Literature of the American 1980s
This semester we will look closely at how a recent American decade invented itself. Interestingly, this self-invention worked in two ways: on the one hand, it conjures to mind images of Ray-ban-wearing Yuppies reelecting Reagan, making piles of money on Wall Street, and partying all night to New Wave music and cocaine; on the other hand, it gives us postmodernism, a slippery self-description of the 80s that focuses on affectlessness, a loss of history, and a love of the superficial. To better see how these two models—excess and affect—self-consciously work together, we will move back and forth between fiction and critical theory. Our goal will be to understand the common reading of the postmodern 80s and at the same time look at disruptions to this pervasive framework.

Lots of reading, multiple short papers leading to a final essay.
Texts may include Philip Roth's The Counterlife, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Don DeLillo’s White Noise, Jay McInerney’s Bright Lights, Big City, Kathy Acker’s Great Expectations, William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy, Maxine Hong Kingston’s Tripmaster Monkey, David B. Feinberg’s Eighty-Sixed, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and shorter readings from Fredric Jameson, Jean-François Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Jürgen Habermas, and Alice Jardine.