ENGLIT 1350 - POSTMODERN LITERATURE

Minimum Credits: 3
Maximum Credits: 3
Long Description Whether it is used to describe art, film, literature, architecture, economics, history, politics, etc., the term "postmodernism" has been the subject of wide-ranging debate for over fifty years. It seems apparent, however, that a rough consensus is beginning to emerge, as many have been confidently claiming that postmodernism is "over." This course will ask how we might now Postmodern Literature represent, discuss, and interpret postmodernity and its literature as a distinct historical period with a beginning and an end, especially in light of how consistently postmodern literature has challenged and complicated various received notions of history and periodization. For instance, regarding the postmodern novel, literary critic Fredric Jameson once claimed that it "can no longer set out to represent the historical past; it can only 'represent' our ideas and stereotypes about that past."1 This course seeks to understand how such a view of literature and history could develop during the postwar era of the twentieth century, and what it might mean to consider such literature historically. To aid us in this task, we will read a number of important postmodern novelists, critics, theorists, essayists, historians, and philosophers. There has been an incredibly diverse, productive, and heady international exchange between postmodern writers and theorists, and though this particular section reads predominantly American literature, we will also look at a number of writers from other countries who have informed the conversations about postmodernity. We will spend significant amounts of time reading postmodern metafiction, fictions of postmodern identity, and literature informed by television and other visual media. The course will conclude with questions about what it means to be living, reading, and writing after the postmodern in what some are beginning to call "contemporaneity."
Academic Career: Undergraduate
Course Component: Lecture
Grade Component: LG/SNC Elective Basis
Course Attributes: DSAS Historical Analysis General Ed. Requirement, DSAS Literature General Ed. Requirement, SCI Polymathic Contexts: Humanistic GE. Req., SCI Polymathic Contexts: Soc/Behav. GE. Req.

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