1.
American Generational Novels: From
Lost Generation to GenX/BS - Spring 1995
This course is designed as
an 8 week sequence of lectures and
workshops. The focus is on the thematic of generations and
generationality, as found in selected 20th century American novels.
We shall read the following
4 novels:
Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also
Rises
(English title: Fiesta)
Jack Kerouac: On the Road
Bret Easton Ellis: Less Than
Zero
Douglas Coupland: Generation X
These texts are readily
available in paperback, hopefully also from
Centerboghandelen. They are also found in AUB or public libraries.
It will be noted that these
novels represent the four main so-called
literary generations of the 20th century in North America. We will
examine both what is unique for each of these generations: The Lost
Generation (Hemingway), The Beat Generation (Kerouac), The Blank
Generation (Ellis), and Generation X (Coupland); and what these
generations, their writers and their texts have in common.
An introductory lecture
will present the idea of ‘generation’ as a
concept within anthropology and cultural studies, the idea of ‘generation’ as a labelling device in the
public and commercial
spheres, the semiotics of the sign ‘generation’, and the literary
history of ‘generations’. We will also work with
concepts of paratext
as a locus for generation markers, and introduce the idea of
generationality as one of the great difference discourses of the 20th
century. Texts supporting this theoretical framework will be available
as a course compendium.
We will then devote two
sessions to each of the 4 novels,
chronologically as listed, with the exception of Easton Ellis’ novel
which will be dealt with in a single session. These sessions will take
the form of workshops rather than lectures, and for each novel the
procedure will be as follows: The first session will focus on close
readings and thematic analysis of selected portions of text. I will
expect student participation and presentations. The second session will
focus on narratological and structural and formal aspects of the novel
in question. Student participation will here be based on an agenda for
analysis provided in advance by me. The Ellis session will cover both
thematic and narrative features of that novel.
2. Scriptures
for an American
Generation: Reading (in) the 1960s/BS - Spring 1998
This course is designed as
an 8 week sequence of lectures and
workshops. The focus is on readers reading in the 1960s in the USA,
that is to say: what did people read, why did they read, and what role
did the act of reading certain, shared texts play in the formation and
development of the so-called ‘Baby Boom Generation’ and the ’60s
movement known as the ‘Counter Culture’, the great conglomerate of all
dissident youth cultures in the US in this turbulent decade: Hippies,
Yippies, Feminists, Environmentalists, Human Rights agitators, New Age
Spiritualists, and all other imaginable kinds of deviants from the
dominant culture.
The focus will be on the
role of the thematic of generations and
generationality in sixties readers’ selection of a sixties canon of
texts, or as Philip Beidler calls them, ‘scriptures for a generation’.
We will use his book as our basic theoretical text:
Philip D. Beidler: Scriptures
for a
Generation: What We Were Reading in the '60s (University of
Georgia Press, Athens & London, 1994)
Copies are available from
Centerboghandelen. A master copy has also
been provided on the course shelf. The source texts from the 1960s,
plus any further readings given as background texts, are available as a
compendium, also from Centerboghandelen.
The course will give us the
opportunity to read a number of 1960s youth
culture ‘classics’ belonging to several genres or
discourse types:
poetry, novels, non-fiction (New Journalism, essays (both popular and
academic), autobiography, and mystical or religious/New Age texts). The
course is designed to give students access to a large array of texts to
choose from in their work with projects and papers. Authors include:
Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Jr., Timothy Leary, Abbie Hoffman,
Carlos Castaneda, Tom Wolfe, Ken Kesey, Kurt Vonnegut, Richard
Brautigan, R.D. Laing, Betty Friedan, Germaine Greer.
In two introductory
lectures I will present the idea of ‘generationality’ as a concept within literary
and cultural studies,
and the semiotics and function of the term ‘generation’ as a labelling
device in the public and commercial spheres. I will also introduce
Beidler's reading theory in a cultural studies perspective and present
a general theory of types of ‘difference discourses’ relevant for
cultural analysis of texts. We will then devote six sessions to close
textual analysis of and cultural perspectives on selected 60s ‘scriptures’. These sessions will take the
form of workshops rather
than lectures, and for each text the procedure will be as follows: The
session will focus on close readings and thematic analysis of selected
portions of text. I expect student participation and presentations
based on an agenda for analysis drawn up in advance by me. I will
provide a cultural/reading perspective on each text.
3. Lost and Found:
The Lost Generation
and the Harlem Renaissance/BS - Fall 1999.
The aim of this course is
to investigate two circles of American
writers, both operating in the 1920s, both seeking to paradoxically
centralize their position in aesthetic production and reception by
marginalizing themselves through in-group labelling and self-imposed
exile. The circles in question have become known, respectively, as The
Lost Generation writers and the Harlem Renaissance writers.
The course will thematize
aspects of labelling as they pertain to
recognition of writers and their work, for instance in terms of
placement in the canon, but aspects of race and gender discourses are
also pertinent, as these two circles are rigidly colour divided, and
both seem to privilege male writers over female. The course will also
investigate the psychogeography involved in these writings, understood
as representations of place, for instance the modern city, and images
of foreign places, in connection with exile.
We will read several works
by representatives of each circle, and
attempt to establish some contrapuntal readings across the two circles.
The writers represented will include F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest
Hemingway, Kay Boyle and Gertrude Stein, who have all been associated
with the Lost Generation, as well as such writers from the Harlem
Renaissance as Jean Toomer, Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.
