The Millennial Novel - Beyond Dating and Instagram

“There’s no writing,” the American writer Bret Easton Ellis declared recently of millennials. “They don’t care about literature. None of them read books.” This seminar will challenge this provocative statement. Categories such as “the Realist novel” or “the Modernist novel” are well-known and associated with a specific aesthetic ideology or a historical period. Yet in this course, we want to investigate together whether novels published in the last seven years by authors belonging to the generation of ‘millennials’ (i.e. people born between the early 1980s and the mid-1990s) have a distinct style and thematic concerns. Arguably, they do: they are characterized by uncertainties of several kinds, ranging from a feeling of anxiety regarding the present and future and an outspoken suspicion regarding memorializations of all kinds, including canons. They engage with literary traditions from previous centuries, such as Realism and (Post)Modernism, and, for instance, use fragmentary styles. At the same time, both millennial authors and their novels are characterised by a much greater diversity than the works written by their literary predecessors. Keeping in mind such aspects as the importance of relatability (for readers) and questions of (transhistorical) value, we will discuss a selection of ‘millennial’ novels that address a representative spectrum of ‘typically millennial’ concerns ranging from interpersonal relationships (Rooney), the impact of technologies such as Instagram on people’s lives (Sudjic), complex assessments of grief (Nelson) and something akin to existential ennui (Moshfegh).

After two more conceptually framed introductory sessions which will draw on frameworks from narratology and cultural studies, we want to collaboratively engage with the selected novels in informed discussions, in order to, at the end of the semester, arrive at a tentative definition of what exactly makes novels ‘millennial’. All discussions will be underpinned by recent theory.

Please obtain these books, any edition will do:

Moshfegh, Ottessa. My Year of Rest and Relaxation (2018) 

Nelson, Caleb Azumah. Open Water (2021) 

Rooney, Sally. Conversations with Friends (2017) 

Sudjic, Olivia. Sympathy (2017)

--> Secondary texts accompanying our sessions will be made available on Moodle.