This fall, I am once again teaching a course in “Postmodern and Contemporary Fiction.” I’ve taught variations on this course since graduate school, and I love it every time. It is always relevant. Every new group of students, whether in 2006 or 2022, finds insights into their world through the books we read.
Why Postmodern Literature?
As I tell my students, the body of literature that falls loosely under the category of “postmodern” is full of often brilliant, sometimes strange, occasionally ugly, frequently heartbreaking, and wonderfully hilarious fiction. In my class, we start with postmodernist writing from the 1960s and follow threads that both enforce and critique postmodern thought through to the present.
These are stories that search for meaning, revise old histories, tackle the complexities of capitalism, struggle with social inequalities, question how we treat the nonhuman, and address the relationship between literature and cultural change.
Course Texts Over the Years
Here’s an incomplete list of the books I’ve taught in versions of this course over the years, in no particular order:
- The Collector of Treasures, Bessie Head
- Disgrace, J.M Coetzee
- Sexing the Cherry, Jeanette Winterson
- Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje
- Parable of the Sower, Octavia E. Butler
- Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
- Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, Art Spiegelman
- Vineland, Thomas Pynchon
- Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie
- American Gods, Neil Gaiman
- Neverwhere, Neil Gaiman
- Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood
- Little Black Book of Stories, A.S. Byatt
- Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
- Mama Day, Gloria Naylor
- Wise Children, Angela Carter
- World’s Fair, E.L. Doctorow
- We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler
- Station Eleven, Emily St. John Mandel
Some versions of the course are global, others balance North American and British fiction, and the most recent iteration of the course focuses exclusively on North American work.
Current Course Texts
The most recent version of the course includes:
- The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon
- Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko
- White Noise, Don DeLillo
- Paradise, Toni Morrison
- The Penelopiad, Margaret Atwood
- Tenth of December, George Saunders
- Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado
- Light from Uncommon Stars, Ryka Aoki
It’s an eclectic group of books, but I think it makes sense. It is certainly not a canonical list of postmodernist writing, but I believe in putting texts into conversation with one another, in my thinking and in my classes.
Pynchon’s novel lays the foundation for a discussion of the shift from modernist to postmodernist writing. Ceremony takes up questions of meaning and purpose like Lot 49, but the context of Native American life after World War II shifts the conversation into much broader terrain. We talk about canon formation as well as literary hierarchies, and we work through a set of themes that is common to, but expressed differently within, the two novels:
- Symbols & interpretation
- Spirituality, religion, & the postsecular
- Communication
- Chaos versus order
- Social roles and hierarchies
- “America”
As the semester progresses, we continue to return to these themes as they are developed in each new novel. The first-person episodic storytelling of White Noise pulls us into postmodernist play, but Morrison’s Paradise yanks us back into questions of history and power. Yet both novels continue to work through the central questions about how we make sense of the contemporary world and how the contemporary world constructs us as subjects. As I write, we are about to move on to Atwood’s retelling of The Odyssey, and I can’t wait to see what the students make of it.
Secondary Texts
Even before we crack open Thomas Pynchon’s novel at the beginning of the semester, students read and discuss a selection of essays about postmodernism. Then, as the semester progresses, they read both set selections of secondary texts, and essays about the fiction that they find through their own research.
The set secondary readings include:
- “Toward a Concept of Postmodernism,” Ihab Hassan
- “Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism,” Jean-Francios Lyotard
- “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” Fredric Jameson
- selections from Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale
- selections from Woman, Native, Other, Trinh T. Minh-ha
- “Postmodern Blackness,” bell hooks
Starting with a few of these essays helps to establish a common vocabulary as well as a baseline understanding of what is at stake in defining something like “postmodernism.” Perhaps more importantly, reading theory and philosophy related to the literary material gives students a chance to cultivate their own expertise. I encourage anyone who is interested in postmodern literature to do the same. Give yourself a chance to wade into the intellectual debates and find your way through the literature with those ideas in mind.