SoSe 20: PS-Surveying English Literatures: "No self is an island" : Postmodern Fiction
Justus Conrad Gronau
Comments
This seminar serves as an introduction to key themes and techniques of postmodern fiction. If postmodern art, in general, is marked by a rejection of universals, totalities and essences, its literary manifestation also questions grand narratives about society, history, the subject, identity, and truth. As a particularly self-reflexive enterprise, postmodern fiction frequently questions realist ways of literary representation, rejecting notions of stable structures as well as the linearity and coherence of storytelling. In the first part of the seminar, our analysis of several postmodern short stories by acclaimed authors (e.g., Carter, McEwan, Josipovici, to mention but a few) will be supplemented by a reflection of crucial texts in postmodern theory (e.g., Derrida, Lyotard, Lacan). Of central importance will be the postmoderns' literary negotiation of subjectivity, identity, and the self. But "no self is an island", as the influential French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard observes about The Postmodern Condition, "each exists in a fabric of relations that is now more complex and mobile than ever before." This complex fabric of relations becomes especially apparent in Salman Rushdie's famous novel Midnight’s Children which, towards the end of the seminar, we will analyse with regard to its postmodern aesthetic, discussing concepts such as historiographical metafiction, unreliable narration, decentred/fragmented subjectivity, and discontinuous narrative.
Course material will be made available on Blackboard. Students need to acquire: Rushdie, Salman. Midnight’s Children. London: Everyman’s Library, 1995. ISBN: 9781857152173.
close12 Class schedule
Regular appointments