When
Kazuo Ishiguro was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2017, the
committee explained the prize motivation by stating that Ishiguro has,
“in novels of great emotional force, […] uncovered the abyss beneath our
illusory sense of connection with the world.” Ever since his debut
novel A Pale View of Hills (1982), Ishiguro’s works have
foregrounded characters struggling between the repression of painful
memories and a process of remembering, between ignorance and the belief
that they understand the world and know their place in it. Their
illusion of connection with the world can often be traced back to
narratives and convictions that they mistake for knowledge and that thus
stand in for real understanding and knowing.
In
this sense, different aspects of memory and the process of remembering
are deeply entwined with Ishiguro's characters' sense of self and
relation to the world. The theme of memory hence is an integral aspect
of Ishiguro's oeuvre. His more recent novels shift the focus towards the
acceptance and deliberate production of non-knowledge through state and
social practices, placing particular emphasis on ethical questions of
remembering and the ethics of (non-)knowledge. Ishiguro’s marginalised
or subordinate characters thus struggle to find their place in a world
they try to make sense of by constructing and interpreting their own
life stories and surroundings.
In
this course, we will take the committee’s slightly cryptic but
well-phrased explanation as our point of departure for an exploration of
Ishiguro’s powerful and complex novels. We are going to read, analyse
and discuss his first novel A Pale View of Hills, Never Let Me Go and either The Buried Giant or Klara and the Sun.
The final selection of texts will be announced in October. Together, we
are going to explore these novels through the lenses of narrative
ethics, the ethics of (non-)knowledge and reader-response theory, for
instance. We will take into account concepts and themes such as memory
and identity, genre and unreliability. Students are invited to suggest
further topics and are expected to eventually construct their own
approaches during the project phase towards the end of the semester.
- Dozent/in: Alessandra Boller