(Books ordered from Centerbogh. are marked (CB), other texts will be
found in a course compendium)
Bibliography:
David Levering Lewis (ed.):
The
Portable Harlem Renaissance Reader (CB)
Zora Neale Hurston: Their Eyes
Were
Watching God (CB)
Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also
Rises
(CB)
F. Scott Fitzgerald: The Great
Gatsby
(CB)
Gertrude Stein: The
Autobiography of
Alice B. Toklas (CB)
L. E. Roses & Randolph
(eds.): Harlem’s
Glory: Black Women Writing, 1900 -1950
Kay Boyle: My Next Bride
Kay Boyle & Robert
McAlmon: Being
Geniuses Together
---------------------------------
Steven Watson: The Harlem
Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930 (CB)
J. Gerald Kennedy: Imagining
Paris:
Exile, Writing and Am. Identity (CB)
Cory D. Wintz (ed.): The Harlem
Renaissance, 1920 - 1940, vol. 1 - 7
Cheryl A Wall: Women of the
Harlem
Renaisssance
Noel Riley Fitch: Sylvia Beach
and
the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and
Thirties
Malcolm Cowley: Exile's
Return
4. Utopian Writing and Gender/BS -
Fall 1999.
This course aims to examine
the construction of gender positions within
a specific literary genre, namely that of the utopian/dystopian novel.
The course will trace the history of the genre through the nineteenth
and twentieth century with a view to create an understanding of the
genre conventions of utopian/dystopian texts, including borderline
problems with other recognised types of texts such as travel literature
and science fiction/fantasy, and the placement of the texts in a field
between the novel and the political tract, with all the attendent
literary and aesthetic problems such a placement entails.
Of all the potentially
interesting political issues raised in
utopian/dystopian writing none has been more persistent than that of
gender and sex roles in the postulated alternative society. The course
will examine a number of attempts at constructing feminist utopias with
a variety of solutions to the problem of gender differences and
inequalities. We will try to align some of these positions from the
novels with forms of thinking within feminist and queer theory, and
other types of post-structuralist thinking.
The main part of the course
will be dedicated to a reading of three
seminal, or if you prefer, ovular texts within the genre, all American
novels from the mid-1970s, which invite a reading of themselves as a
block of texts by placing themselves in an interesting transtextual
dialogue where they and their authors actively engage with each other
through explicit commentary (metatext, f. ex. essays by each of the
three authors on their own and the two other writers’ works), as well
as implicit intertextual (allusions) and paratextual means
(titles/subtitles etc.).
Primary
texts:
Novels (ordered from
Centerbogh.):
Joanna Russ, The Female
Man
Ursula Le Guin, The
Dispossessed: An
Ambiguous Utopia
Samuel R. Delany, Triton: An
Ambiguous Heterotopia
Essays (excerpted in course
compendium):
Ursula LeGuin, Dancing at
the Edge
of the World: Thoughts on Words,
Women, Places
Samuel R. Delany, Silent
Interviews:
On Language, Race, Sex, Science
Fiction and Some Comics
Joanna Russ, Writing Like
A Woman:
Essays
Secondary
literature
(excerpted in course compendium):
Tom Moylan, Demand the
Impossible
Robin Roberts, "Feminist
Utopias" in
A New Species: Gender and Science
in Science Fiction
James Sallis (ed.), Ash of
Stars: On
the Writing of Samuel R. Delany
Rita Felski, Beyond
Feminist
Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social
Change
Sara Mills (ed.), Gendering
the
Reader
Elaine Showalter (ed.), Speaking of
Gender
Stevi Jackson &
Sue Scott (eds.), Feminism
and Sexuality: A
Reader
Annamarie Jagose, Queer
Theory: An
Introduction
Other
utopian/dystopian
writings of gender studies interest:
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland
Marge Piercy, Woman on the
Edge of
Time
Margaret Atwood, The
Handmaid's Tale
Dorothy Bryant, The Kin of
Ata Are
Waiting for You
Suzy McKee Charnas, Motherlines
Sally Miller Gearhart, The
Wanderground
5. The
Theory and History of
Metafiction/BS - Spring 2000.
The aim of this course is
to trace through literary history what is
commonly thought of as a distinctly postmodern feature, namely the use
of metafictive devices in prose fiction, breaking the frame of the
told, drawing attention to the telling, and thus undermining the status
of the text as mimetic representation.
The course will look at
theories concerning metafiction, and construct
a tentative poetics of metafiction. It will also close-read specific
examples of various types of metafiction from various periods, for
instance early examples of framing and frame-breaking in narratives
(Adam Bede; Jane Eyre); early use of unusual, self-reflexive paratext
(Tristram Shandy); more recent forms of metafiction such as
historiographic metafiction (Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five),
specifically the two-tier tale (A.S. Byatt, Possession); or ecriture
oriented metafiction: palimpsesting existing tales (Barth, Chimera,
Barthelme, Snow White), playing language games (Barthelme, Sixty
Stories), paratext-conscious texts (Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in
America).
Theoretical texts:
Gerard Genette, Paratexts
Patricia Waugh, Metafiction
Mark Currie (ed.), Metafiction
Linda Hutcheon, A Poetics of
Postmodernism
Brian McHale, Postmodern
Fiction
Primary texts:
Lawrence Sterne, Tristram
Shandy
(excerpts)
George Eliot, Adam Bede
(excerpts)
Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre
(excerpts)
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
(excerpts)
Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse
Five
Richard Brautigan, Trout
Fishing in
America
A.S. Byatt, Possession
John Barth, Chimera (excerpts)
Donald Barthelme, Snow White (excerpts)
Donald Barthelme, Sixty Stories
(excerpts)
Course plan:
1. The theory
and history of metafiction: an introductory lecture
Readings:
Patricia
Waugh: “What is
Metafiction and Why are They Saying Such Awful Things About It?” (in
Mark
Currie (ed.) Metafiction);
Robert
Scholes: “Metafiction” (in
Mark Currie (ed.): Metafiction)
2.
Early meta-devices in prose narratives
Readings:
Laurence
Sterne: The Life and
Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (excerpt, master copy)
Patricia
Waugh: “Literary
Self-consciousness: Developments”, pp.
21-34 (master copy)
3.
Historiographic metafiction: Possession
Readings:
A.S. Byatt: Possession
Linda
Hutcheon: “Historiographic
Metafiction” (in
Mark Currie (ed.): Metafiction)
4.
