Open Yale Courses

ENGL 291: The American Novel Since 1945

Lecture 23 - Edward P. Jones, The Known World (cont.) << previous session | next session >>

Overview:

In this second lecture on The Known World, Professor Hungerford addresses Edward P. Jones's ambitious and ambivalent relation to literacy. Jones shows us the power of narrative to bring together the fragmentation of the world, but is at the same time deeply aware of the fragility of text, all of the ways it can be destroyed, misinterpreted, abused, or lost. The son of an illiterate mother, Jones--who, it seems, composed and memorized large portions of The Known World before setting anything down in print--models a form of literary self-consciousness infused with the moral dilemmas of slavery and freedom that is unique among contemporary novels.

Reading assignment:

Edward P. Jones, The Known World (2003)

Class lecture:

Transcript
html
Audio
mp3
Video
medium bandwidth
low bandwidth
high bandwidth

Yale University 2008.  Some rights reserved. Unless otherwise indicated on this page or on the Open Yale Courses website, all content on this page is licensed under a Creative Commons License (Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0)