Reacting to the horrors of World War II and the period of decolonization, postmodernism has been questioning the humanistic assumptions of modernism while extending and sometimes transforming the earlier period’s avant-garde techniques through such currents as the new novel, absurdism, minimalism, magic realism, etc. Each offering of this course will study postmodern literature and culture from a specific perspective.
Spring 12: Martin (10A)
Tears, Love, Happiness: Feminine Territories, Feminist Readings (Identical to Women's and Gender Studies 54.1)
Tears, Love, Happiness: Feminine Territories/Feminist Readings is a cross-cultural and interdisciplinary rethinking of classical Hollywood melodrama and how it becomes a cultural imaginary for writers interested in understanding the role mass culture plays in the articulation of historical memory and political resistance. With the help of cultural theorists who have carefully examined the connections between consumerism and citizenry, we will examine the "cultural body" of classical Hollywood melodrama in its many contexts and study the ways in which this "body," in both its literal and symbolic sense, becomes a feminine or "feminized" one. We will approach melodrama as both an aesthetics of cultural hegemony and as a language of resistance to those cultural powers. Poststructuralist film studies were the first to reclaim the "highness" of melodramatic texts by reinscribing melodrama's defining features as modes of ironic distance or ideological critique. While a valid avenue of interpretation, this course will explore a different position and rethink the issues of "excess" and "affect" (melodrama's defining features) as new philosophical and cognitive avenues for reading the "reason of emotion." We will focus on the role that the Hollywood rendering of mass culture plays in different historical contexts (US, Latin America, and Europe), analyze the political importance of tears, and look at the ways specific literary texts use that universal locally. Topics include socio-political repression, the site of social agency, politics and "feeling," cultural, national, and gender identities, and historical memory. Dist: LIT; WCult: CI.