Historiographic metafiction: Slaughterhouse 5
Readings:
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: Slaughterhouse
5, or The Children's Crusade: A Duty-dance with Death
Patricia
Waugh: “Fictionality
and
Context”, pp.
115-129 (master copy)
5.
The author drops in: Barth’s
Chimera
Readings:
John Barth: from Chimera, “Dunyazadiad”
(master copy)
John
Barth: “The
Literature of
Exhaustion” (in
Mark Currie (ed.): Metafiction)
Brian
McHale: Postmodern Fiction, 13:
Authors: Dead and Posthumous
6.
Palimpsesting: Snow White
Readings:
Donald Barthelme: from Snow White
(master copy)
Patricia
Waugh: “Fictionality
and
Context”, pp.
130-149 (master copy)
Gerard
Genette: from Palimpsests (master
copy)
7.
Language games: Bathelme’s
balloon and other toys
Readings:
Donald Barthelme: “The
Balloon” & “Games”
(master copy)
Harold
Jaffe: “Counter
Couture”
(master copy)
Tom
Robbins: “Moonlight
Whoopie Cushion
Sonata”
(master copy)
Patricia
Waugh: “Literary
Self-consciousness:
Developments”, pp.
34-48 (master copy)
Brian
McHale: Postmodern Fiction, 9:
Tropological Worlds
8.
Paratexts and intertexts: Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America
Readings:
Richard Brautigan: Trout Fishing in
America
Brian
McHale: Postmodern Fiction, 12:
Worlds on Paper
Gerard
Genette: from Paratexts (master
copy)
6. “I
Belong to the Beat
Generation”/BS - Fall
2000.
This course aims to
introduce students to the texts and thoughts of the
so-called Beat Generation writers of the 1950s. The texts will be
contextualised in various ways to further allow students to explore the
cultural, aesthetic and intellectual climate of contemporary North
America and Europe, as well as later reception of these authors and
their works.
These contexts will include:
Beats and race
Beats and gender
Beats and the avantgarde
Beats and Bohemians
Beats and exile
Beat and Buddhism
Beat cross-aesthetics:
music, film and painting
Beat poetics
Beat and auto-biography
Beat and sexual politics
Beat and counter-culture
We will read some of the
core-texts of the Beat canon, largely with the
aid of three recently compiled readers:
The
Viking Portable Library Beat
Reader (ed. Ann
Charters)
Big Sky
Mind: Buddhism and the Beat
Generation (ed.
Carole Tonkinson)
The
Beat Book (ed. Anne
Waldman)
Two novels and one
collection of poetry will be read in full:
Jack Kerouac, Dharma Bums
William Burroughs, Junky
Allen Ginsberg, Howl and
Other Poems
Theory and reference books:
W.T. Lhamon, Jr., Deliberate
Speed:
The Origins of a Cultural Style In the American 1950s
Steven Watson, The Birth of
the Beat
Generation: Visionaries, Rebels and Hipsters, 1944-1960
Course plan:
1.
|
Acts
of naming |
Kerouac,
Holmes, Corso |
2. |
Beat
poetics |
Kerouac,
Ginsberg, Snyder |
3. |
Sights and
Sounds of the Beat Generation
|
Screening
of The Source |
4.
|
Burroughs:
Junkie |
Beats
&
drugs
|
5.
|
Ginsberg:
Howl |
Beats
& madness |
6. |
Kerouac: Dharma Bums |
Beats
& Bhuddism |
7. |
Beat
women |
Joyce
Johnson, Hettie Jones, Carolyn Cassady
|
8. |
Beat
biographies |
Gerald
Nicosia, Ann Charters
|
7. Textualized
Subjects - British and
American Post -WWII Cultural history/Team taught with Søren
Hattesen Balle, Spring 2001
1. Introduction: WW II as
water-shed for cultural lines of
dissemination: Mass society, media boom, colonial dismantling, popular
culture becoming all-pervasive, self and identity destabilized and
potentially fragmented, class consciousness destabilized, youth
reaching affluence, etc.. Theory: Kenneth Galbraith, from The Affluent
Society
2. Mass culture and mass
society: Readings of Frank O'Hara, Richard
Penniman. Theory: David Riesmann, from The Lonely
Crowd
3. Black & White
Negroes, Angry Young Males: Beats, Brits and
exiles. Readings of Norman Mailer et al. and Brits, queer and otherwise
(Allan Sillitoe from The
Loneliness
of the Longdistance Runner). Theory
fx. Franz Fanon, from Black Faces,
White Masks; Raymond
Williams, from
Culture
and Society 1780-1950
4. Metropolitan identities:
London and San Francisco swinging. Reading
of Brits and Americans from the 60s. Readings of Allen Ginsberg, Bob
Dylan, Peter Brook, from The Empty
Space etc. Theory:
Theodore Roszak,
from The Making
of a Counter-Culture
5. White riots: punk, race
and gender. American and Brit 70s voices.
Readings of Angela Carter, Adrienne Rich. Theory fx. Dick Hebdige, from
Hiding
in the Light;
Christopher Lasch, from The Culture
of Narcissism
6. Ethnicity and
multiculturalism: Spicy Brits and ethnic Americans
(80s and on). Readings of Salman Rushdie, Wendy Rose, etc. Theory: Toni
Morrison, from Playing in
the Dark;
Salman Rushdie, "Imaginary
Homelands"
8.
Introduction to 20th Century
American Poetry/Team taught with Søren
Hattesen Balle, spring 2001
The aim of this course is
threefold. The course will be an introduction
to American poetry as a special area of study, provide various
approaches to the close reading of lyric poetry, and deal with the
question of what constitutes Modernism and Postmodernism in poetry.
