LIT 2010 Spring 2018 Michaels

We’ve heard it all before. Heroes and villains; budding romances; good guys turning bad, bad guys turning good; plot twists; moments of truth; humankind vs. society, nature, or themselves—the tropes go on and on, and we’ve all heard it before. This may be a cynical response to storytelling, and yet, many of us feel the fatigue of worn-out fictions, even as we feel compelled to consume them, live by them, and tell them ourselves. Stories, both real and imaginative, circulate around us every day, and sometimes we have trouble discerning what in fact is real and what is fake, especially as factual stories can leave us cold while imaginative stories can cause us to laugh, cry, sweat, panic—very real responses. Many writers of post-1945 fiction felt the same way, that modernism and its forebears had exhausted all possible narrative forms and that there was nothing new under the sun. At the same time, many of history’s grand narratives weren’t panning out: The Enlightenment could lead to freedom, but it could also lead to imperialism and horrific atrocities done in its name; the rags-to-riches American Dream was beginning to look like a stalled plot; and Marxism’s revolution of the proletariat may not have brought an end of dialectical materialism after all.

And so as one story ends, another begins: the emergence of a new kind of fiction—one no longer so naïve about the process of storytelling, a fiction that is post-modern, aware of itself, ironic, playful and non-committal, deconstructive, intertextual, etc. In fact, in the spirit of things, we should recognize that “the emergence of a new kind of fiction” is already a fiction, and one that is suspect no less; for modernists had been ironic, intertextual, and self-conscious in their fictions, which is to say nothing of Tristram Shandy (1759) or the countless other earlier texts that featured intertextuality and self-awareness. Nevertheless, in this course we will look at mostly post-’45 stories and novels that can be considered metafictional, texts that are self-reflexive and/or that experiment radically with literary conventions, pushing the limits of what fiction can do. Along the way, and through these texts, we will also consider the nature and significance of fictions more broadly, as they comprise histories, conventions and values, narratives of the self, and so on.