Four Tuesdays: March 5, 12, 19, 26 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. ET Online
Lecture and Discussion. This live class will be recorded and available for later viewing.
In this course we will read Zadie Smith’s first novel, White Teeth (2000), and her most recent, The Fraud (2023). We will explore her construction of the Atlantic world, from England to Jamaica, as well as their entanglements with places beyond, including Australia and India, and work toward an understanding of her construction of empire, race, and gender. This class will focus on especially on narrative genre and form, from the so-called “hysterical fiction” of her first novel to the 19th-century pastiche of her most recent, representations of women, and histories of Atlantic slavery.
Four Tuesdays: March 5, 12, 19, 26 from 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. ET Online
Required Reading:
White Teeth (9780375703867)
The Fraud (9780525558965)
Joanna Davis-McElligatt is an Assistant Professor of Black Literary and Cultural Studies in the Department of English at the University of North Texas, where she is also affiliated faculty in the Women’s and Gender Studies and LGBTQ Studies Programs. She is co-editor of Narratives of Marginalized Identities in Higher Education: Inside and Outside the Academy (Routledge, 2019), Narrating History, Home, and Dyaspora: Critical Essays on Edwidge Danticat (U of Mississippi P, 2022), and BOOM! SPLAT! Comics and Violence (U of Mississippi P, 2024). She is currently at work on her first monograph entitled Black Aliens: Navigating Narrative Spacetime in Diasporic Speculative Fiction. Her scholarly work appears or is forthcoming in south: a scholarly journal, Mississippi Quarterly, The New William Faulkner Studies(Cambridge UP, 2023), The Cambridge Companion to the American Graphic Novel(Cambridge UP, 2023), A History of the Literature of the U.S. South (Cambridge UP, 2021), and Small Screen Souths: Region, Identity, and the Cultural Politics of Television (LSU P, 2017), among other places. She is currently serving as President of the Comics Studies Society, and is a Member at Large for the William Faulkner Society.
REFUND POLICY: Please note that we can issue class refunds up until seven (7) days before the first class session.