American poets are often
said to be different from their British or
European colleagues. Is there such a thing as “the American difference”
in American poetry - something that links American poets to the
American land and to American culture? This is a question that is
particularly pertinent in connection with Wallace Stevens (1879-1955),
one of the poets on whom we shall focus in the course. Another American
poet and contemporary with Stevens, T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) left America
and settled in England in order to write a poetry that was
international in scope, theme and voice. Internationalism in poetry is
seen by many critics as a typical characteristic of poetic Modernism.
In the course we shall discuss what Modernist poetry is, and what
distinguishes it from Postmodernist poetry. If Modernist poetry is
international, does that mean that Postmodernist poetry - i.e., poetry
after Modernism - is not international, but rather both post-national
and post-international? Apart from trying to answer such questions the
course will offer a variety of analytic tools relevant to the reading
of poetry, just as an introduction to the stylistic features of
Modernist and Postmodernist poetry will be given.
The following poets will be
included in the course: Wallace Stevens,
William Carlos Williams, T.S. Eliot, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay,
Robert Lowell, Elisabeth Bishop, Denise Levertov, Allen Ginsberg, John
Ashbery, Adrienne Rich, and Audre Lorde
Course plan:
1. Wallace Stevens. Primary
texts: The Man on the Dump; Sunday Morning;
Of Modern Poetry. Please read the rest of the Heath A2 selection of
Stevens poems as background
2. William Carlos Williams
& T.S. Eliot. Primary texts: Portrait of
a Lady (Williams); Portrait of a Lady (Eliot). Please read the rest of
the Williams poems in Heath A2 as background
3. Langston Hughes &
Claude McKay. Primary texts: The Negro Speaks
of Rivers; The Weary Blues; America (Hughes); The Desolate City;
America (McKay)
4. Robert Lowell. Primary
texts: For the Union Dead; Waking in the
Blue. Please read the other Lowell poems in Heath A2 as background
5. Denise Levertov &
Elisabeth Bishop. Primary texts: A Solitude
(Levertov); Filling Station (Bishop). Please read the other Levertov
and Bishop poems in Heath A2 as background
6. Allen Ginsberg.
Primary texts: Howl; America
7. John Ashbery. Primary
texts: As You Come from the Holy Land;
Paradoxes and Oxymorons. Please read the other Ashbery texts in Heath
A2 as background
8. Adrienne Rich &
Audre Lorde. Primary texts: Diving into the
Wreck; Not Somewhere Else, But Here; Power (Rich); Power (Lorde)
9.
Introduction to the American Short
Story/Team taught with Søren Hattesen Balle - Spring 2002
This course is designed
particularly for 4th semester students and aims
to provide a forum for close reading and interpretation of American
short stories from (roughly) the first half of the 20th century.
Writing
- genre and
profession:
There will be an
introductory lecture on the theories of genre in
connection with the short story (SHB), as well as some reflections on
the profession of short story writer in the USA, which is contingent on
the development of magazines and other publication outlets, providing a
market and a readership for the professional writer (BS).
Chronology:
The subsequent sessions
will be centered each time on one short story
(occasionally two), which will give us ample time to analyse structure,
characters, themes etc. The course will progress chronologically from
the 1920s to the 1960s, but will also establish the 19th century and
early 20th century roots of the American short story. Most texts will
be available in the Heath A2 anthology; others, plus all secondary
literature will be available as a master box set for copying.
Course
plan:
1. Genre (SHB); Markets and
professionalism (BS)
2. Edith Wharton: “Souls
Belated”
(Heath A2)
3. Ernest Hemingway: “Hills
Like
White Elephants” (Heath A2)
Sherwood Anderson: “Death
in the
Woods” (Heath A2)
4. F. Scott Fitzgerald:
“Babylon
Revisited” (Heath A2)
5. William Faulkner: “Go
Down,
Moses” (Master box)
Katherine Anne Porter:
“Rope”
(Master box)
6. J.D. Salinger: “A
Perfect Day
for Bananafish” (Master box)
7. Saul Bellow: “Looking
for Mr.
Green" (Heath A2)
8. John Updike: “Your Lover
Just
Called” (Master box)
10.
Contemporary Canadian
Ironies and
Cross-aesthetic Practices/BS - Spring 2002
This course focuses on
Canadian writing from the contemporary period,
roughly 1960 - 1995. The distinctive feature of the writers the course
focuses on is their playful attitude to traditional delimitations of
genre and mode. Many have practiced cross-aesthetic expression in that
they are prose writers and/or poets, plus something else. Leonard Cohen
is a novelist and a poet, plus a songwriter/performer, painter and film
artist; Douglas Coupland is a novelist, short story writer and
essayist, plus a video, film and WWW-artist; Glenn Gould is an
accomplished essayist on aesthetics, identity politics and music, plus
a world-famous pianist, composer, and a master of radio montage. Others
are writers of both literature and scholarly criticism, for instance
Margaret Atwood, Robert Kroetsch and Rudy Wiebe. What mandates these
contemporary Canadian voices to express themselves across genres and
modes? Are they best categorised as Canadian postmodernists? Are there
specific Canadian ironies at play in their practices?
