Instructor: Dr. Stephen doCarmo
Office: Dooling 253
Phone: 1651
E-mail: stephen.docarmo@desales.edu
Hours: M&W 3:00-4:00; Tu&Th 1:45-3:15

Required Texts
Danielewski, Mark. House of Leaves.

DeLillo, Don.  White Noise.  New York: Penguin, 1985.

Geyh, Paula, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy, eds.  Postmodern American Fiction.  New  York: W.W. Norton, 1998.

Morrison, Toni.  Beloved.  New York: Knopf, 1987.

Pynchon, Thomas.  The Crying of Lot 49.  New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1966.

Description (from DSU's Bulletin of Information)
An opportunity to explore in more depth, or from a different perspective, some aspect of American literary history.  The course may focus on a theme, a genre, a writer or a group of writers, a literary or cultural movement, or some aspect of American history or culture as it is reflected, explored, and influenced by American writers.  May be repeated with a change of subject matter and permission of Departmental Chair.  Prerequisites: MOT/Literature and Humanities 1 and 2, or permission of instructor.

Objectives
Our topic for this course is postmodernism in American literature.  Our chief objectives, then, are 1) to introduce you to notions of postmodernism as a philosophical movement, as an artistic style, and as a historical period; 2) to familiarize you with a number of contemporary American fictions often referred to as postmodernist, relating them to the three "types" of postmodernism named above; and 3) to familiarize you with a small amount of important scholarly/critical writing about postmodernism.  Since our methods will be reading, writing, and discussing, you should also leave the course a more skilled reader, writer, and public speaker than you were upon entering it.

Evaluation
Your final grade in the course will be based on five things:
1.  Regular reading quizzes (worth 15% of your final grade);
2.  An essay-based take-home midterm exam (20%)
3.  An essay-based take-home final exam (20%);
4.  A researched, roughly 7-page critical essay (30%);
5.  Your classroom participation (15%).

You'll take eight to ten unannounced reading quizzes over the course of the semester.  Each quiz will have five questions designed to test your familiarity with important plot developments in the texts assigned for that day.  They'll be the types of questions you either get totally wrong or totally right, within reason -- thus they won't deal with abstract, subjective matters like theme, tone, symbolism, etc.  And they won't be cruelly nit-picky either.  Read the assigned texts reasonably carefully and you'll do fine.

I'll give each of your quizzes a 1-5 grade -- a 5 (basically an "A") if you get all the questions right, a 1 (an "F") if you get one or none of them.  At the end of the term I'll drop your lowest grade, average the others, and translate that average into a four-point-scale grade.

Your essay-based, take-home exams (midterm and final) will require you to discuss important passages from fictions we've read in whichever half of the semester the exam is for, and/or to compare and contrast those fictions in interesting ways.  Count on doing four to five pages of reasonably polished writing for each exam.  I'll give you the writing prompts for each one a week before it's due, and I'll grade each one on an A-F scale, with +'s and -'s possible.  The due-dates for your midterm and final are on the schedule below.

Your (roughly) seven-page researched critical essay should be on one or more of the fictions we've read for class and should make some use of at least four outside "scholarly" sources.  It should also demonstrate your understanding of one or more of the types of postmodernism we'll have learned about during the course.  Beyond that, what you do in your essay is up to you.  You'll have the opportunity, though, to talk with me about what you're going to write about before it actually comes time to do it.  I'll grade your essay on an A-F scale, with +'s and -'s possible.  The due-date for your critical essay is on the schedule below.

Class participation is the final thing you need to worry about -- though if you do the reading and come to class ready to talk about your ideas with others (this will be a seminar-style course, not a lecture one), you won't have to worry much.  Provided you do stay up on the readings and do speak thoughtfully and regularly during our class meetings, you'll have no problem landing an "A" for this portion of your final grade.

At the end of the term, I'll translate all your grades into four-point-system equivalences and average out your final grade that way.  Here's how it'll work: A = 4.0, A- = 3.7, B+ = 3.3, B = 3.0, B- = 2.7, C+ = 2.3, C = 2.0, C- = 1.7, D+ = 1.3, D = 1.0, D- = .7, F = 0.

Attendance
If you're a freshman in this course, you get six free unexcused absences; after that, your final grade drops a third of a letter grade per unexcused absence.  If you're a sophomore, junior, or senior, you can take as many skips as you like, but accruing more than six unexcused absences will adversely affect the "participation" part of your final grade.

