ENGL 431 - Ethnographic Fictions: Travel Writing, Bearing Witness, and Human Rights

Helps students navigate fiction’s complex relationship with representation and reality. Scans a broad spectrum of texts, beginning with 18th- and 19th-century European novels, and continue onto contemporary writings from the postcolonial world. Students discuss the complex ways in which fiction documents the social world, produces historical archives, bears witness to trauma and violence, and memorializes loss, but also rejects and/or makes readers critically aware of realism’s positivist impulses. Also guides students in reading theoretical texts on the topic. Possible authors include Daniel Defoe, Rudyard Kipling, Leonard Woolf, Bertolt Brecht, Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Michael Ondaatje, and David Henry Hwang.

Credits: 1.00
Prerequisites: None
Major/Minor Restrictions: None
Class Restriction: None
Area of Inquiry: Human Thought and Expression
Liberal Arts CORE: Global Engagements

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