Work-list:
Leonard Cohen: Death of a
Ladies’ Man (CD/song-cycle)/Death of a
Lady’s
Man (book of poems
and prose fragments)/Beautiful
Losers (novel)
Douglas Coupland: Life After
God
(stories)/Polaroids
from the Dead
(essays)/ www.coupland.com (website)
Glenn Gould: “The Idea of
North”
(radio montage)/The Glenn
Gould Reader
(ed. by Tim Page) (letters & aesthetic essays)
Margaret Atwood: The
Handmaid's Tale
(dystopian novel)/Survival
(criticism)/“Notes Towards a Poem
That Can Never Be Written” (poetry)
Robert Kroetsch: What the
Crow Said
(novel)/“The Exploding Porcupine:
Violence of Form in English-Canadian Fiction” (critical essay)
Rudy Wiebe: “Canada in the
Making”
(essay)/The
Temptations of Big Bear
(novel)
Secondary literature:
Linda Hutcheon: The Canadian
Postmodern; Splitting
Image:
Contemporary Canadian Ironies; A
Poetics of Postmodernism
M. Trikha (ed.): Canadian
Literature: Recent Essays
M.F. Salat: The Canadian
Novel: A
Search for Identity
11. Realists
and Meta-realists:
Doctorow, Auster & De Lillo/BS, Fall 2002
This course aims to examine
the state of realist fiction in American
literature at the beginning of the new millenium. We will read new
novels by three of the most celebrated writers in the 1980s and ’90s,
E.L. Doctorow, Paul Auster and Don De Lillo, and see how their most
recent prose ficitions are preoccupied with detailed descriptions of
everyday life and events (someti mes explicitly fuelled by a desire to
write (auto-)biographically), and yet simultaneously contain what could
be postulated to be a meta-realist dimension, in the sense that these
texts display an element of self-awareness of their status as textual
constructs, with characters (and authors) whose existence is
circumscribed by ontological doubts. As part of generating a history of
the recurrence of the realist impulse in American fiction of the last
two decades of the 20th Century, we shall also look at excerpts from
the writings of other neo-realists in American fiction, such as
Nicholson Baker, Jay McInerney, Douglas Coupland and Chuck Palahniuk.
For our first session
(Sept. 5.) please read Don DeLillo: The
Body
Artist. This short novel is already available from
Centerboghandelen.
While reading the book, consider these questions: What’s realistic
about this novel and what’s not? Is
it too detailed in some parts (the
breakfast scene) and too vague in others? Is it a fantasy/ghost story
as well? Is it a meta-fiction? Consider terms such as ‘description’ -
where do we find description in this book (on the levels of setting and
character, for instance)? Consider also ‘theme’ - can themes be
carriers of realism? If so, which themes are realist, and which are not?
Primary texts:
E.L. Doctorow: City of God
Paul Auster: Timbuktu
Don De Lillo: The Body
Artist
Nicholson Baker: The Mezzanine
(excerpts)
Jay McInerney: Bright
Lights, Big
City (excerpts)
Douglas Coupland: Generation X
(excerpts)
Chuck Pahlaniuk: Fight Club (excerpts)
Course plan:
1. 5/9 Don DeLillo: The Body
Artist
Stephen Baker: “Now More
Than Ever”
from The Fiction
of
Postmodernity,
Edinburgh UP, 2000
Jeremy Hawthorn: “Types of
Novels”
from Studying the
Novel,
Arnold,
1997
2. 12/9 Nicholson Baker:
The Mezzanine (excerpts)
Russ Chambers: “Time Out”
from Loiterature,
Univ. of Nebraska Press,
1999
Jeremy Hawthorn: “Realism,
Modernism, Postmodernism” from Studying
the
Novel, Arnold, 1997
19-20/9 Symposium SDU:
Amerikas Apokalypser
3. 26/9 Jay McInerney: Bright
Lights, Big City
(excerpts)
Graham Caveney:
“Psychodrama,
Qu’est-ce que c’est?” from Caveney
& Young (eds.) Shopping in
Space: Essays on American ‘Blank
Generation’ Fiction, Serpent’s Tail, 1992
Roland Barthes: “The
Reality
Effect” from Lilian Furst (ed.) Realism,
Longman, 1992
4. 3/10 Douglas Coupland: Generation
X (excerpts)
Bent Sorensen: “Moses at
Mental
Ground Zero?” from Generationing
the
Text: Readings in the North American Generational Difference Discourse
Aalborg U., 2001
Luc Hernan: “In Search of a
Definition”, from Concepts of
Realism,
Camden House, 1996
5. 10/10 Chuck Pahlaniuk: Fight Club
(excerpts)
Kent Hytten: “‘I
Want You to Hit Me As Hard As You Can’”
Dario Villanueva: “The
Realist
Reading” from Theories of
Literary
Realism, SUNY Press,
1997
6. 17/10 Paul Auster: Timbuktu
Marc Chenetier: “Paul
Auster’s
Pseudonymous World” from Dennis Barone
(ed.): Beyond the
Red Notebook:
Essays on Paul Auster,
U. of
Pennsylvania Press, 1995
Michael Riffaterre: “Truth
in
Diegesis” from Fictional
Truth,
Johns
Hopkins, 1990
7. 24/10 E.L. Doctorow: City of God,
1
Tom Deignan: “Are You
There, God?”,
book review in The World
& I,
Washington, June 2000
Linda Hutcheon: “The
Pastime of
Past Time” from Marjorie Perloff (ed.) Postmodern
Genres, U. of
Oklahoma
Press, 1989
8. 31/10 E.L. Doctorow: City of God,
2
David Lodge: “The Novel
Now” from
Mark Currie: Metafiction,
Longman,
1995
12.
Postmodern Genres/BS
- Spring 2003
How do genres function in
post-modern literature? We shall investigate
this through readings of postmodern specimens of genre literature: The
western, the detective novel, the historical romance, the
science-fiction/fantasy novel.
Each novel will be compared
with examples from the history of each
individual genre in order to establish a normative poetics, which can
then be contrasted with the postmodern version. This will also involve
a discussion of postmodern poetics as such, esp. the function of parody
and pastiche as well as other intertextual techniques in postmodern
fiction.