Late Work
You can't make up reading quizzes.  If you miss a quiz and your absence was excused, that quiz simply won't factor into your average at the end of the semester.  If you miss a quiz and your absence was unexcused, you have to eat a zero on it.

Your take-home exams and your critical essay you can turn in late at a penalty of one full letter grade per day.  (And that's a 24-hour day, not a next-class-meeting day).  The penalties start the moment I collect the assignments.

Course Schedule

Wednesday Jan. 16.  Introduction to the course.

Friday Jan. 18.  Discussion of my notes on postmodernism (they're included in this syllabus) and of some art prints and photos we'll look at together in class.

Monday Jan. 21.  Discussion of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, through pg. 30.

Wednesday Jan. 23.  Discussion of Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, though pg. 63.

Friday Jan. 25.  Class replaced by a viewing of Roman Polanski's 1974 film Chinatown.  We'll most likely watch it on the evening of Thursday the 24th.  More info before this date.

Monday Jan. 28.  Discussion of the remainder of The Crying of Lot 49 and of Chinatown.

Wednesday Jan. 30.  Discussion of Ihab Hassan's "Toward a Concept of Postmodernism" (586-95) in your anthology.

Friday Feb. 1.  Discussion of Donald Barthelme's "Sentence" (33-37) and Tim O'Brien's "How to Tell a True War Story" (174-83), both in your anthology.

Monday Feb. 4.  Discussion of Morrison's Beloved, through pg. ___.

Wednesday Feb. 6.  Discussion of Morrison's Beloved, through pg. ___.

Friday Feb. 8.  Discussion of Morrison's Beloved, through pg. ___.

Monday Feb. 11.  Class replaced by a screening of (most likely) Sally Potter's 1992 film Orlando.  I'll let you know when and where we'll be watching it before this date.

Wednesday Feb. 13.  Discussion of the remainder of Morrison's Beloved and of Orlando.  I'll also give you the writing prompts for your take-home midterm on this day.

Friday Feb. 15.  Discussion of David Foster Wallace's "Lyndon," pgs. 362-93 in your anthology.

Monday Feb. 18.  Discussion of an excerpt from Art Spiegelman's Maus (295-301) and of E.L. Doctorow's "The Leather Man" (332-38), both in your anthology.

Wednesday Feb. 20.  Discussion of Bell Hooks' "Postmodern Blackness," pgs. 624-31 in your anthology.

Friday Feb. 22.  Take-home midterm exam due.  Discussion of DeLillo's White Noise, through pg. 40.

Monday Feb. 25.  Discussion of DeLillo's White Noise, through pg. 105.

Wednesday Feb. 27. Discussion of DeLillo's White Noise, through pg. 163.

Friday March 1. Discussion of DeLillo's White Noise, through pg. 203.

Monday March 11.  Discussion of DeLillo's White Noise, through pg. 271.

Wednesday March 13. Class replaced by a screening of Todd Haynes' 1998 film Safe.  I'll let you know before this date when and where we'll be watching it.

Friday March 15.  No class on this day -- your prof will be attending a conference in Toronto.

Monday March 18.  Discussion of the remainder of DeLillo's White Noise and of the Todd Haynes movie you watched -- Safe.

Wednesday March 20.  Discussion of Bobbie Ann Mason's "Shiloh" (271-81 in your anthology).

Friday March 22.  Discussion of the excerpt from Douglas Coupland's Generation X (568-73) and of the excerpt from Leyner's Tooth Imprints on a Corn Dog (242-55), both in your anthology.

Monday March 25.  Discussion of Robert Coover's "A Night at the Movies," pgs. 226-41 in your anthology.

Wednesday March 27.  Discussion of the excerpt from Jean Baudrillard's Simulacra and Simulations in your anthology (631-37).

Thursday March 28.  Discussion of Danielewski's House of Leaves, through pg. 7.  (That means you need to read the Roman-numeralized introduction to the book, too!).

Wednesday April 3.  Discussion of Danielewski's House of Leaves, through pg. 106.

Friday April 5.  Discussion of Danielewski's House of Leaves, through pg. 152.

Monday April 8.  Discussion of Danielewski's House of Leaves, through pg. 273.

Wednesday April 10.  Discussion of Danielewski's House of Leaves, through pg. 346.

Friday April 12.  Discussion of Danielewski's House of Leaves, through pg. 407.

Monday April 15.  Class replaced by a film screening.  I'll let you know what we'll be watching -- and when and where -- before this date.

