Winter 2012: Milich (10A)
From Modernism to Postmodernism
Fredric Jameson once described postmodernity as "the effort to take the temperature of the age without instruments and in a situation in which we are not even sure there is so coherent a thing as an 'age,' or 'zeitgeist' any longer." Taking the temperature of the age through a comparative reading of modern and postmodern American literature, we will try to seize the change from one era and movement to the other by way of elucidating a number of postmodern and poststructuralist concepts, such as "the exhaustion of literature," "the death of author," "the world as text," "the free-floating signifier," "the end of meta-narratives," "time-space compression," "self-reflexive literature," "the blurring of genres," "intertextuality," "entropy" and the like. Movies, art works, and some theoretical texts will enhance the literary readings and the comparative perspective, which includes texts by modern and postmodern writers such as James, Faulkner, Stein, Hemingway, Abish, Sukenick, Morrison, and Pynchon. LIT/W