ENGL 375(S) After the Ashes: Modern, Post-modern, Post-Colonial, Contemporary

This seminar will explore post-World War II English language literature in an interdisciplinary and global context, and will focus extensively on contemporary (i.e. 1990s) literature, visual art, and theory. What, we shall be asking, is the relation between the modern, the post-modern, the post-colonial and the contemporary, and what do these terms, used mainly for convenience, have to do with history? How do post-War literature, art and theory inform one another? What can "contemporary" literature teach us about the past, about the future, about time itself? The course will begin with a brief analysis of Beckett's Texts for Nothing, and a consideration of the crisis of representation raised by the holocaust. We then will explore novels, poetry, and political writing from the 50s, 60s and 70s (Nabokov, Plath, Fanon, Malcolm X) and salient theories of post-structuralism (Lacan, Derrida). We will read emblematic "post-modern" texts by DeLillo and Kathy Acker, discuss the film Blade Runner, and re-consider some of the art of the 80s (Salle, Nauman, Sherman, Basquiat, Koons). In the second half of the class, we will read recent work by Lydia Davis, Derek Walcott, Mary Gaitskell, Sapphire, and Salman Rushdie; view the film Safe and the artwork of Damien Hirst, Mona Hatoum, Glenn Ligon and several others; and discuss recent theoretical work by Judith Butler and Paul Gilroy. At issue throughout are questions concerning trauma, irony, globalization, "newness," and the representability of historical change.
Requirements: three 2-page position papers and one final paper of 10-12 pages.
Prerequisite: English 101, or permission of the instructor. (Some familiarity with literary or art theory would be helpful, but enthusiasm is more important than expertise.) (Criticism)

Hour: ISRAEL