Postmodern genre novels:
John Crowley: Little, Big
(1981)
Cormac Mc Carthy: Blood
Meridian
(1985)
Thomas Pynchon: Mason &
Dixon
(1997)
Jonathan Lethem: Motherless
Brooklyn
(1999)
Theory:
Marjorie Perloff (ed.): Postmodern
Genres (University
of Oklahoma Press, 1989)
David Duff (ed.): Modern Genre
Theory
(Longman, 2000)
Simon Dentith: “Is Nothing
Sacred:
Parody and the Postmodern” in Parody
(Routledge New Critical
Idiom, 2000)
Graham Allen: “Postmodern
Conclusions” in Intertextuality
(Routledge New
Critical Idiom, 2000)
Histories of individual
genres, fx.:
Stephen Baker:
“Postmodernity
and
the Historical Novel” in The Fiction
of Postmodernity
(Edinburgh University Press, 2000)
Marty Roth: Foul and
Fair Play:
Reading Genre in Classic Detective
Fiction (University
of Georgia Press, 1995)
David J. Stevens: The Word
Rides
Again: Rereading the Frontier in
American Fiction
(Ohio University Press, 2002)
Lee Clark Mitchell: Westerns:
Making
the Man in Fiction and Film (U. of
Chicago Press, 1996)
Neil Cornwell: The Literary
Fantastic: From Gothic to Postmodernism
(Harvester/Wheatsheaf, 1990)
Postmodern poetics, fx.:
Linda Hutcheon: A Poetics of
Postmodernism
(Routledge, 1988)
Brian McHale: Constructing
Postmodernism
(Routledge, 1992)
13.
American Icons
- A Cultural
Studies Seminar/BS - Spring 2003/Fall 2006
The aim of this course is
to investigate the construction and
dissemination of iconic status in an American cultural context.
Some initial questions can
be raised: How and why do specific persons
(fx. Elvis or Marilyn), or objects (fx. the Barbie doll or the
World Trade Center towers) become familiarized to an extent where we
begin to hear them labelled as ‘American
icons’?
Which historical
developments can we trace in the development of icon status? Is there a
cultural acceleration at play, so that icon-hood is attained more
quickly towards the end of the 20th century; and are icons increasingly
generationally specific, so that older icons slip out of the ‘pantheon’
of icons? (Rudolph Valentino or Charles Lindbergh are examples of
pre-WW II icons that no longer spark universal recognition) What
symbiosis exists between the development of new media and the
construction of cultural icons? What functions do icons have in the
(popular) cultural field, i.e. what referentiality positions do they
establish? Are we witnessing modern forms of worship/idolatry in
connection with cultural icons, as the origin of the word might
suggest? If so, which, and how do icons tie in with developments in
spiritual culture? What are the relations between phenomena such as ‘fandom’,
‘cult
status’, ‘celebrity’,
‘fame’
and the attainment of
iconic status? Is there a necessary connection between icon-hood and
death? Are icons gender and race specific in their construction? Do all
icons involve a story of struggle and rise through a class hierarchy?
Which connections exist between icon-hood and nation-hood
(American-ness)?
The course will commence
with an attempt to theorize the concept of
cultural icons by drawing on semiotics (iconicity) and the cultural
history of religion (cult; worship). After this introduction to
icon-theory, we will proceed to look at some of the earliest American
icons, associated with various American mythologies, fx. Puritanism,
Frontier ideologies, Rags to Riches tales etc., and subsequently bring
the idea of cultural icons into the 20th Century. This will lead to the
sketching out of a provisional typology of icons: Heroes and villains
(crime, sports, exploration etc.); Stars (movies, music etc.); Great
Men (and Women) (politics, movements etc.); Artists (painters, poets,
writers etc.)
After this each session
will be devoted to the close reading of one or
more icon(s). The selection will focus on post-WW II figures which are
all based on real people from all of the above categories. The crucial
decade for icon formation will be shown to be the 1960s, partly because
of the political and cultural turbulence of that decade, partly because
of the proliferation of image through TV, film and mass events during
that decade. The icons will be read through their manifestations in
images and other texts; through their own (auto-biographical) words,
sounds and images; through the key (other-authored) texts that
establish their status as icons; and finally through ‘parasitical’
texts that enhance and/or exploit an already established icon-status
(films, biographies, songs, fictions, etc. - often parodic and
satirical in intent).
Preliminary list of icons:
Elvis Presley, James Dean,
Marilyn Monroe
Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan,
Jerry Garcia
Martin Luther King, Malcolm
X
John F. Kennedy, Jackie O.
Mohammed Ali, Andy Warhol,
Allen Ginsberg
Patty Hearst, Jane Fonda
Ronald Reagan
14. New York in Historiographic Metafiction - (Spring 2004)
Authors and works:
Michael Chabon: The Amazing
Adventures of Kavalier & Clay (2001)
Mark Helprin: Winter's Tale
(1983)
Steven Millhauser, Martin
Dressler:
The Tale of an American Dreamer (2001)
Theory and aproaches:
Metafiction
– Mark Currie (ed.): Metafiction (Longman, 1995)
Historiographic
metafiction –
Linda Hutcheon: A
Poetics of
Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction (Routledge, 1988)
Magical
realism – Lois
Parkinson Zamora
& Wendy B. Faris (eds.): Magical
Realism: Theory, History, Community (Duke, 1995)
Meta-realism
& realism –
Michael Riffaterre: Truth
in Fiction
(Johns Hopkins, 1990)
Description:
The topography of New York
is particularly appealing for novelists who
seek the broad canvas so typically employed in historical novels,
magical realism and the overlapping mode of historiographic
metafiction. The works chosen here all share, at least, the following
features:They have a historical setting; they play out on the
colourful, larger than life canvas of New York; and most importantly
they feature a tension between realistic description and playfully
destabilizing language and narrational effects, such as the ones we
know from metafiction, romances of various kind (detective novels,
fantasy and science fiction) and magical realism.
The aim of the course is to
focus on the role given to New York as
setting (i.e. reading its literary topography), and to examine how the
description of setting colours our reading of characters, themes and
narration in these texts. It is in such descriptive passages that we
particularly find a tension between the reality effect and
metafictional devices. The course proposes to develop a meta-realist
reading of the works in question and thus indirectly come to a deeper
understanding of the workings of the hybrid genre and mode labels
mentioned above.
