Kazuo Ishiguro, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in literature, counts among the most prolific and influential writers of our time. His novels, however diverse in range and setting, frequently feature homodiegetic narrators whose accounts of themselves largely rely on the unreliable and fragile forces of memory, which constantly lead them to shape and reshape their identity and their sense of self. Among them, we find Stevens, the exceptional English butler from The Remains of the Day, who glosses over his wasted chances by clinging to professional ideals of dignity and restraint; Christopher Banks, the master detective from When We Were Orphans, who loses himself in his childhood traumas as he tries to find his allegedly abducted parents in war-torn Shanghai in the mid-1930s; Kathy H., the clone and soon-to-be donor from Never Let Me Go, whose speculative memoir shows how, in this novel, institutionalised miseducation and cultivated non-knowledge lead characters to adopt a view of themselves as living organ farms; and finally, Klara, the 'Artificial Friend', a humanoid robot, who eventually comes to embody mankind's exploitation of the posthuman in Ishiguro's most recent novel Klara and the Sun. In the seminar, we will explore how all these narrators rearrange fact and fiction, memory and fantasy, so as to produce coherent and consistent self-narratives that will allow them to make sense of their own lives – and how, eventually, they all will have to cope with the inevitable and unalterable fragility of these narratives.

Primary Texts (Mandatory Reading)
Ishiguro, Kazuo. The Remains of the Day. 1989. London: Faber and Faber, 1999. Print.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. When We Were Orphans. 2000. London: Faber and Faber, 2013. Print.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Never Let Me Go. 2005. London: Faber and Faber, 2010. Print.
Ishiguro, Kazuo. Klara and the Sun. 2021. London: Faber and Faber, 2022. Print.