Sneak Peek

Here’s the blog for one of my fall courses, Postmodern Literature. The description follows. You can find a complete syllabus, including a list of books, as a PDF down the right-hand column.

No two surveys of postmodern literature will look alike, and this class is no exception. While we will read some important authors and some important books, our readings will in no way be comprehensive, or even necessarily representative of “postmodernism.” The centerpiece for the course, temporally and otherwise, will be the events of September 11, 2001. Approximately half of our reading will be from works published before that day, and half after. Whether 9/11 is deserving of such a pivotal position in our literary and artistic imaginations, whether it means the end of postmodernism, remains to be seen. 9/11 in any case will not be our sole topic of conversation or point of reference. Its image, however, will prove inescapable, from the cover of the longest work we will read, Don Delillo’s Underworld, to its afterimage in Art Spiegelman’s newly-published graphic novel In the Shadow of No Towers. Related themes for the course will include cities and/as texts, the role of visual and graphical forms in contemporary narrative, and the transition, of both books and society at large, to a global information culture.

This is a plain vanilla MT blog; my other class, Computer and Text, will be making use of Liz Lawley’s courseware software.

Thanks to Chuck for the link that led to the image.