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 next Monday, June 18, telling me briefly what you intend to do. The highest grades will go to the papers which are most convincing, most imaginative, most logical, most thorough, and most effectively written. Be careful not to waste much time on plot summary, or on things that have been said in our class meetings. 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 July 2. 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 other than Word, tell the program to save the file as RTF, and the resulting file will have the .RTF extension. If you can not 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. Include your list of works cited within the main file, not as a separate file. A. Here are three dozen significant short-to-medium-length postmodern novels. I recommend all of them. Choose one, and write a paper on the postmodernism of the book. You might, for instance, demonstrate the ways in which the novel is representative of postmodernism, that it extends the scope of postmodernism, or that it is not really 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. 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, Kenneth 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 looking over the table of Modernist and Postmodernist characteristics by Ihab Hassan in class last week, 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. C. As I have mentioned, some scholars think that postmodernism is already over. If you consider yourself to be pretty familiar with a fair range of 21st-century serious or ambitious literary fiction, do you consider it to be a continuation of late-20th-century postmodern fiction, or do you think that it represents a new phase in literary history? Argue convincingly for your position, citing numerous examples and characteristics. Do not fall into the trap of thinking that popular 21st-century fiction is more conventional and accessible than late-20th-century postmodern fiction was, since that would be comparing apples and oranges. Very little postmodern fiction was ever popular, and there was just as much conventional popular fiction in the late 20th century as there is now. This paper must be about ambitious literary fiction: to put it a bit crudely, the kinds of fiction which you would study in college.
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 badly. Follow the rules in the Third Edition of the MLA Style Manual (not the MLA Handbook, which is intended for undergraduate work) to the letter.
If you don't come up with your own topic, here are three possibilities:
Walter Abish: Alphabetical Africa
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
Donald Barthelme: The Dead Father
Donald Barthelme: Snow White
Richard Beard: Damascus
Richard Beard: X20: a novel of (not) smoking
Christine Brooke-Rose: Amalgamemnon
Christine Brooke-Rose: Between
Christine Brooke-Rose: Textermination
Christine Brooke-Rose: Thru
Blake Butler and Sean Kilpatrick: Anatomy Courses
Italo Calvino: Invisible Cities
Jerome Charyn: The Tar Baby
Susan Daitch: L.C.
Jeremy M. Davies: Rose Alley
Patricia Duncker: Hallucinating Foucault
Jonathan Safran Foer: Tree of Codes
B.S. Johnson: House Mother Normal
B.S. Johnson: The Unfortunates
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 Paviç: Dictionary of the Khazars
Georges Perec: The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex (in the book Three)
Georges Perec: W, or The Memory of Childhood
Gilbert Sorrentino: Gold Fools
Curtis White: Requiem