32201

WiSe 21/22: Reframing the Unfinished in the American Novel of the 1990s

Simone Sannio

Information for students

Please note: This course will be held in-person (on campus).

Comments

This course will focus on a selection of novels from the 1990s that include within their plots fictitious unfinished texts, or other unfinished works of art, as media of textual self-reflection. Our twofold aim will be to define the varied use of the incomplete as an aesthetic principle in this literary form and to retrace its transformations during a transitional period in US culture. To this end, we will read both fiction and non-fiction writings by some of the defining novelists of the era, including Don DeLillo, Michael Chabon, and Colson Whitehead. Besides looking at the peculiar ways in which these authors subvert the Aristotelian ideal of narrative closure, we will also consider how their works respond to multiple “narratives of the End” that were popular in the 1990s, most notably by exposing at the textual level the decade’s obsession with endings. For this reason, each primary text will be framed within the larger debate over the state of literature at the close of the 20th century, a pivotal historical and cultural moment that coincided in the popular and scholarly imagination with a series of perceived “conclusions” to which these novels resist in varying degrees: among them, the end of the Cold War and the end of the millennium, but also the so-called “end of history”, the end of postmodernism, the “end of the book” as a medium, and the often-announced “death of the novel”. // Students planning to take this course should enroll via Blackboard before the first session. close

16 Class schedule

Regular appointments

Tue, 14:00 - 16:00 16 Class schedule

Tue, 2021-10-19 14:00 - 16:00

Lecturers:
Simone Sannio