This course is a survey of fiction in English from 2001 to the present. We will approach this fiction through three different lenses: history, form, and media. Historically, how does literature respond to and register emerging social anxieties around issues including cultural diversity, terrorism, and climate change? Formally, how have novels developed new strategies of representation in the way characters are developed, plots are narrated, and sentences are written? And in terms of media, how do novels remain novel when digital and social media increasingly take up some of the traditional functions and platforms of the novelistic enterprise? We will explore these questions through works by authors including Zadie Smith, Tom McCarthy, Tao Lin, Marie Calloway, David Mitchell, Colson Whitehead, Barbara Browning, Nell Zink, and Chris Ware. Our primary goals are two: to develop close reading skills that can pick out emerging patterns in novel form; and to develop knowledge about our contemporary social and cultural landscape in order to relate these patterns to history and other media. (B)