Captured in Fiction: Populism and Identity to Mass Migration

• Week 1
  Why fiction matters: shaping the social imaginary, driving civic culture. Facts and truths.
  
  • “Sitting still and reading: rethinking the role of literary fiction in civics education” (Annie Schultz, 2020)
  • “Uses of world literature” (Bruce Robbins, 2022)
• Week 2
  The Crucible (Miller, 1953): “Elemental decencies” in cultural and political life—and the cost of historical amnesia.
  
  • “Why I wrote The Crucible” (Arthur Miller, 1996)
  • “Abuse, witch-hunts and hangings: why Arthur Miller’s masterpiece The Crucible still haunts us” (Michael Billington, 2025)
• Week 3
  What Strange Paradise (El Akkad, 2021): in a crisis, humans are not reducible to simply good and bad—they are “engines and fuel.”
  
  • “'What Strange Paradise" explores two sides of a migrant crisis” (Wendell Steavenson, 2021)
  • CBC’s Shelagh Rodgers in conversation with Omar El Akkad (2021)
  • Discussion Guide, Amnesty International Book Club (2024)
• Week 4
  “A Temporary Matter” from Interpreter of Maladies (Lahiri, 1998): modernity and its discontents—intimacy, gender, culture in exile.
  
  • Overview and criticism – Encylopedia.com
  • “Jhumpa Lahiri's ‘The Interpreter of Maladies’ and tourist realism” (Robert Wood, 2019)
  • “How to assess the contemporary short story” (Richard Ford, 2016)
• Week 5
  The Last White Man (Hamid, 2022): in a globalized world of complex race relations, does everyone become multicultural?
  
  • "Face the strange: a white man wakes up to find himself brown-skinned" (Benjamin Markovits, 2022)
  • Interview – CNN video (2022)
• Week 6
  Future of the novel in the age of social media and A.I. Why the library still matters for civil society.
  
  • “John Updike (and others) on why fiction matters” (Andrew Careaga, 2024)
  • “Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming” (Neil Gaiman, 2013)

By the end of the course, you should be able to:

• Appreciate why and how fiction can offer essential truths about ourselves and society, both past and present
• Recognize what great novels have done in illuminating “milestone moments” and getting us to rethink the stories we tell ourselves about who we are
• Engage with current debates about the value of cultural institutions such as libraries and reading communities in enabling civic culture to flourish

• Lectures
• Reading novels, a short story and other articles
• Participation in discussions
• Reflective essay (applicable only to certificate students)

You should obtain a copy of The Crucible by Arthur Miller; What Strange Paradise by Omar El Akkad; and The Last White Man by Mohsin Hamid. All books should be readily available in paperback through local bookstores, used bookstores and libraries. The short story “A Temporary Matter” from Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, will be provided online, along with all other course materials.