English 412R Syllabus

 

Studies in Fiction - The Postmodern and Neo-postmodern http://research.uvsc.edu/mortensen/412R

YOUR PROFESSOR

I'm Lee Ann Mortensen and I have an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Utah.  Though I have written in a variety of genres, I primarily focus on neo- postmodern, sort of minimalist prose/fiction that focuses on marginalized voices in the West. Click here to read my sometimes upsetting, angry, funny, four-letter-word work (that means it isn't everything for everyone). I've been published in journals like Ploughshares, River Styx and Prism International.

OFFICE: Liberal Arts room 114B (the metrosexual)
HOURS : TTR 1-2PM , and I can meet people by appointment at other times on TTR. 
PHONE: 801-863-8785
E.MAIL: mortenle@uvu.edu.

 

REQUIRED TEXTS

• Marquez, Gabriel Garcia.  One Hundred Years of Solitude.  New York: Perennial Classics, 1967 rpt. 1998.

• Morrison, Toni. Beloved.

• Barthelme, Donald.  The Dead Father.

• Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology

• Woolf, Virginia.  Orlando.  New York: Harcourt Brace, 1928 rpt. 1956.

• Winterson, Jeanette.  Written on the Body.  New York: Vintage, 1992.
• Optional: A good critical theory text (Lois Tyson), and/or Harmon and Holman's Handbook to Literature.
• Computer access--we will use my Calendar for daily activities, additional links, writing, and email, so you will need to have access to technology (all of you can use the Open Lab computers in SC 116; SB101; AD007; SC215).  Go to the Center for Student Computing Web site for more information at http://www.uvu.edu/studentcomputing/openlabs/.
• Rental of 3 films, one in each of the following category (some of these are in our library; some films cross into the other categories; you can suggest other films too; I prefer films that are from blissful or "high" culture rather than films from pleasure or "low" culture, but I suggest texts/films of pleasure too because high vs. low is a problematic binary):