Wednesday April 17.  Discussion of our film and of the remainder of Danielewski's House of Leaves.  (You only need to read through pg. 535; the "appendices" after that you can just peruse when or if you feel like it.)

Friday April 19.  Discussion of Frederic Jameson's "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" (654-65 in your anthology).

Monday April 22.  Discussion of William Gass' "In the Heart of the Heart of the Country" (66-84 in your anthology).

Wednesday April 24.  Class replaced by a screening of a videotaped production of Sam Shepard's play True West. I'll let you know before this date when and where we'll be watching it.

Friday April 26.  Discussion of True West.  I'll also give you the writing prompts for your take-home final on this day.

Monday April 29.  Class replaced by one-on-one conferences with me on your critical essays.

Wednesday May 1.  Class replaced by one-on-once conferences with me on your critical essays.

Friday May 3.  Take-home final exam due.  Course evaluations.

Your critical essay will be due to my office by 2:00 p.m. on Wednesday May 8th!
 

Stephen doCarmo's Down-and-Dirty Answer to the Question "What Is Postmodernism?"

Well....  Postmodernism is something that's been happening in -- or to -- the world since about 1960, though that date depends on which particular philosopher/cultural pundit/art critic you're listening to.  The first thing we've really got to note, though, is that the above question should probably read "What are postmodernisms?"

Since "postmodernism" means different things to different thinkers in different fields, we've got to acknowledge right off the bat a variety of types of postmodernism.  And there are three types I think it's important we acknowledge and discuss in this course: postmodernism as a philosophy, postmodernism as an artistic style, and postmodernism as a historical period.
 

Postmodernism: A Philosophy
In the mid-to-late 1960s, philosophers like Jacques Derrida, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze, and Jean-Francois Lyotard (all these guys are French, incidentally) began formulating philosophies they thought were well suited for -- or even necessitated by -- our information-laden, increasingly "globalized" world.  These guys' ideas are diverse, and it's a little dangerous to lump them all together, but I think we can identify at least two major trends in their collective works.

1.  Postmodernist philosophers are for multiplicity and difference and are against totalization and regimentation.
2.  Postmodernist philosophers believe all "truth" is constructed, not fixed, eternal, or written in the stars.

As for the first of those two things....  To say that postmodernism, as a philosophy, is for multiplicity and difference and against totalization and regimentation means it wants us to give up "totalizing" principles and ideas and accept that the world is full of ungovernable differences instead.

Postmodernist philosophers don't like any of the big ideas we've come up with to explain human nature or human history.  They don't like psychoanalysis (Freud's gift to the world) because it says all people everywhere have to struggle with and resolve the same internal psychological conflicts.  They're wary of Marxism because it would force all people everywhere to march towards a certain type of "revolutionary" society.  They don't much care for free-market capitalism, either, since it, too, would "totalize" the world and have everyone everywhere living in the same "monculture."  And they're not too hot on religion -- fundamentalist stuff, at least -- because it too often tries to "expain" the whole world in terms of some all-powerful deity's influence.

Also...postmodernist philosophers don't throw out just totalizing theories ("metanarratives," they sometimes call them) but also some ideas that have long been staples in those theories.  They don't want to hear any more, for instance, about notions of a self: they believe each of us is a multiplicity of selves, not an individual person.  They shudder at the word teleology, which names the idea that history and/or human society is moving in some unavoidable, pre-ordained direction.  And the idea of representation, or the notion that a word or image can stand in for some absent "real thing," also goes out with the bathwater.

Postmodernists don't denounce these theories and ideas because they're mean or want to wreak havoc in the world.  They're doing, it, believe it or not, because they want us to become better, more humane people.  "Totalizing" theories and ideas, they say, too often become whips we use to inflict uniformity and predictability on the world -- and on our fellow citizens in it.  Let's let that go, they say, and accept some unexplainability, unpredictability, and difference instead.  Maybe we'll all live longer.

As for that second item above -- the one about how postmodernists believe all "truth" is fabricated....  It's true.  Nothing is absolute for the postmodernist.  We construct the truths and principles we live by depending on who we are, where we are, and when we are.  Marx, for instance, may have believed all of humanity is destined for a workers' revolution, that it's just written in the stars.  A postmodernist would say Marx was seeing the "truth" of a male philosopher with certain personal experiences living in a certain part of Europe at a certain moment in the 19th century.  What seemed universally true and imminent for him when he lived looks anything but from our own vantage point early in the 21st century.

