6. Genre

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we think about the genre of Never Let Me Go. Is Never Let Me Go a science fiction novel? To what extent is it worth thinking about the novel in terms of its genre, in any case?

Course

In this course, Dr Richard Robinson (Swansea University) explores Kazuo Ishiguro's 2005 novel, Never Let Me Go. We begin by introducing Ishiguro's previous works, before focusing on the idea on the unreliable first-person narrator. After that, we consider a number of themes in the novel, including the presentation of time and memory, the style and voice of the novel, the ideas of 'original' and 'copy', and the relationship between art and creation. In the sixth and final module, we think about the genre of Never Let Me Go: is it a science fiction novel? does it matter?

Lecturer

Richard Robinson is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English Literature and Creative Writing at Swansea University. He has published widely on modernism and contemporary fiction, in journals such as James Joyce Quarterly, Journal of European Studies, Critical Quarterly, Modern Fiction Studies, Textual Practice and Irish University Review, and is the author of two monographs, Narratives of the European Border: A History of Nowhere (Palgrave, 2007) and John McGahern and Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2016).