last updated 2/26/07 POSTMODERN STYLE/TEXTS OF BLISS Being John Malcovich (magical realism?) The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (technology and memory) Kill Bill Vol. 1 (excess; pastiche) Amelie (magical realism) Run Lola Run (short circuit) The Quick and the Dead (1995 with Sharon Stone; pastiche) Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (excess) Naked Lunch (Burroughs; short circuit, randomness) Network (fabulous 1970's--identity as ratings; simulacrum of TV) The Hours (mild narrative disruptions; time overlaps) Get Shorty (meta) Shrek (intertextualities; pastiche; identity politics) Early Woody Allen movies (What's Up Tiger Lilly? as pastiche/parody, low culture) Peter Sellers 60's movies (What's New Pussycat?  Dr. Strangelove; parody, pastiche, tech worship/critique) David Lynch movies, TV shows (Blue Velvet; randomness, absurdism; Twin Peaks; Mulholand Drive) Stanley Kubrik movies (Dr. Strangelove--funny and scary; Clockwork Orange--tech worship/critique, but not for the faint of heart!!) Pedro Almodovar movies (like the over the top Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown) FASTER, PUSSYCAT! KILL! KILL! (1960's killer camp; low culture) Raising Arizona (Coen Brothers; excess) The Royal Tennenbaums (Wes Anderson; short circuit, randomness) Annie Hall (Middle Woody Allen; meta) Road Warrior (Mel Gibson and technology run amuck/tech worship) Life of Brian (Monty Python; pastiche/parody; religion as construct) American Splendor (extreme meta! life and art merge) The World According to Garp (magical realism, queer, feminist parody;  Robin Willaims, Glenn Close) Memento (short circuit; what is memory if not language; written on the body, literally) Tom Jones (1963; picaresque epic with an anti-hero; humor, excess, farce, meta) Christopher Guest mockumentaries (Spinal Tap; Best of Show; pastiche/parody) Sealab 2021 (adult pastiche of many things including the original from 1972) Garfield and Friends? Rat Race (and the Barbie Museum)   LATINO/AFRICAN AM/POSTCOLONIAL Wings of Desire (Wim Wenders; magical realism) Like Water for Chocolate (Mexican, 1993; magical realism) El Mariachi (Mexican, 1993) or any of Richard Rodriguez's with Antonio Banderas (Desperado; Once Upon A Time in Mexico; and Rodriguez did Spy Kids too; excess; hero pastiche?) Men With Guns (John Sayles--Latin American, 1998; postcolonial chaos; decimation of native tribes not unlike in Columbia) Apocalypse Now (postcolonial concerns in Vietnam) Girl Fight (2000; feminist, latina) Jungle Fever (or any of Spike Lee's movies; race identities) Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee--ethnicities collide) Frida (meta, feminism, surreality) Margaret Cho (I'm the One that I Want--"you're not testing Asian"; identity, sexuality deconstructions) Chris Rock (Bring the Pain, 1996) Spanglish (yikes!) Aladdin (Disney; a trilogy?? Are all Arabs evil?) Pocahontas (Disney; are all Native Americans savages?  Are all white colonialists savages?) Bend it Like Beckham (are all Indian cultures retrograde?) Monsoon Wedding (ethnicities collide) My Big Fat Greek Wedding (ethnicities collide, but what clichés!) Far From Heaven (?) White Chicks (yikes!) Real Women Have Curves (identity; feminism) Bride and Prejudice (Bollywood does Jane Austin; Gurinder Chadha) Lone Star (1996, on a small, Texas bordertown; race relations) Amores Perros (deconstruction of previous Mexican cinema expectations) Smoke Signals (based on a Sherman Alexie short story; native identities and families; violation of previous film expectations with "Indians" like Dances with Wolves) Pedro Almadovar movies (Volver--feminist; magically real?) Borat (pastich/parody of a documentary; racisms and bigotry pastiche) A telenovela on Univision??  Cantinflas?  Some Low art? Adaptation (extreme meta; Susan Orlean and her Orchids; has a sort of GGM ouruboros structure where the writing creates the events) Strawberry and Chocolate (1994; 70's Cuban revolution) We're all Stars (1993; Peru and TV) Sarah Silverman's Jesus is Magic (insults/deconstructs everyone from various races and creeds; pastiche; Signifyin(g)?) Collateral Damage (Schwartzenegger--American War Propaganda in Columbia?) Man Facing Southeast (Argentine; Sci fi?  Magically Real?) Some Japanese Anime like Kanon and Da Capo (accepted acts of magic)    GENDER/QUEER THEORY/NEW HISTORICISM My Life in Pink/Ma Vie en Rose (French, 1997; transexual identity) Orlando (British, 1993; not very mocky; magical realism) Fight Club (1999; tech worship, masculinism, capitalism) Billy Elliot (identity, masculinism) The Naked Civil Servant (British, 1975; queer, identity) Hedwig and the Angry Inch ("transexual" identity) Pricilla Queen of the Desert (queer identity; class conflicts; rednecks and transgendered love) Gods and Monsters (James Whale is Frankenstein's gay director) Boys Don't Cry (transexual idendity) Monster (but Charlise Theron is such a "femme"!) Victor/Victoria (Julie Andrews in drag; identity) Birdcage or La Cage Aux Faux (performativity, identity) Tootsie (feminist, performativity, TV) The Little Mermaid (Disney; feminist) Mulan (Disney; feminist; drag) Yentle (yes, Barbara S.; doing drag to get ahead) TO WONG FOO (identity, performativity, cultures collide) Blade Runner (Cyborgs, and love stories; tech worship) M. Butterfly (Jeremy Irons, John Lone; transexuality, drag, performativity) Angels in America (2 parts from HBO; cultures collide; magical realism; queer) Mrs. Doubtfire (drag, performativity) Happy Texas (two cons have to pass as gay) Brokeback Mountain (cultures collide; queer) Queer as Folk (Showtime; meta, camera excess, mythologizing Gay experience) TransAmerica (a transexual father finding his son)

COURSE OBJECTIVES

We are about to read, discuss, and write about some of the best works of postmodern and neo-postmodern fiction written, works that will surprise us, make us laugh, play softly on our ears, shock us, and make us question traditional narrative (and other traditions) altogether.  As a writer, and as a human living on the planet earth, I have been greatly affected by these books, and thus I believe all English majors, and all writers, need to read and absorb the beauty, diversity, and occasional chaos of these authors full of style.

