Department of English

Topic: Nostalgia

You can’t go home again. Or can you? This class thinks about home, loss, and that pleasurably achy feeling of nostalgia from the early twentieth century to the present. Is nostalgia conservative? Does it have a national or gender politics? Does it tell us anything about the future, or our feelings about our globalizing world? What is the relationship between gender and migration? We’ll discuss nostalgia in relation to movements such as modernism, postmodernism, and postcolonialism, and will read a range of narratives, that will likely include Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier, Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, and Lynn Nottage’s Sweat.

• A&H
• What are CASE requirements?