English 267, The Modern Novel, offered online through the Extended Learning Institute of Northern Virginia Community College, is intended to acquaint the student with the development of the novel in the modern world. Students will analyze, interpret, and discuss selected novels from the modern and contemporary periods.

There is no cricitical consensus on recent novels or even a clear sense of where they fit into a history of literature. There are as many ways to choose novels to read in a course like this as there are instructors.

The novels I have chosen for this course are all distinquished by the way they approach narrative, the way to tell a story. I have chosen novels whose narratives reflect a postmodern sensibility of a world without universal constants. All of these novels feature at least one of a number of postmodernist approaches to the novel:

• multiple and overlapping narrative voices
• a non linear narrative
• magical realism
• metafiction
• graphics

This course has a prerequisite, English 112, College Composition II, or any college composition class which covers the critical reading and writing about literature.