In this class we will think about, well, everything, and nothing, and everything.  We will discuss lyricism in prose vs. the prosaic (naive realism as John Barth calls it), narrative vs. anti-narrative, postmodern/avant-garde playfullness vs. so-called traditionality, voice and the problems of omniscience, the history of gender and queer identity politics (second and third wave), high and low cultures (semiotics), the world of TV and TV in the world (Baudrillard's simulacra), Las Vegas as the postmodern epicenter (and the NTS with it's bombs), technology vs, capitalism and their believers, race vs. ethnicity vs. performativity, and the way all of this affects literati as well as creative writers. 

I've organized the class around three sets of fictional dyads.  Two of our selections come from more "hard core" postmodern literature, Donald Barthelme, who in many ways is the "father" of postmodern literature (and often one of the funniest authors I've read), and numerous selections from the Norton anthology that play with all the postmodern techniques.  Two of our selections come from Latino writers, the Nobel Prize winning Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the cutting edge Tejana Sandra Cisneros.  Both of these authors write lyrically about common people who often encounter the magical, the beautiful, and the tragic in every day life.  We will also read two novels from wonderful, postmodern authors who question the stability of gender as well as narrative (some contemporary theorists call these authors "queer" in the broad sense of the word).  The legendary Virginia Woolf's book Orlando is one of the funniest (and most important feminist) novels I've ever read, spanning history, and, magically, gender boundaries, over four hundred years.  Jeanette Winterson, my favorite contemporary author, writes a lyrical, postmodern love story in Written on the Body that frankly breaks my heart, but all the while the narrator, and the narrative, are always shifting in playful, metafictional ways.

We will also watch, discuss, and write about films that complement these dyads, but show us a different, more visual approach to narrative.  We will also read critical theory handouts that will give us additional lenses through which to comment on each text.

PROFESSOR'S RULES

1. Attendance is, of course, essential:  Your voice adds greatly to our community of literary absorbers and critics, and when you are not here and prepared, our class, and our learning, are hugely diminished.  I find that those who miss class a lot don't tend to get what it is we are doing (or undoing), and thus their grades suffer.

• If you do arrive late, or miss a class, please do not interrupt class to give me excuses or ask me what's going on.  Consult with a responsible class mate afterward to see what you missed.

• Oh, and as often as I can, I may give weekly quizzes to help us deepen our awareness of the course texts and theories (so obviously these will be impacted by absences).

2. Arrive on time and prepared for class discussions, tests, and writing assignments.  Participation is essential.   If you are prepared, you should be able to participate. I am not a lecturer.   Your active participation in our discourse community--that means talking, thinking people getting together to discuss interesting and important things--is required. 

3. Writing Assignments must be turned in at the start of class the day they are due or you will lower your course grade. Always keep a photo copy and disk backup for yourself. Always keep your work saved on multiple diskettes.  Use MLA Format to structure your formal essays (ask for a handout on this at the UVSC Writing Lab on the second floor of the LEC), or visit them at http://ec.uvu.edu/owl/.  You can also get more MLA information on the web at Diana Hacker's on-line reference guide.

4. Be sure to pay attention to your course Calendar and be responsible for keeping up with the work.  

5. I will be available for consultations with you during hours or by appointment (see my office hours). Please come talk with me about your ideas, questions, interpretations and so on.  The best way to get a hold of me is through E. Mail at mortenle@uvu.edu.

6. Students with Disabilities - If you have any disability which may impair your ability to successfully complete this course, please contact the Accessibility Services Department (WB 146; 863-8747). Academic accommodations are granted for all students who have qualified disabilities. Services are coordinated with the student and instructor by the Accessibility Services Department.