Reading the Postmodern: Writing and Rewriting Genre, Gender, and Culture

This course in postmodern literary practice explores the radical experiments taking place in narrative design and poetics from the mid-twentieth century to the present.  Each course offering will explore a single writer whose work captures the essence of this disruptive critique and departure from modernism and the Enlightenment tradition. Our readings focus on the postmodern writer in the context of our cultural moment. We’ll study the politics of human identity, as new definitions for subjectivity emerge from the critical theory that has shaped late twentieth century intellectual history. By the end of the class you will see that the postmodern writer weaves the three realms of genre, gender, and culture into a text that often transgresses their boundaries, to produce a body of work that challenges our expectations for conventional literature.