CMLT 375 - Postmodern World Literatures

This course investigates postmodernist literature and the light that it casts on contemporary life and subjectivity, particularly the ways in which phenomena such as globalization, multiculturalism, consumerism, and the electronic media profoundly shape our experience of the world, one another, and ourselves. Readings include brief theoretical texts that help illumine the meaning of “postmodernism” and its associated concepts such as (inter) textuality, deconstruction, the nouveau roman, discourse, metafiction, metanarrative, pastiche, schizophrenia, and simulacra, among others. Theorists engaged include Fredric Jameson, Umberto Eco, Brian McHale, Jean Baudrillard, and Jean-François Lyotard. Literary texts include works by Marguerite Duras (The Lover), Alain Robbe-Grillet (La Maison de rendez-vous), Don DeLillo (White Noise), Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose), Milan Kundera (The Book of Laughter and Forgetting), and Art Spiegelman (Maus). (Group III) (Writing Option)