All truths, for the postmodernist philosopher, are temporary truths that reflect the interests of the people who construct them.  And again, postmodernists want us to recognize this not because they're mean and hateful but because we're less likely, they'd say, to use our "truths" as clubs for beating up other people if we remember they are only temporary and constructed.
 

Postmodernism: An Artistic Style
There are a lot of different "arts" going around: theater, dance, music, painting, sculpture, architecture, film, poetry, and -- of course -- fiction, which is what we'll be concentrating on in this class.  Since there are so many different arts (way more than I've named above), it's a little dangerous to generalize about how we can recognize postmodernist style in all of them.  And this being first and foremost a literature class, I'll probably concentrate here on artistic traits you can readily find within postmodernist fiction.  But not exclusively.  Some of the traits on the list below can be found easily enough in theater, film, music, etc.

So.  You can tell postmodernist art when you see it because...

1.  It's self-referential.  In other words...it refers to itself, or is about itself.  Postmodernist artists often refuse to let their works be about something else.  Their works are about themselves as works of art, and they constantly draw attention to themselves as artifices instead of trying to be windows on some sort of "truth" or "reality."  John Barth's "Life Story" is a great example: it's a short story about nothing more than how it itself came to be written.  (When fiction writers go in for these sorts of hijinx, it's often called "metafiction.")

2.  It's "intertextual."  That is, it's art that often likes to be about some other work of art, or some other "text."  A famous pop artist named Roy Lichtenstein loved painting images taken right out of comic books.  That's intertextuality.  He made art about somebody else's art.  Similarly, a writer named John Gardner wrote a novel in the '70s called Grendel that's a funny retelling of the medieval classic Beowulf.  That's intertextuality, too.

3.  It's category-defying, often in really befuddling ways.  You go to the museum and realize the security guard in the corner watching you is actually a wax dummy.  You go to a concert and the pianist just sits there in front of the piano and does nothing.  You watch a film that simply ends half-way through a scene.  You read a novel whose author has for some reason indulged in hundreds of tedious scholarly footnotes.  All of this could easily be postmodern.  Postmodernist artists love to defy your expectations and do things they're not "supposed" to do, maybe because they want us to see that rational categorizations never work as well or as perfectly as we like to think they do.

4.  It's "pastiched."  Fancy French word, that.  "Pastiche," to recent art critics, is the practice of borrowing elements from different genres and different styles from lots of different historical periods, then mixing them all together in a single work of art.  It creates a kind of collage effect.  It's how you get a building like Charles Moores' Piazza d'Italia in New Orleans, which looks like a classical Roman building but is all done up in Las Vegas-style neon lights.  Or it's how you get a movie like Wild Wild West that mixes up the western genre with the sci-fi genre.  The postmodernist artist who creates a pastiche sees all of art history a big toybox full of fun things to play with and stick together in new and interesting ways.

5.  It's not snobbish.  Postmodern art is often very "pop."  It draws its subject matter from the realm of popular culture; it often employs pop-culture forms and genres....  Thus you have an acclaimed, capital-L Literary author like Joyce Carol Oates writing a novel about Marilyn Monroe's life (Blonde, it's called).  You've got Andy Warhol painting Campbell's soup cans.  You've got Art Spiegelman creating a moving account of the Nazi holocaust in the form of a comic book featuring cats and mice as characters.  Most postmodernist artists don't draw the sorts of distinctions between "high" and "low" culture that many artists in the past did.

6.  It gets fact & fiction all mixed up.  Postmodernist artists -- fiction writers especially -- aren't much interested in the distinction between real and make-believe.  They often make famous "real" historical figures interact with fictional characters in their works, and they often re-tell "actual" textbook history in peculiar, unsettling, often illuminating ways.  David Foster Wallace's story "Lyndon," which features President Johnson (JFK's successor) as a key character, is a great example.
 

Postmodernism: A Historical Period
It's the historical period, many cultural critics say, that we're living in now -- and have been in since roughly 1960 or so, depending (as I remarked at the top of this ever-growing document) on whom you ask.  And what characterizes this postmodern historical moment of ours?  Well....

1.  It's info- and image-laden.  We modern western folks are truly swamped by texts and images flying at us from computer and TV and movie screens, from billboards and magazines and newspapers and storefronts and...you get the picture.  So to speak.  Our inundation in all this stuff has led, says a French philosopher named Jean Baudrillard, to a "precession of simulacra."  What does that mean?  It means that images and simulations often now seem to precede everything in the real world: they come first, and "reality" must dutifully imitate them.

