Week 1

Welcome, everybody, to the course blog for EN3314 Booker Prize, Aesthetics and Commerce in Contemporary Fiction.

The point of this blog is partly to post-up material relating to each of the novels as we cover them, week by week; and partly to coordinate more general discussion about these novels, the Booker Prize, and contemporary fiction as a whole. I also want to use this site as a record of some of the things covered in lectures and seminars: hopefully that will be useful to you. Accordingly some of the stuff here will duplicate material from the course booklet (which you all have); and some of it will be re-posted from last year's version of this course, which is all still there in the archives if you want to rootle around. But hopefully there will be some new stuff too.

The way to get the best out of this course, and to do well on it, is to read as widely as you can, and take as active an interest as you can in the state of the contemporary novel, in prizes and the prizegiving culture, and in the questions of aesthetic and commercial judgment they entail. The course doesn't encompass this year's Booker Prize, but I urge you to at the least follow the reviews and news coverage of the shortlisted titles, and if possible read a couple, in addition to doing the reading for the course itself.

I have put some links on the sidebar: some of these are relevant to the course, and some more general. Some of the links are to pieces I've written about previous Booker titles. I try and read the shortlist, or some of it, and post some reviews.

The 2010 shortlist (also linked, right) was announced was announced on Tuesday 7 September. The winner will be declared in a few weeks time, on Tuesday 12 October 2010. We will have a class on the winning book, whichever it is, next term.