ENGL 378: Millennial Angst: Reading Precarity in the Twenty-First Century

The beginning of the twenty-first century was ushered in under the panic of Y2K--a computer bug predicted to upend the social order. Its ties to technology, impending chaos, financial solvency, and temporal instability would come to intimately inform the lives of generation y, better known to us as "millennials". Millennial, as a term, generally describes those born between 1981 and the mid-1990s reaching "adulthood" in the early 21st century. They are children of baby boomers, internet and social media pioneers with their lives witness to 9/11, Katrina, the United States' first Black president, the War on Terror, the financial crisis of 2008, and major social movements such as #MeToo and #BLM. This course explores how authors and artists have chronicled the millennial predicament through themes of uncertainly and precarity, isolation, anxiety, and hopelessness, as well resiliency and survival. Our reading of our primary works of literature will be supported by engagements with foundational theoretical texts through which we will use to engage critically with our primary readings.