Module Information

Postwar American fiction is the site of innovative metafictional interventions that threw narrative conventions wide open. This module has a particular focus on questions of periodisation, “experimentalism”, modernism/postmodernism, metafiction, the representation of the city, and issues of spatiality. The texts will be treated as springboards into a particular author’s wider oeuvre; or indicative of thematic areas of representation or conceptual ideas about narrative and subjectivity that are the focus of several different authors. Alongside the literary authors, students will be expected to engage with works by theoreticians and cultural critics who have intersected with the metafictional innovation of the past 60 years. The aim of the module is to develop students’ critical consciousness of the relevant terminology, key historical and cultural concepts, and of the major ideas that inform this literary trajectory or persuasion in postwar decades.

Estimated Student Workload
20 hours – seminars
5 hours – student presentations
30 hours – seminar preparation
5 hours – preparation for presentation
90 hours – self study and reading
50 hours – researching and writing essay

The module will focus on the following texts:
Week 1 Introduction
Week 2 Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
Week 3 John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse (1968)
Week 4 William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
Week 5 Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (1986)
Week 6 Don DeLillo, Mao II (1991)
Week 7 Toni Morrison, Jazz (1992)
Week 8 Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
Week 9 Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)
Week 10 David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996)