Courses

In this seminar, we will study “Sally Rooney.” In so doing, we will talk about the real author of that name: a thirty-year old Irishwoman whose three novels, each set in Ireland and each concerning the social and erotic lives of attractive young people of European descent, have achieved remarkable commercial and critical success. We will discuss the pleasures of those texts, as well as their formal and generic features, their language, and their relation to literary history. But we will also discuss the idea and institution named “Sally Rooney,” considering it as what Michel Foucault called an “author function,” or what Pierre Bourdieu dubbed a “space of possibilities” within the literary field.

Our inquiry into “Sally Rooney” will, therefore, also be an inquiry into the meaning of literary authorship in the twenty-first century. Through secondary readings in criticism and theory, we will engage longstanding arguments about the relation between critical interpretation and authorial intention, as well as between social and historical “context” and authorial and aesthetic autonomy. We will examine how patterns of social exclusion — particularly, race and the changing commercial market for literary fiction — define the digitally-mediated literary field of the present. And we will ask how the rise of social media and newly popularized notions of “narrative identity” shape twenty-first-century experiences of authorship, audience, and literariness.