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What is "The Postmodern"? A period concept, indicating a distinctive style in the arts following after modernism? A special cultural formation, peculiar to a late phase in the development of capitalism? Not so much a chronological category as a peculiar "moment of consciousness"? A certain "scene of writing," unthinkable without the foreplay of poststructuralist theory? A tactical theoretic and/or narrative stance taken up in the interest of some political, aesthetic, economic, or broadly cultural strategy? A borderland where the monologue of Eurocentric order is everywhere challenged by the din of other voices?
This seminar will interrogate "the postmodern" and its relations with both "poststructuralism" and "postcolonialism" in examples of "theory" and "fiction" selected from a cosmopolitan range of texts by such writers as Gloria Anzaldua, Jean Baudrillard, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Robert Coover, Don DeLillo, E.L. Doctorow, Umberto Eco, Louise Erdrich, John Fowles, Carlos Fuentes, Jurgens Habermas, Ihab Hassan, Fredric Jameson, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Gabriel García Márquez, Toni Morrison, Vladimir Nabokov, Manuel Puig, Thomas Pynchon, Ishmael Reed, Salmon Rushdie, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gerald Vizenor, and Christa Wolf.
This course will be conducted as a true seminar, with each student expected to take her or his share of the responsibility for the conduct of our class meetings. Each student will write three 6-8 page papers at roughly even intervals over the course of the semester, each of which will involve close analysis of specific text assigned for a given seminar meeting. Students will be expected to play an especially active role in initiating discussions at the seminar meetings devoted to the texts on which they have written. Thus, each student will undertake some sort of formal (that is to say, prepared) presentation for three different seminar meetings over the course of the semester. There will be a final essay (15-20 pages) due at the end of the semester in lieu of an examination.
This seminar, cross-listed with Comparative Literature, has the standard English departmental prerequisite for 300-level courses of at least two courses in English at the 200-level and is recommended for juniors and seniors only. While all texts will be available in English language versions, students with competence in other languages will be encouraged to read individual volumes in the languages in which they were originally published.