Instr:                  Cam Tatham
Office:               CRT 392  229-3504
e-mail:                ctatham@uwm.edu
Office hours:    by appointment

Course Information:                       MW       3:00-4:15            CRT 368

Required Texts:
John Barth, The Floating Opera/The End of the Road
Robert Coover, Pricksongs and Descants
Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories
William Gass, Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife
Raymond Federman, Take It or Leave It
Ron Sukenick, Mosaic Man
Toni Morrison, Jazz
Don DeLillo, White Noise
Cris Mazza, Your Name Here:_______

Course Requirements:
1. Regular Attendance (no more than two cuts allowed without subsequent grade penalty), participation in class discussion.
2. Participation in an on-line Discussion Forum, posting at least twice weakly. (Perhaps some of the authors will join our online conversations.)
3. 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.
4. Discussion Leader: for one class, you will be responsible to introduce what, to you, are interesting issues for the text assigned for that day, to generate a subsequent discussion.

Grade:
Participation = 20%; Forum = 20%; Journal = 50%; Discussion Leader = 10%

Description:
 “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.  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)