English 624-001
Seminar in Modern Literature: Postmodern Fictions
Instr: Campbell Tatham
Office: CRT 392, 229-3504
e-mail: ctatham@uwm.edu
Office hours: TR 2:45-3:30, by appointment
Course Information: TR 3:30-4:45, CRT 368
Course Description
Required Texts:
Italo Calvino, If on a winter's night a traveler
Ronald Sukenick, The Death of the Novel and Other Stories
Raymond Federman, Take It or Leave It
Mark Danielewski, House of Leaves
Julio Cortázar, Hopscotch
Ana Castillo, The Mixquiahuala Letters
Carole Maso, The Art Lover
Tim O'Brien, The Things They Carried
Toni Morrison, Jazz
Fiction constitutes a way of looking at the world. ...Realistic fiction presupposed chronological time as the medium of a plotted narrative, an irreducible individual psyche as the subject of its characterization, and, above all, the ultimate, concrete reality of things as the object and rationale of its description. In the world of post-realism, however, all of these absolutes have become absolutely problematic.
The contemporary writer--the writer who is acutely in touch with the life of which he is part--is forced to start from scratch: Reality doesn't exist, time doesn't exist, personality doesn't exist. God was the omniscient author, but he died; now no one knows the plot, and since our reality lacks the sanction of a creator, there's no guarantee of the authenticity of the received version. Time is reduced to presence, the series of discontinuous moments. Time is no longer purposive, and so there is no destiny, only chance. Reality is, simply, our experience, and objectivity is, of course, an illusion. ... In view of these annihilations, it should be no surprise that literature, also, does not exist--how could it? There is only reading and writing, which are things we do, like eating and making love, to pass the time, ways of maintaining a considered boredom in the face of the abyss.
Not to mention a series of overwhelming social dislocations.
Ronald Sukenick, The Death of the Novel and Other Stories (1969)
Et cetera. This course will examine certain experimental fictions - we shall call them 'postmodern' without becoming overly obsessed with matters of definition - written in a period beginning in the 70's and continuing to the present. We could also call such texts as these 'metafictions' - that is, texts which foreground, even insist, on their textual status. We will see how these fictions 'deterritorialize' or 'deconstruct' various assumptions about reading and writing texts of all sorts. To illustrate such concerns, we shall start with certain fundamental textual/experiential issues (are they the same?) posed by Calvino and Sukenick, move through varying degrees of typographical and delirious self-reflexiveness (Federman and Danielweski), and wonder about the writerly v. the readerly in Cortázar. It's surely worth asking if these approaches are inherently gendered - that is, do women 'do' 'postmodernism' differently? Castillo responds directly to Cortázar, and Maso works the boundaries between read and seen, story and image, both women coming from a deliberately xicanista/feminist perspective. Finally, we will explore the dynamics of storytelling and the interference of desire and memory through the narratives of O'Brien and Morrison Fundamental to the course (and assumed by many of the fictions) will be a paradoxical stance advocated by Jacques Derrida in his notorious response to Jean Hyppolite's question at the Structuralist Conference held at Johns Hopkins in 1966: "I am trying, precisely, to put myself at a point so that I do not know any longer where I am going." That such attitudes, to whatever extent they may be evidenced in these fictions, may be shockingly irresponsible will be one of the more problematic issues of this course. What does 'postmodernism' have to say to and about our post-9/11 world? Is that even a legitimate question? And so on.
Oh God comma I abhor self-consciousness.
John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse
Course Requirements:
- Regular Attendance (no more than two cuts allowed without subsequent grade penalty), participation in class discussion.
- Participation in an on-line Discussion Forum, posting at least twice weekly.
- Keeping a Writing Journal, in which you comment on texts, issues raised in class discussion and on the Forum, and the ways in which these intersect with your own experience. The entries for the Writing Journal may double as postings to the Forum. You should write at least two single-spaced pages a week. Date your entries and number your pages.
- Graduate students will further be required to write on 10-15 page paper that is in itself plausibly 'postmodern.'
- Discussion Leader: for one class, you will be responsible to introduce what, to you, are interesting issues for the text assigned for that day, in order to generate a subsequent discussion.
Grade:
Participation = 20%; Forum = 20%; Journal (and paper) = 50%; Discussion Facilitator = 10%
