11:15a-12:30p TR (70) 3 cr 


This course will be organized around the transition from modernism, in
the first half of the
20th-century, to postmodernism after World War II.  We will discuss
"modernism" and "postmodernism" as a set of literary responses to the
historical and social changes that characterize this century – that
is, we will discuss modernism and postmodernism as specifically
literary movements, but we will also place those movements in a larger
historical context.  On a literary level, the course will examine the
emergence of a modernist aesthetic of formal innovation, exemplified
by the modernist slogan "make it new," to a postmodernist aesthetic of
"recycling" characterized by techniques of pastiche, collage, and
image scavenging.  On the social and cultural levels, we will be
especially interested in the relation of modernist and postmodernist
fiction to multicultural movements in this century, especially
feminism and African-American struggles for civil rights.  We will
also pay special attention to the emergence of mass media and the
possible breakdown of distinctions between high and popular cultures,
since that breakdown is often cited as one of the main differences
between modernism and postmodernism.


Assignments will include two papers, a take-home midterm, and a final
exam.	


I expect to choose eight or nine fictional texts from this list:

Gertrude Stein,  Three Lives 

Ernest Hemingway,  The Sun Also Rises  

William Faulkner,  The Sound and the Fury  or  As I Lay
Dying  

Zora Neale Hurston,  Their Eyes Were Watching God 

Nella Larsen,  Passing  

Ralph Ellison,  Invisible Man  

John Barth,  Lost in the Funhouse  

Thomas Pynchon,  The Crying of Lot 49  

Ishmael Reed,  Mumbo-Jumbo  or  Flight to Canada  

Alice Walker,  Meridian  

Mark Leyner,  Et Tu, Babe  

Octavia Butler,  Kindred 

Carole Maso,  The Art Lover