the game of squash, and the pressures and perils of winning; the recovering alcoholic son of an Iranian immigrant and his chaotic, tragicomic search for meaning. Readings: Tan Twan Eng, The House of Doors; Kaveh Akbar, Martyr! Martyr; Paul Lynch, Prophet Song; Jon Fosse, The Shining; Claire Messud, A Strange Eventful History; Colm Toibin, Long Island; Sigrid Nunez, The Vulnerables; Julia Phllips, The Bear; Chetna Maroo, Western Lane; Jayne Anne Phillips, The Night Watch. Students should read The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez for the first class.
Masterpieces of 19th-century Fiction Spring 2025 LITR1-CE 9031-001(15053)
Course Meets Every Three Weeks Online Monday 1:00-2:40 PM
Study five major 20th-century classics that have passed the test of time: a classic French novel about great fortunes, great crimes, and “the human comedy;" an extraordinary novel by the youngest of a legendary family of literary sisters and considered the most shocking of them all; a novel of hard fact, social protest, and oddball circus folk by England’s legendary great social novelist; a profound Russian novel of grand estates and radical rebels; a controversial late-Victorian study of the collision of fate and free spirits. Readings: Honoré de Balzac, Eugenie Grandet; Anne Bronte, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; Charles Dickens, Hard Times, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Demons; George Gissing, The Odd women. Students should read Eugenie Grandet for the first class.
The New School
The Intimate Epic: Novellas Classic and ModernDepartment of Humanities 3166 - NLIT 3400 - A
Margaret Boe Birns birnsm@newschool.edu Online
Sometimes called “the intimate epic,” The novella is one of the richest and most rewarding of literary forms, providing both the concentrated focus of the short story and the broad scope of the novel. This course explores important short novels or novellas both classic and modern, with authors ranging from Brazil to Ireland, Japan, Russia, Czechoslovakia, Norway, France, Mexico, Germany, Brooklyn, New Orleans and upstate New York. These stories will feature a variety of situations and people, including, a penniless princess, a Christmas prisoner, and a monstrous insect, as well as fugitives, heroes, villains and desperate characters, demons natural and supernatural, a superstar, a ghost town, and an Irish ghost. We will discuss these novellas within their historical, political, social and literary contexts as well as their growing relevance for the 21st Century. Readings: Ivan Turgenev, First Love; Kate Chopin,The Awakening; James Joyce, The Dead; Franz Kafka, Metamorphosis; Juan Rulfo, Pedro Páramo; Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star; Toni Morrison, A Mercy; Francoise Sagan, Bonjour Tristesse; Paula Fox, Desperate Characters; Justin Torres, We The Animals; Daniel Kehlmann, You Should Have Left; Meiko Kawakami, Heaven; Jon Fosse, A Shining; Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These.