I encourage you to choose a topic of your own relating directly to our subject. You are likely to do your best work when you have chosen the topic. I must approve all topics. Please email me a paragraph as soon as possible, and definitely no later than 5:00 on March 1, telling me briefly what you intend to do.


If you can't come up with anything, here are two possibilities:

A. Here is a list of important short-to-medium-length books of postmodern fiction. I recommend all of them. Choose one, and write a paper on the postmodernism of the book. You might, for instance, demonstrate that the book is representative of postmodernism, that it extends the scope of postmodernism, or that it is not postmodernist at all. Or you might analyze the book in terms of some character­istically postmodernist devices and strategies. Or you could compare the modes of postmodernism in two of these books. In any event, think long and hard about the book and your subject, and give me the best argument you can devise.

Walter Abish: Alphabetical Africa
Walter Abish: Minds Meet (or one of its stories)
Kathy Acker: Blood and Guts in High School
Kathy Acker: Great Expectations
Kathy Acker: Don Quixote
Paul Auster: The New York Trilogy (or one of its constituent novels)
Paul Auster: Oracle Night
Julian Barnes: Flaubert's Parrot
Richard Beard: X20: a novel of (not) smoking
Donald Barthelme: The Dead Father
Christine Brooke-Rose: Amalgamemnon
Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities
Jerome Charyn: The Tar Baby
Robert Coover: Pricksongs and Descants (or one of its stories)
Julio Cortázar: End of the Game and Other Stories (or one of its stories)
Susan Daitch: L.C.
Guy Davenport: Da Vinci's Bicycle (or one of its stories)
Guy Davenport: Tatlin! (or one of its stories)
Alasdair Gray: Unlikely Stories, Mostly (or one of its stories)
B.S. Johnson: Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry
David Markson: Reader’s Block
David Markson: This Is Not a Novel
David Markson: Wittgenstein's Mistress
Harry Mathews: The Conversions
Harry Mathews: Tlooth
Harry Mathews: The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium
Harry Mathews: Cigarettes
Milorad Pavić: Dictionary of the Khazars
Georges Perec: W, or The Memory of Childhood
Jacques Roubaud: The Great Fire of London
Curtis White: Requiem

B. Brian McHale says that someone asserted that the only Postmodern poet was Paul Celan. At the other extreme, Paul Hoover published an anthology of Postmodern American Poetry featuring 103 poets. Read some English-language poetry which you judge to be Postmodern. For example, the Electronic Poetry Center (http://epc.buffalo.edu/authors) offers works of, and/or links to, and/or information on, poetry by many Postmodern poets such as David Antin, John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Christian Bök, Raymond Federman, Kennth Goldsmith, Lyn Hejinian, Susan Howe, Nathaniel Mackey, Jerome Rothenberg, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Anne Waldman. You can also find much Postmodern poetry in our Library, and in the full-text database Twentieth-century American Poetry (http://collections.chadwyck.com/home/home_20ap.jsp). Write a paper of at least 1,200 words on the postmodernism of a poem, a sequence or volume of poems, or a poet. By this point in the course, and especially after we look over Ihab Hassan’s table of Modernist and Postmodernist characteristics in class this Thursday, you should be able to judge for yourself whether the work qualifies as Postmodernist, and to make the case in your paper. Again, of course, think long and hard about the poetry, and give me the best argument you can devise.

All papers must be at least 1,200 words, not counting documentation and other paraphernalia. Regardless of your topic, you must cite at least three critical and/or theoretical sources, using them in support of your own argument, not in lieu of it. For all sources, including primary and secondary sources, follow MLA procedures for fair use and documentation. MLA form is complex and demanding; if you just assume that you know how it works, your grade will suffer. Follow the rules in the MLA Style Manual (not the MLA Handbook, which is intended for undergraduate work) to the letter.

The highest grades will go to the papers which are most convincing, most imaginative, most logical, most thorough, and most effectively written. Edit your work carefully; this is, after all, a graduate English course, and papers with basic writing errors will not pass regardless of their content.

Email the paper to me, preferably as a Microsoft Word attachment, by 5:00 PM on April 19.If you don’t have Microsoft Word, you can almost certainly save your file, within whatever program you use, as an RTF (Rich Text Format) file, in which case you should send me that file as an attachment. If you are using a program such as Works or WordPerfect, tell the program to save the file as RTF, and the resulting file will have the .RTF extension. If you can’t figure out how to do this, get help before the due date. DO NOT submit a file in any other format, such as the native format of Works or WordPerfect, and DO NOT send me in-line text pasted into your email message. If you use a list of works cited, include it within the main file, not as a separate file.

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