Module description
Critics may never have agreed that there was such a thing as 'postmodernist literature', but there is no denying that conversations regarding its putative existence dominated studies of contemporary literature in the 1980s and 1990s. The prevalence of the postmodern literature rubric arose in part because of a widely recognized synergy between certain strains of contemporary writing and the poststructuralist theory generated by thinkers such as Jean-François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard. To a great extent, texts came to be designated as postmodern when they could be read as enacting the epistemological stances and cultural diagnostics associated with this body of theory, which forms part of a larger modernity story of secularisation and technological development. Although the postmodernist rubric has clearly faded from view since the start of the twenty-first century, it is not yet evident what paradigm or paradigms will take its place, or in what capacities theory interacts with literary works in the twenty-first century. And while it is clear that much contemporary writing itself enacts critique, literary critics often revert to vocabularies of postmodernism when they describe the strategies it adopts to do so. But is more required of a theory capable of understanding this century's literary innovations?
This seminar will investigate these questions by examining a range of topics that are prominent in both contemporary literature and theory, including biopolitics, disposability, social reproduction, settler colonialism and antiblackness. Rather than applying theory to literature, we will consider to what extent each register tells us something about the other and what particular approach each offers to the topic at hand. In the process, we will consider issues such as the following: How sharp is the break with postmodernism we are witnessing? Is it one of form or only of content? In what ways do current directions in theory and literature hark back to the anticolonial, feminist and queer liberation struggles of the 1960s and 70s? As there is no critical consensus as yet regarding these and other questions concerning twenty-first century literature, students will have the opportunity to produce original work on texts that have as yet been little studied.
Educational aims & objectives
To provide students with an understanding of the complex and uneven relationship between contemporary fiction and theory; to explore the costs and benefits of existing methodological approaches to contemporary fiction; to offer students an opportunity to conceptualise fiction after 1999 in new and experimental ways.