Course plan:
Week
1:
Introduction
to the field (no theory reading)
Michael
Chabon – first third of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &
Clay
Week
2:
Patricia
Waugh: “What is metafiction and why are they saying such awful things
about
it?” (in Currie (ed.))
Michael
Chabon – middle third of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &
Clay
Week
3:
Linda
Hutcheon: “Historiographic metafiction” (in Currie (ed.))
Michael
Chabon – final third of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier &
Clay
Week
4:
Wendy
B. Faris: “Scheherezade’s Children: Magical Realism and Postmodern
Fiction” (in
Zamora & Faris (eds.))
Mark
Helprin – first third of Winter's
Tale
Week
5:
Rawdon
Wilson: “The Metamorphoses of Fictional Space: Magical Realism” (in
Zamora & Faris (eds.))
Mark
Helprin – middle third of Winter's
Tale
Week
6:
Theo
L. D’haen: “Magic Realism and Postmodernism: Decentering Privileged
Centers” (in
Zamora & Faris (eds.))
Mark
Helprin – final third of Winter's
Tale
Week
7:
Linda
Hutcheon: “Theorizing the postmodern: toward a poetics” (in Hutcheon)
Steven
Millhauser – first half of Martin Dressler: The Tale of an American
Dreamer
Week
8:
Michael
Riffaterre: “Truth in Diegesis” (in Riffaterre)
Steven
Millhauser – second half of Martin Dressler: The Tale of an
American Dreamer
15. Writing California/BS
- Fall 2004
This course aims to present
a number of ways in which place and writing
can meet. The textualized location of choice is California, with a
specific bias towards representations of rural California(s) of the
past, present and future. The genres of writing presented will include
fiction (also science fiction/fantasy); poetry; and non-fiction in the
form of nature writing, travel writing, anthropology texts, memoirs and
(auto) biographies etc. Writers will include Ursula LeGuin, Richard
Brautigan, Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac, Gary Snyder, John Muir, Barry
Lopez, Alfred and Theodora Kroeber. The theoretical background for the
course will be provided by discussions of place and setting in literary
theory, as well as a general discussion of representation/mimesis and
identity as currently employed in cultural and literary studies. Texts
will include: John Brinckerhoff Jackson: A Sense of
Place, a Sense of
Time; Michaels, Reid
& Scherr (eds.): West of the
West: Imagining
California
Primary texts:
Ursula K. LeGuin: Always
Coming Home
Richard Brautigan: A
Confederate
General from Big Sur
Henry Miller: Big Sur and
the
Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch
Jack Kerouac: The Dharma
Bums;
Big
Sur
Gary Snyder: Riprap; The Practice
of the Wild
(excerpts); A Place in
Space (excerpts)
John Muir: Mountain
Thoughts
(excerpts)
Barry Lopez: Desert Notes; River Notes; Field Notes (excerpts); The
Rediscovery of North America
(excerpts)
Alfred Kroeber: Handbook of
the
Indians of California
(excerpts)
Theodora Kroeber: Ishi in Two
Worlds
(excerpts)
16. Scottish
Postmodern Fiction -
Spring 2005
Authors and works:
Iain Banks: The Crow Road
(1992)
Alasdair Gray: Poor Things (1992)
Irvine Welch: Trainspotting
(1993)
Jim Kelman: How late it
was, how late
(1994)
Christopher Brookmyre: One Fine Day
in the Middle of the Night (1999)
Andrew Crumey: Mr. Mee (2000)
Is there a peculiarly
Scottish postmodernism?
These novels seem to insist
both on their particularity as Scottish
texts (whether in their topography, their language quirks, or their
(postcolonial) political obsessions with independence and separate
identity), as well as on their postmodern qualities (whether in their
non-linear story-telling, genre mixing, use of historiographic
metafictional techniques, or their obsession with the break-down of
grand narratives of religion and science). Thus they form part of a
hitherto little discussed canon of Scottish postmodern fiction which
this course will examine in the light of literary history as well as in
the light of postmodern and postcolonial poetics - with a view to
defining the Scottish particularism in this body of texts.
Background:
Wallace & Stevenson: The
Scottish Novel since the Seventies
Cairns Craig: The Modern
Scottish
Novel: Narrative and the National Imagination
Linda Hutcheon: A Poetics of
Postmodernism
Brian McHale: Postmodernist
Fiction
Stephen Baker: The Fiction
of
Postmodernity
17.
Passing...
- Fall 2005
This course examines the
notion of passing
as an essential part of identity
construction in 20th literature and film. Malcontent with one’s
place within the various identity hierarchies, individuals have always
tried to better or protect their position through passing for something
or someone else. Taking advantage of the fact that identities are
discursively constructed and transmitted thorugh texts, one can use the
notion and dynamics of passing in texts to examine historically bound
representations of identities. The six main discursive differences in
the 20th century pertain to race,
gender, class, nation, belief, and age. Each will be examined
as a discourse of identity construction through one illustrative filmic
or literary text. The periods investigated are the interwar
years, the Cold War/Eisenhower years, and the beginning and end of the
postmodern period.
Race: Nella
Larsen: Passing (1929)
Class: F. Scott
Fitzgerald: The Great
Gatsby (1926)
Nation: Don Siegel
(director), Daniel Mainwaring (pseudonym: Geoffrey Holmes
(screenwriter)): Invasion of
the Body Snatchers (1956)
(Film based on novel by Jack Finney)
Belief: Jack Kerouac: Dharma Bums (1958)
Gender: Kimberley
Pierce (director & screenwriter): Boys
Don’t Cry (1999)
Age: Hal Ashby
(director), Colin Higgins (screenwriter): Harold and
Maude (1971)
The course will build on a
background of twentieth century American
literary and cultural history (course book: Passing: Identity and Interpretation in
Sexuality, Race and Religion (eds. María Carla
Sánchez & Linda Schlossberg), NYU Press, 2001), and the
theoretical framework will be
based on the notion of difference discourses. There will be an
introductory lecture on difference discourses and social
constructivism, followed by one session on each text/main difference.
