Course Description for "Significant Connections: Making Sense in Postmodern American Literature"

Not just planning for the Summer semester, but for the Fall as well. Thankfully, this Fall I'll have a Tuesday/Thursday teaching schedule, which I'll need as I prepare for my exams and the presentation of my dissertation prospectus to the department.

Significant Connections: Making Sense in Postmodern American Literature
Engl 109 (#11163): American Literature and Culture
Eric Rasmussen
2:00-3:15 pm TR /115 Stevenson Hall (SH)
University of Illinois at Chicago, Fall 2004

This reading-intensive course provides an introduction to recent American fiction, particularly as it relates to various poststructuralist and postmodern theories about language, communication, and meaning. Our class investigations will emphasize the concept of connectedness, that is, the ways in which a range of texts imagine various subjects (human and Other-wise) to be linked to one another and how texts are understood to be technologies through which significant (though not necessarily meaningful) connections are established.

Reading Catherine Belsey's Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction and Steven Shaviro's Connected, or What it Means to Live in a Network Society will introduce students to terms (e.g., difference, significance, subject, ideology) and concepts (e.g., differential vs. referential accounts of signification) that will enable them to make sense of key theoretical positions about our so-called postmodern culture. Class discussions will focus on how these theoretical claims (about topics such as new models of human subjectivity and the extent to which reality is thoroughly textualized) play themselves out in postmodern American novels. That is, the situations narrated in the fictional texts will provide examples with which to assess both the utility and the validity of various theoretical positions.

We will definitely be reading Don DeLillo's Underworld, and students are advised to read this fairly lengthy novel along with Belsey's short primer over the summer. Other literary authors whose work we might read include: Kathy Acker, Laurie Anderson, Octavia Butler, Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, E.L. Doctorow, Shelley Jackson, Toni Morrison, Chuck Palahniuk, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Powers, William Vollmann, and David Foster Wallace.

Course requirements include two exams, two 3-5 page papers, in-class presentations, and mandatory attendance.