Course
Times: Tuesdays, 7-9:30 PM, in 312 EPB
Office
Hours: Tues, 4-5:30 PM, in 455 EPB; Wed, 2:30-4 PM, in 401 Jefferson
E-mail/Phone:
rob-latham@uiowa.edu; 335-0465 (EPB office); 335-0035 (JB office)
Required
Texts (at Prairie Lights Bookstore):
Donald Barthelme, Snow White
Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays
Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo
Thomas
Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow
Joseph McElroy, Lookout
Cartridge
Kathy
Acker, Blood and Guts in High School
Don
DeLillo, The Names
William
Gaddis, Carpenter’s Gothic
Toni
Morrison, Beloved
Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa
Stephen Wright, Going Native
Recommended
Text (at Prairie Lights):
Stephen
Weisenberger, A “Gravity’s
Rainbow” Companion
Also
Required (available at Zephyr Copies):
Course
Reader
Description:
This course brings representative works of postmodernist fiction into alignment
with major conceptual models of postmodernity and significant theorizations of
postmodernism in literature. The goal of the course is to use theory and
fiction to mutually illuminate one another and the postmodern condition they
both embody and critique.
Requirements
and Assignments: The first requirement is preparation and attendance. Because
we meet only once per week, and because the material we’ll cover builds
cumulatively, missing class for any reason short of serious illness or other
major emergency is not a good idea. Also, your consistent participation in
dialogue—based on a focused and critical engagement with the course
materials—is absolutely essential to the success of this course. An evaluation
of your contribution to class discussion will form a major part of my
assessment of your final grade.
The
required writing is as follows: twelve brief (1-2 page) response papers and a
final 15-page essay. The response papers, which should focus on the texts we
have read in common, can be expository (explaining some issue or implication in
the texts), critical (arraigning the texts on the basis of factual or
ideological problems), and/or quizzical (formulating questions to be addressed
in our collective response to the texts). Your responses need not address all
of the texts assigned in a given week, but they should make an effort to be as
synthetic as possible, in particular by drawing the “primary” texts (the
novels) into conversation with the “secondary” texts (the critical essays, book
chapters, etc.). Feel free to use these papers to stake out strong positions
and to engage the assigned materials forcefully, though knee-jerk emotional
responses should be eschewed. You’re required to produce a total of twelve of
these responses over the course of the semester; these responses will not be
graded individually, but a cumulative grade will be assigned to them at
semester’s end. I’ll write extensive comments on the responses and return them
promptly, so you should have a good sense of how you’re doing from week to
week.
In most cases, the responses will be collected
before class begins on Tuesdays. Three times during the semester, however,
you’ll be required to circulate your responses to the class via email by 5 PM
on the preceding Monday evenings. Each student will also be required, once
during the semester, to act as an oral respondent to the papers that have been
thus circulated. These respondents will kick off our discussions by offering
brief (7-8 minute) remarks, drawing relevant connections among the papers and
raising further questions. Respondents may work from notes, but should not
simply read prepared remarks; rather, they should offer extemporaneous—and
relatively engaging—comments intended to elicit thoughtful reactions from the
class. Indeed, the respondents will essentially function as discussion leaders
for roughly the first half-hour of each class meeting. Depending on final
enrollments, there should be an average of four circulated papers and one oral
respondent per class session. (See handout for schedule.)
The final paper is geared to show your ability to bring
literature and theory into fruitful dialogue with one another by drawing upon selected
“primary” and “secondary” texts from the syllabus in some synthetic fashion.
You are strongly urged to avoid narrowly reductive arguments in which literary
texts are seen as mere illustrations of theoretical positions; rather, you
should use literature and theory to interrogate and complicate one another. You
may, if you wish, bring in materials not included on the syllabus so long as
they are clearly relevant and your treatment of them does not swamp your
coverage of the assigned texts. I’ll have much more to say about this
assignment later in the semester.
Grading:
The distribution of your grade will be as follows: 20% class participation
(including in-class oral response); 30% response papers; and 50% final paper.
Weekly Schedule:
Week 1. (8/24)
John Barth, “Lost in the Funhouse” (1967)
-----, “The Literature of Exhaustion” (1967)
-----, “The Literature of Replenishment”
(1980)
Week
2. (8/31)
Donald Barthelme, Snow White (1968)
Raymond Federman, “Surfiction:
Four Propositions In Form of An Introduction” (1975)
Fredric
Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society” (1982)
Week 3. (9/7)
Joan Didion, Play It As It Lays (1970)
Ihab Hassan, “The Literature of Silence”
(1967)
Alan Wilde, “A Map of Suspensiveness: Irony in
the Postmodern Age” (1987)
Week
4. (9/14)
Ishmael Reed, Mumbo Jumbo (1972)
Linda
Hutcheon, “Historiographic Metafiction” (1988)
-----,
“Intertextuality, Parody, and the Discourses of History” (1988)
Week
5. (9/21)
Walter Abish, Alphabetical Africa (1974)
Marcel
Benabou, “Rule and Constraint” (1983)
Week
6. (9/28)
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), through p.
278
Timothy Melley, “Agency Panic and the Culture
of Conspiracy” (2002)
Week
7. (10/5)
Pynchon,
Gravity’s Rainbow, though p. 532
Zygmunt
Bauman, “A Sociological Theory of Postmodernity” (1992)
Week
8. (10/12)
Pynchon,
Gravity’s Rainbow, through p. 760
Brian
McHale, “Modernist Reading, Postmodernist Text: The Case of Gravity's
Rainbow” (1979)
Week
9. (10/19)
Joseph
McElroy, Lookout Cartridge (1974), through p. 257
Stanley Aronowitz, “Postmodernism and
Politics” (1992)
Week
10. (10/26)
McElroy,
Lookout Cartridge (1974), through p. 531
John
Johnston, “Narrative, Delirium, Machinic Consciousness: Lookout Cartridge”
(1998)
Week
11. (11/2)
Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School (1978)
Luce Irigaray, “Women on the Market” (1978)
Judith Butler, “Bodily Inscriptions,
Performative Subversions” (1990)
Week
12. (11/9)
Don DeLillo, The Names (1982)
Iain Chambers, “Migrant Landscapes” (1994)
Week
13. (11/16)
William
Gaddis, Carpenter’s Gothic (1985)
David
Harvey, “Time-Space Compression and the Postmodern Condition” (1989)
Week
14. (11/23)
Thanksgiving
break
Week
15. (11/30)
Toni
Morrison, Beloved (1988)
Hayden
White, “Interpretation in History” (1972)
bell
hooks, “Postmodern Blackness” (1990) – available online at:
<http://www.iath.virginia.edu/pmc/text-only/issue.990/hooks.990>
Week
16. (12/7)
Stephen Wright, Going Native (1992)
Jean Baudrillard, “The Precession of
Simulacra” (1981)
-----, “The Ecstasy of
Communication” (1983)
Exam
Week
Final
papers due in my mailbox in 310 EPB by 5 PM Thursday, 12/16