The final session will indicate some trends in the current discursive
fields in early 21st century American literature and film.
18. Narratives
of Disorder - Disorders of Narrative - Spring 2006
What is order, what is
disorder? Consecution
of temporal events (things happen in sequences which are easy to
follow,
flashbacks and –forwards are clearly marked) and causality (cause
precedes
effect) is normally regarded as a prerequisite for understanding
narratives.
What happens when narratives become disorderly by violating the
principles of
consecution?
One approach might be to
look at
narratives about disorder, or narratives where protagonists
or narrators
suffer from disorders. Such disorders as amnesia, attention
deficiencies,
involuntary tics and compulsions (such as Tourette Syndrome symptoms),
and
other perception and communication related disorders, such as
autism/Asperger’s
syndrome or certain forms of schizophrenia all pose challenges to
narratives:
interruptions, lacunae, disruptions, inversions, surpluses can all
become
narrative manifestations of these disorders. Can non-sufferers of these
disorders still decode such disturbed narratives? (If so, why and how?)
Can we
even learn things from them that we cannot learn from more orderly
narratives?
A proposition
would be that by
reading both fictional and non-fictional disorder narratives, we might
gain
insights into both the orders and disorders of brains and psyches and
the workings of narratives as a medium of carrying meaning.
A
preliminary corpus of such
narratives would consist of at least the following books (an marks a book we shall read in
full for the course):
Oliver Sacks: The Man
Who Mistook His
Wife
for a Hat: Clinical Tales (1985) (excerpts)
Mark Richard: Fishboy: A
Ghost's Tale
(1993)
Chuck Palahniuk: Fight Club
(1996)
Gwyn Hyman
Rubio: Icy
Sparks (1998)
Jonathan Lethem: Motherless
Brooklyn
(1999)
Jonathan
Lethem (ed.): The Book of
Amnesia
(2000) (excerpts)
Alan Lightman: The
Diagnosis
(2000)
Myla Goldberg: Bee
Season
(2001)
Don
De Lillo: The Body Artist
(2001)
Craig
Clevenger: The
Contortionist's
Handbook (2002)
Nicholson
Baker: A Box of Matches
(2003)
Mark Haddon: The
Curious
Incident of
the Dog
in the Night-time (2003)
Theory:
Narrative theory, narratology: H. Porter
Abbott: The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative; Paul Cobley: Narrative;
Shlomith
Rimmon-Kenan: Narrative
Fiction: Contemporary Poetics;
Gerard Genette: Narrative
Discourse: An Essay in Method
Trauma theory: Cathy Caruth: Trauma:
Explorations in Memory; Geoffrey Hartman: “On Traumatic Knowledge
and
Literary Studies” in New Literary History 26.3 (1995) 537-563
Story telling and functional theory: Richard
Kearney: On Stories (Thinking in Action); Michael Roemer: Telling
Stories: Postmodernism and the Invalidation of Traditional Narrative
19.
Scientific Discourses in Literature - Fall 2007
The aim of this course is
to investigate the representations of science in postmodern literature
and to chart the presence of scientific discourses as legitimizing
explanations for human activity and agency. Some of the questions we
shall address are: Which types of scientific discourses proliferate in
postmodern novels? What are the discourses of the hard sciences, such
as physics, particularly good at capturing, compared to those of softer
sciences, such as biology? What specific functions do pure science
discourses culled from mathematics and logic fulfil in literature?
Where is the common ground between literaure and science - in
philosophy, perhaps? What are some of the relations between literature
and chaos
and complexity theory on the one hand and narratology on the other?
What happens to representations of emotions in literature inspired by
scientific world-views?
Primary texts:
Alan Lightman (1993): Einstein's
Dreams (excerpts)
Andrew Crumey (1994): Music in a
Foreign
Language
Jonathan Lethem (1997): As She
Climbed
Across the Table
Secondary literature:
Lyotard: The Postmodern Condition: A
Report on Knowledge (1979)
Jean Baudrillard: “The Precession of Simulacra” (1981)
David Harvey: “Time-Space Compression and the
Postmodern Condition” (1989)
Ursula Heise: Chronoschisms (1997) (excerpt)
Brian McHale: Constructing Postmodernism (1992)
(excerpt)
20.
Sense and
Non-sense - (not
scheduled at present/devised to be team taught with Camelia Elias)
The aim of this course is
both to interpret literary and theoretical
texts and to theorize interpretation itself, especially with a view to
understanding how interpretation works in the case of limit-texts that
resist interpretation - or in other words: what can we do to make sense
of non-sense? What is is that attracts us to non-sensical texts, and
how can we engage with them if we cannot ultimately interpret them? We
will present theories that focus on aesthetic response and reception
aesthetics to offer inroads into what seems like either deliberately
obscure or hermetic texts, or playfully nonsensical texts. The course
also has a historical dimension in that the texts read illustrate how
non-sensicality is construed in different periods in literary history.
Primary texts:
Lewis Carroll, Alice in
Wonderland
and Through the
Looking-Glass
Gertrude Stein, Tender
Buttons
and Here I Am
and Look at Me Now
(excerpts)
Walter Abish, “Ardor/Awe/Atrocity” from In the
Future Perfect
Ursula Krammer Maynard, Performing
Postmodernity
(excerpts)
Avital Ronell, The
Telephone Book
(excerpts)
Theoretical texts
(excerpted in course compendium):
Umberto Eco, The Limits
of
Interpretation
E.D. Hirsch, Validity
in
Interpretation
Wolfgang Iser, The Act of
Reading
Hans Robert Jauss, Towards an
Aesthetics of Reception
Ruth Lorand, A Portrait
of
Interpretation
Warren Motte, Playtexts: Ludics in
Contemporary Literature
Ruth E. Burke, The Games
of Poetics:
Ludic Criticism and Postmodern Fiction