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Index # - 52878

Distribution Requirement:  A5, B

Wednesday – 4:30 p.m. 

MU 207

John McClure

Postmodern Fiction and Life Philosophies

Literature shares with philosophy and social theory an interest in what Leo Bersani calls “styles of being”: life philosophies, life practices, projects of self-fashioning. According to Bersani, the novel is a privileged site for the evaluation of both conventional and experimental styles of being. It is designed for “testing the life and death potentialities of certain styles of being”; thus, the “fate of a certain character, as it slowly takes shape in the course of a novel, reveals the value of his or her style, its complicity with life or with death."

(Bersani, A Future for Astyanax, 197).

Early discussions of postmodernity tended to stress the many ways in which contemporary fiction challenges the notion of the coherent, autonomous subject and discredits the life philosophies it sponsors. But more recently, critical attention has turned to the strategies this fiction proposes for negotiating experiences of destabilization and scattering. Foucault’s late work on self-formation exerts a crucial influence here, but feminist, Marxist, and postcolonial theorists of the postmodern (Haraway, Harvey, Clifford, Mbembe) also study  and recommend postmodern projects of self-formation. This course will explore several questions. What does postmodern fiction have to say about such projects? What does it contribute to theory’s effort to imagine new modes of being to meet the philosophical and social provocations of the times? And what does it contribute to sociology’s project of identifying and evaluating the popular ideologies of self-fashioning sponsored by  neo-liberal capitalism, postcolonial migrancy, media culture, time-space compression, and “the state of war”?

In our readings, we will explore the philosophies of self-fashioning advocated by James Clifford, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Pierre Hadot, Donna Haraway,  Fredric Jameson, and others. We will examine studies of popular self-fashioning by David Harvey, Fredric Jameson, Achille Mbembe, and Misao Miyoshi. We’ll use two recent works of literary analysis--Frank Lentricchia and Jody McAuliffe’s Crimes of Art and Terror and Sean McCann and Michael Szalay’s “Do You Believe in Magic?: Literary Thinking After the New Left”--as models for the critical examination of life philosophies and practices in contemporary fiction. And we will study literary texts such as J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Tony Kushner’s play Angels in America, Tony Morrison’s Paradise, Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient,  Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland, Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses, and Leslie Silko’s Ceremony.

Requirements: in addition to the reading, two papers and an oral presentation: