Postmodern Lit

3 Credits · Level: Undergraduate

This course examines a variety of literatures that are remixed, remade or reframed in some way, and, as such, complicate our understanding of authorship, creativity and literary value. Mashed-up film clips and audio remixes that we find on the Internet are the most obvious examples of remixed works today, but there are many more less obvious examples dating back to the last century and earlier. The more literary works of this kind give us an opportunity to ask important questions about our current cultural moment and literature generally: What makes something literary? How is literature adapting to digital culture and the globalizing consumer culture connected to it? How do changes in the way we view creativity, originality and authorship affect our ideas about what literature is and does, and what do these changes require of us as readers, viewers, consumers and citizens? To answer these questions we will take a critical, often comparative, approach to the material. In addition to examining primary works in fiction, poetry, the graphic novel and audio, we will follow developments in aesthetics, literary and cultural theory, rhetoric and semiotics (the theory of signs). The course material, as well as the concepts we will discuss and develop in class, will be the basis for two writing assignments. Correspondingly, we will discuss topic and thesis development, paper organization and research and examine a variety of secondary sources that will help students situate their claims and critiques. There will also be a mid-term exam.