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
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 four things:
1.  Regular reading quizzes (worth 15% of your final grade);
2.  An essay-based take-home midterm exam (30%);
3.  A researched, roughly 7-page critical essay (40%);
4.  Your classroom participation (15%).

You'll take a reading quiz at the start of each of our class meetings.  Each one will have seven questions designed to test your knowledge of situations and events in the stories we've read for that night.  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 (i.e. detail-oriented) either.  Read the assigned texts reasonably carefully and you'll do fine.

I'll give each of your quizzes a 1-7 grade -- a 7 if you get all the questions right, a 1 if you get one or none of them.  At the end of the term I'll average your quiz grades, and if you've got between a 6.1 and a 7.0 you'll have an A; between a 5.7 and a 6.0 and you'll have an A-; between a 5.3 and a 5.6 and you'll have a B+; between a 4.7 and a 5.2 and you'll have a B; between a 4.3 and a 4.6 and you'll have a B-; between a 3.9 and a 4.2 and you'll have a C+; between a 3.4 and a 3.8 and you'll have a C; between a 2.9 and a 3.2 and you'll have a C-; between a 2.5 and a 2.8 and you'll have a D+; between a 1.9 and a 2.4 and you'll have a D; between a 1.5 and a 1.8 and you'll have a D-; and anything lower than that will give you an F.

Your essay-based, take-home midterm will probably ask you to discuss important passages from fictions we've read up to that point in the session, and/or to compare and contrast those fictions in interesting ways.  Count on doing four to five pages of reasonably polished writing for it.  I'll give you the writing prompts for the exam the week before it's due, and I'll grade it on an A-F scale, with +'s and -'s possible.  The due-date for your midterm is 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.

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
Since we've got so few class meetings, I feel like you should try hard not to miss any of them.  I also know, though, that real life can sometimes be a smidge intrusive, so if you need to miss a class at some point, it shouldn't be a big deal.  Just talk to me about it.  Unless there are extraordinary circumstances, though, missing two classes will hurt your final grade, and missing more than two may hurt it a lot, so...come be with us.

Course Schedule

Monday January 7
Introduction to the course, and to each other.  My "lecture" on what postmodernism is.  Discussion of some photos and art prints we'll look at together.  And discussion of Stanley Kubrick's 1963 film Dr. Strangelove, or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, which we'll watch together on this night.

Monday January 14
Discussion of the entirety of Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 and of Donald Barthelme's story "Sentence," pgs. 33-37 of your anthology.

Monday January 21
Discussion of Morrison's Beloved, through page 132, and of the excerpt from Art Spiegelman's Maus in your anthology (295-301).  We may also watch Sally Potter's film Orlando on this night.

Monday January 28
Discussion of the remainder of Morrison's Beloved and of the excerpt from Kathy Acker's Great Expectations in your anthology (409-15).  I'll also give you the writing prompts for your take-home midterm on this night.

Monday February 4
Take-home midterm due.  Also, discussion of DeLillo's White Noise, though page 163.  We may also watch Todd Haynes' 1998 film Safe on this night.

Monday February 11
Discussion of the remainder of DeLillo's White Noise and of Bobbie Ann Mason's story "Shiloh" in your anthology (271-80).

Monday February 18
This will be our "theory" night.  We'll discuss four critical essays about postmodernism, all of them in the back of your Norton anthology.  We'll do Ihab Hassan's "Toward a Concept of Postmodernism" (586-94), Umberto Eco's "Postscript to The Name of the Rose" (622-24), bell hooks' "Postmodern Blackness" (624-30), and Jean Baudrillard's "From Simulacra and Simulations" (631-37). I'll probably also ask each of you to talk a little on this night about what you're up to in your critical essay you're working on.

Monday February 25
Discussion of four works in your anthology: the excerpt from Truman Capote's In Cold Blood (127-140), Mark Leyner's "The Making of 'Tooth Imprints on a Corndog'" (242-55), Helena Maria Viramontes' "The Cariboo Cafe" (497-508), and David Foster Wallace's "Lyndon" (362-92).

Your critical essay will be due by....
 

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 comic books.  That's intertextuality.  He made art about somebody else's art.  Similarly, a writer named John Gardner wrote a novel 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.
 

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 and has 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 the existence of some type of secret underground mail network she comes to call the Trystero 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, Trystero 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./Trystero 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 met an unfortunate end.

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 Trystero.

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 Trystero in Europe.
 

Prompts for the Take-Home Midterm Exam

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

1.  Choose from either Morrison's Beloved or Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 a passage particularly useful in understanding what's postmodernist about its source novel as a whole.  (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, quoting 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 critics often refer to both 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.  If you see any significant differences between them as postmodernist works, feel free to talk about those, too.  Whatever you do, though, be sure to quote the novels whenever necessary or useful.