2.  It's global.  You've got multinational corporations selling their wares in every corner of the globe.  You've got people in Siberia and Sri Lanka watching re-runs of The Cosby Show.  You've got McDonald's opening across the street from Tianenmen Square in China.  You've got new mosques opening in New York City.  You've got an Indian lawyer educated in New Delhi starting a firm in Peoria, Illinois.  You've got a business meeting in London tomorrow, but you've got to be in L.A. by tomorrow night.  Your mom, born and raised in Louisiana, can't get enough of this Celtic folk band she's discovered.  Etc., etc., etc.

3.  It's schizoid.  You're one person when you're talking to your boss, somebody else when you're talking to your kids.  You go to a Chinese place for lunch and a Mexican place for dinner.  You watch TV and keep flipping back and forth between an NBA game, a VH-1 "Behind the Music" show on KISS, and an old Humphry Bogart fick on AMC.  You saw a Neil Simon play at your college last night and tonight you've been conned by friends into going to see The Rocky Horror Picture Show.  You were at museum in Philadelphia just an hour and a half ago; now you're standing in a dry cleaner in Allentown.   Being schizoid and fragmented can start to seem like our modus operandi.  Isn't this what LSD was for?

4.  Its past is present.  Did the past ever really go away?  You've got your bellbottom jeans.  You've got your great grandparents' photographs over the fireplace.  You've got your Three Stooges and Little Rascals movies on the cable TV.  You've got every edition of every New York Times ever published available on the web.  You've got your antique car show at Stabler Arena.  You've got your Beatles and Miles Davis CDs.  You've got your Ali, your Braveheart, your Titanic, your Beloved, your countless Jane Austen movies.  You've got your twenty centuries' worth of masterpieces at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, waiting for your perusal.  It seems nothing ever really vanishes.  Everything lives on and on -- at least as image.  It often makes us nostalgic for times we didn't even live in.  And it can make it awfully easy to believe we're all immortal in some weird way.

5.  It's "postindustrial."  Yes, we still need steel and lumber and cars and buildings and factories.  But the new economy -- the postindustrial economy -- seems more oriented towards creating, managing, moving, and selling abstract goods like "information" than solid tangible goods like the ones your parents or grandparents may have helped produce.  It's all good and nice to be able to rivet steel, sew a shirt, fix a car, build a house.  But the worker who wants to get ahead these days better know a little more about circuits and networks, databases and wavebands, web pages and content providers.  Information -- not sweat -- is what apparently makes the new, postmodern world go 'round.
 

A quote from Jean-Francois Lyotard

"It should be made clear that it is not up to us to provide reality, but to invent allusions to what is conceivable but not presentable.  And this task should not lead us to expect the slightest reconciliation between 'language games.'  Kant, in naming them the faculties, knew that they are separated by an abyss and that only a transcendental illusion (Hegel’s) can hope to totalize them into a real unity.  But he also knew that the price of this illusion is terror.  The nineteenth and twentieth centuries have given us our fill of terror.  We have paid dearly for our nostalgia for the all in the one, for a reconciliation of the concept of and the sensible, for a transparent and communicable experience.  Beneath the general demand for relaxation and appeasement, we hear murmurings of the desire to reinstate terror and fulfill the phantasm of taking possession of reality.  The answer is this: war on totality.  Let us attest to the unpresentable; let us activate the differends and save the honor of the name."  (15-16)

Lyotard, Jean-Francois. The Postmodern Explained.  Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992.
 

To Help Get You Through Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49....

It's the mid-1960s. Oedipa Maas is our heroine.  She's a young California housewife married to a rather neurotic guy named Wendell "Mucho" Maas, a rock 'n' roll D.J. and former used-car salesman.

A couple years before the time when the story takes place, Oedipa had an affair (she was unmarried then) with an eccentric, multimillionaire real estate mogul named Pierce Inverarity.  As the book begins, Oedipa learns via mail that Pierce has been dead for some months now but, before dying, named her executor of his will.  This means it's her job to sort through Pierce's many, many assets to figure out who gets what and which moneys go where.  And though she could shrug off the job on some lawyers, her own husband's lawyer, Roseman, persuades her to take it on herself, just because she might discover interesting things.

