Born in northeast India in 1961, Arundhati Roy grew up on the southwestern coast in Kerala. She attended the School of Planning and Architecture in New Delhi and worked as a screenwriter before penning her lyrical novel, The God of Small Things, which won the 1997 Booker Prize. “A novel gives a writer the freedom to be as complicated as she wants – to move through worlds, languages, and time, through societies, communities, and politics,” she tells us. But this acclaimed novelist, who loves the freedom the form provides, turned in 1998 to essay writing, authoring a scathing critique of her country’s nuclear arms tests. Since then, Roy has used her body and pen to fight against ecological devastation caused by dams, the violence of empires, and for the freedom struggle in occupied Kashmir. For her courageous stand against state power, critic and writer John Berger called her “the direct descendant of Antigone.” In this class, we will begin with the novel The God of Small Things (1997) and then examine how Roy employs the figurative language of fiction in her essays by reading selections from My Seditious Heart (2019), The End of Imagination (2016), and Azadi: Freedom. Fascism. Fiction. We will conclude the class with Roy’s most recent novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017), which she describes as “a novel written in English but imagined in several languages.” Roy understands novel writing as a political act, arguing that fiction's emotional and narrative complexity is “our beehive, our maze” against “the sweeping simplifications of fascism.” Through the work of writer and activist Arundhati Roy, we will consider the “place of literature in the times in which we live” (Roy).LITPA 200 courses introduce students to the study of literature or the performing arts, emphasizing analysis of both particular works and of the range of genres, periods and traditions. Frequent reading and writing assignments will be made.

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