Postwar American Fiction

On successful completion of this module students should be able to:

1. Critically evaluate the novels and relate their concerns to theoretical concepts and terminology.
2. Explain and synthesize key arguments concerning the definitions of modernist and postmodernist fiction
3. Compare, analyse and evaluate the experimental innovations in the texts of one author, or of several authors, drawn from the period

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
30 hours – seminar preparation
90 hours – self study and reading
60 hours – researching and writing essay

This will form part of the suite of option modules available to MA English Literature students. Following the review of English MA modules in 2015, this module has been shaped to adhere to the suggested standard departmental format. The module is an optional module that allows students to pursue their interests in modern and contemporary literature, albeit with an American focus. That said, the module will engage students in literary analysis that is rigorously informed by theoretical and historical concepts and debates to mark the progression from BA to MA study.

The module will focus on the following texts:

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 (1966)
John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse (1968)
William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984)
Paul Auster, The New York Trilogy (1986)
Don DeLillo, Mao II (1991)
Toni Morrison, Jazz (1992)
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005)
Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad (2010)
David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996)

This module is at CQFW Level 7