Turns out she discovers lots of interesting things, most significantly some type of secret underground mail network she comes to call the Tristero system.  It has roots that go all the way back to medieval Europe, where it opposed the private "Thurn and Taxis" mail monopoly that existed there at that time.  At some point, though, after Thurn and Taxis went the way of the dodo, Tristero hopped the Atlantic and now apparently exists in the U.S. as the "W.A.S.T.E." system -- a secret means of communication for all kinds of strange and secretive counter-cultural groups.  Pierce Inverarity's peculiar stamp collection connects him to the W.A.S.T.E./Tristero network in ambiguous and troubling ways.

The novel, in any event, is about how poor Oedipa becomes a total paranoid, partly convinced she's discovered a secret worldwide network of conspiratorial anarchists, partly convinced someone (possibly Pierce) is playing an enormous, sick joke on her for no good reason at all.  Whether she ever gets to the bottom of the mystery you'll have to read to find out.

Key Characters

Oedipa Maas.  Our heroine.

Wendell "Mucho" Maas.  Oedipa's husband.

Pierce Inverarity.  Oedipa's former lover.

Dr. Hilarius.  Oedipa's shrink, who's trying to get her involved in some experiment involving housewives taking L.S.D.

Roseman.  Oedipa and Mucho's lawyer.

Miles.  A teenage bellhop at Echo Courts -- a hotel in San Narcisso where Oedipa stays for a while.  He's also lead guy in the Paranoids, an upstart rock band.

Metzger.  A good-looking lawyer and one-time child movie actor.  He's been appointed by Pierce to be co-executor of his will, and so is Oedipa's teammate of sorts -- at least for a while.

Mike Fallopian.  A guy Oedipa and Metzger meet in a San Narcisso bar called the Scope.  He's in an underground organization called the Peter Pinguid Society and is writing a history of the U.S. mail system.

Manny DiPresso.  A lawyer friend of Metzger's.  He represents a guy named Tony Jaguar, who's suing Pierce Inverarity's estate because Pierce never paid for some human bones Tony provided to Beaconsfield Cigarettes, a company Pierce was heavily invested
in.

Mr. Thoth.  An old guy Oedipa meets in a nursing home Pierce helped get built.  His grandfather was a rider for the Pony Express who got an interesting souvenir after being attacked on his route one day.

Randolph Driblette.  Director of a renaissance-era play called The Courier's Tragedy, which has situations in it that strangely echo Pierce's mess with Beaconsfield Cigarettes and the bones.  The play is where Oedipa first hears of Tristero.

Stanley Koteks.  An engineer at Yoyodyne, an aerospace firm Pierce was heavily invested in.

John Nefastis.  An eccentric inventor in Berkeley.  He's the creator of the Nefastis machine, in which Maxwell's Demon allegedly lives.

Zapf.  Owner of a used bookstore in a strip mall Pierce helped get built.  His store is where Randolph Driblette supposedly got the edition of The Courier's Tragedy he used for his production.

Genghis Cohen.  A philatelist -- that is, a stamp collector and expert.  He gets Oedipa all sorts of information about the more distinctive stamps in Pierce's collection.

Jesus Arrabal.  A Mexican anarchist living in San Francisco.  Oedipa and Pierce met him once in Mexico several years ago; now Oedipa chances across him while wandering around San Francisco one night.

Emory Bortz.  An English professor at San Narciso University, a school whose Board of Trustees Pierce was on.  He's the editor of the version of The Courier's Tragedy Randolph Driblette claims to have used for his production, but he'll inform Oedipa that Driblette's version could've only actually come from one place: a secret library in the Vatican.  He gives Oedipa all kinds of interesting information about the history of Tristero in Europe.
 

Prompts for the Take-Home Midterm Exam

Please write a reasonably polished, two to three-page essay in response to each of the following:

1.  Choose from either Morrison's Beloved or Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 a passage you think is particularly useful to understanding the entirety of its source novel as a postmodernist work. (A "passage" might be a sentence, a whole scene, or something in between.)  Explain your choice, being sure to relate information/events/ideas described in that passage to other important information/events/ideas in the novel.  Be sure also to directly quote the text whenever necessary or useful.

2.  Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and Morrison's Beloved are two works that may not seem to have a whole lot in common – except, of course, that they’re often both referred to as "postmodernist."  This in mind, put these two books into dialogue for me, telling me what sorts of ideas and suppositions they might actually share.  And again, be sure to quote the novels whenever necessary or useful.

