Fall 2018
Taught by Professor Warren Motte
TR 9:30-10:45 am MKNA 204 (3 credits)
A course focusing upon recent innovations in the French novel, and upon the postmodernist literary aesthetic. Students will examine a variety of avant-garde novels, and analyze the kinds of literary experimentation that those novels propose. Dealing with texts from 1956 to 2015, we will consider examples of minimalist fiction, existentialist fiction, feminist fiction, and confessional fiction. We will read novels that ask questions about literature and play, literature and mourning, and literature and performance. We will consider events as broadly important as the Holocaust, and as smoothly banal as the surface of a bathtub. During the semester, students will be asked to reflect upon a series of questions concerning the changing nature of literary representation and the status of the novel as a cultural form.