A Summer Syllabus: The Mann Booker Prize: short and short-listed

Emily Mortimer as Florence Green in the meadow contemplating opening her bookshop (2017, Isabel Coixet, The Bookshop)

A Syllabus

For a course at the Oscher LifeLong Learning Institute at American University
Day: Four Tuesday afternoons, 1:45 to 3:15 pm,
June 4 to June 24
4801 Massachusetts Avenue, Washington DC 20016
Dr Ellen Moody

Description of Course

We’ll cover two (short) short-listed Bookers, one (short) winner, and watch one movie (outside class) from a screenplay by a Booker winner from an American novel it’s said could have “been in the running” had the prize been opens to Americans at the time. Our novels: Penelope Fitzgerald, The Bookshop; J. L. Carr, A Month in the Country; Julian Barnes’s A Sense of an Ending, and a Merchant-Ivory film, screenplay Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, The City of your Final Destination (from Peter Cameron’s novel). We’ll discuss our prize-obsessed culture, how the Bookers function in the literary marketplace, and their typical themes, techniques, and moods: autobiographical, historical, self-reflexive, witty, post-colonial, mostly melancholy books and films

Required Books & a film (in the order we’ll read & see them):

Fitzgerald, Penelope. The Bookshop. 1978; rpt. NY: Mariner, Houghton Mifflin, 2013 ISBN 978-0-544-48409-2
Carr, J. L. A Month in the Country. 1980: rpt. NY: New York Review of Books, 2000. 0-9040322-47-1
Barnes, Julian. The Sense of an Ending. 2011; rpt. NY: Vintage, 2012.

One film: Merchant-Ivory-Jhabvala 2009 The City of Your Final Destination, featuring Anthony Hopkins, Laura Linney, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Alexandria Maria Lara, Omar Metwally, Kiroyyuki Sanada. (Please see this on your own outside class by the fourth session.)

Kenneth Branagh and Colin Firth as James Moon and Tim Birkin eating lunch amid the tombs (1987 A Month in the Country)

Jim Carter as Mr Ellerbeck offering Birkin an umbrella (ditto)

Format: The class will be a mix of informal lecture and group discussion.

June 4: Introduction: The Booker Prize: history and context; begin The Bookshop. I will review James English. “Winning the Culture Game: Prizes, Awards, and the Rules of Art,” New Literary History, 33:1 (Winter, 2002):109-135.

June 11: The Bookshop into A Month in the Country. If time permits, we’ll see a clip from Isabel Coixet’s The Bookshop, featuring Emily Mortimer and Bill Nighy and Patricia Clarkson.
June 18: A Month in the Country into The Sense of an Ending. On this day if the class decides to, we can come in at 11:15 and see the whole of Patrick O’Connor, Simon Gray 1987 film A Month in the Country, featuring Kenneth Branagh, Colin Firth, Natasha Richardson, Patrick Malahide, Jim Carter. I will send by attachment Rosemarie Gerr, “It’s not all that easy to find your way back to the Middle Ages,” Criticism, 47:3 (2005):353-86.

June 25: The Sense of an Ending; the film adaptation tradition: James Ivory, JPJhabvala 2009 The City of Your Final Destination

Jim Broadbent as Tony Webster (2017, Ritesh Batra, Nick Payne, The Sense of an Ending)

Suggested supplementary reading:

Barnes, Julian. Flaubert’s Parrot. NY: Vintage, 1984. Short-listed for the Booker.
Cameron, Peter. The City of Your Final Destination. New York: Penguin Plume, 2002.
Fitzgerald, Penelope. Offshore. NY: Houghton Mifflin Mariner, 1979. The Booker Prize winner for that year.
Gray, Simon. Old Flames and A Month in the Country. London: Faber and Faber, 1990. Contains screenplay for the film adaptation.
Groes, Sebastian & Peter Childs, eds. Julian Barnes (Contemporary Critical Perspectives). London: Continuum, 2011.
Hopkinson, Natalie. “The Booker Prize’s Bad History,” The New York Times, October 17, 2017. Online.
Lee, Hermione. Penelope Fitzgerald: A Life. NY: Vintage, 2005.
Rogers, Byron. The Last Englishman: The Life of J.L. Carr. Bodmin: Quince Tree Press, 2003.
Strongman, Luke. The Booker Prize and the Legacy of Empire. Netherlands: Rodopi, 2002.
Todd, Richard. Consuming Fictions: The Booker Prize and Fiction in Britain Today. London: Bloomsbury, 1996.

Anthony Hopkins and Kiroyyuki Sanada as Adam Gund and his partner, Pete (City of Your Final Destination)

Charlotte Gainsbourg and Laura Linney as Arden Langden and Caroline Gund (ditto)

Ellen