Additional Directions
Your essays should be typed! (Or “word-processed,” anyway.)  Twelve-point font and one-inch margins all around are good.  And none of those crazy plastic binder things or cover sheets, please.

Also, be sure to put a page number in parentheses at the end of each direct quote you use.  And you can mention/quote things we’ve read for class beyond the novels if you like, but please don’t use any “outside” research at this point unless you talk to me about it first.  I’ll be doing conferences on the midterm with all interested parties on Wednesday the 20th (no regular class that day).  Make me proud.
 

Prompt for the Take-Home Final Exam

Please write me roughly four pages in response to this question: How useful is postmodernist American literature to those of us living in postmodernist times?

Some related questions that might help illuminate that main one: Does reading postmodernist literature make us better people?  Does it teach us anything we didn’t already know?  Does it offer a vision of the future – or the past – that might help us create a better society?  Does it do anything to right wrongs?  Does it make us more humane?  Do you hope your children will someday read any of the works we’ve looked at this semester?  Why or why not?

Additional Requirements and Pointers

The only question above you need to answer is the first one.  All the others are just there to get you thinking about how you might go about it.

In your answer, I’d like you to speak at reasonable length about at least one of the books we’ve read since the midterm: DeLillo’s White Noise and (or) Danielewski’s House of Leaves.  I hope, though, that you’ll make good use of other texts (novels or shorter fictions – or even films) we’ve looked at during the course.

Please quote the texts you’re discussing to back up your important claims about them.

Some amount of first-person narration about people you’ve known and things you’ve seen is certainly acceptable.

Please double-space, keep one-inch margins all around, and use a 12-point font for me.

That’s it.  Knock yrselves out.  Your essay is due in class on Friday, May 3rd.
 

Some Guidelines and Pointers for the Critical Essay (Due May 8th)

1.  It should be about seven pages long.  No shorter than six, though, let’s say, and don’t feel like you have to write more than seven to impress me.  I’m not nearly as interested in the length of your essay as in the quality of your thinking and writing.

2.  It should be on a topic of your own choosing.  It’s fine – really – if that topic is an extension/deeper exploration of some idea we’ve already discussed in class.  And it’s fine too if it reflects some idea all your own.  All I ask is that (a) your topic deal with at least one of the novels we’ve read, and (b) that it revolve around your good understanding of at least one aspect of “postmodernism” as we’ve learned about it in this class (i.e. as an artistic style, a philosophy, or a historical period).

3.  Your essay should incorporate ideas from at least four outside sources.  They can be “scholarly” essays (stuff published by English professors in professional journals) or they can be from the popular press (commercial “periodicals” like The New Republic, The Nation, Mother Jones, etc.).  But the articles you use should be about the literature itself – not about our authors’ lives, their latest book deals, their public readings – anything like that.  Look for articles that say intelligent things about the books themselves.

You can use two published book reviews, let’s say (and amateur ones on Amazon.com or places like that don’t count).  You can also use either the intro to your Norton Anthology or any of the items in its “Casebook of Postmodern Theory” (the stuff at the back of the book) for two more sources.  And you’re welcome to quote my notes in the syllabus if you like, but they don’t count as an outside source.

Let me remind you too that the MLA bibliography (available on CD-ROM at Trexler) is a good place to look for “scholarly” sources, while Proquest (available on Trexler Library’s website) is a good place to start looking, at least, for pop-press stuff.

4.  You should use MLA format for your paper.  You can find guidelines for making an MLA “works cited” page on the web or in any English handbook, if you’ve got one.  And I’ll give you a worksheet showing you how to do citations within your text at the ends of your direct quotes and paraphrases.

5.  Whatever you do, make sure your essay has a clear, interesting, and sophisticated central thesis, that it’s well organized throughout, and that it defends its claims with good support drawn either from the fictions you’re writing about or from your outside sources.  It should be reasonably well proofread, too.  While I’m not one to go ballistic over a few misspellings or apostrophe errors, it’s a turn-off to read something full of careless mistakes.  All that does is scream that you don’t care enough about your own ideas to make them pretty.

6.  Double-space it.  One-inch margins all around.  No monster fonts.  Put your name, my name, the course title, and the date in the upper left hand corner of page one.  Put a title under that.  And no cover sheets or awful plastic binder thingees, please.  Ick.

I think that’s it.  Write, call, or come see me with questions.  Make me proud.

Yr,

S.d.