123250 AR Literature Course - American/North American Lit./Studies (2012S)

The course will focus on two novels ("A Friend of the Earth", 2000; and "The Tortilla Curtain", 1995) and on a choice of short stories by the celebrated American author and professor of creative writing Tom C. Boyle. The focus will be on texts dealing with "Love, Death and Anything in Between" (subtitle of Boyle's Collected Short Stories). More specifically, the focus will be on works addressing satirically or comically, in the author's unique, "carnivalesque" style, such serious concerns as displacement, illigal immigration, climatic change and other environmental issues, the vicissitudes of erotic love, the redemptive power of true love and charity, collision of cultures, the decline of moral and spiritual values in contemporary American (and by implication Western) society, and dystopian visions of the future.