This course examines a selection of contemporary American fiction in historic, aesthetic, and social contexts. In other words, we will explore the relationship between contemporary American literature and the world we live in. Topics may include literature and postmodern culture, how aesthetic style may be influenced by social and historic conditions, the blurring of fact and fiction in contemporary literature, and how literature is affected by issues of race, class, and gender. While the range of contemporary American fiction is extremely broad and varied, and impossible to cover in one semester, students will become acquainted with several of the major trends in American literature since 1965. The course is divided into three main units: 1) Post-W.W.II and Postmodernism; 2) Race and Gender; 3) Graphic Memoir. As students will discover, these categories are not mutually exclusive. They overlap and intersect one another.
Required Books
- Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-5
- Don DeLillo, White Noise
- Tim O’Brien, The Things They Carried
- Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
- Louise Erdrich, Tracks
- Jane Smiley, A Thousand Acres
- Art Spiegelman, Maus I and Maus II
- Alison Bechdel, Fun Home
General Education Humanities
This course fulfills part of your general education humanities requirement. All courses that meet this requirement include the following learning outcomes:
- Students analyze how ideas are represented, interpreted or valued in various expressions of human culture
- Students examine relevant primary source materials as understood by the discipline and interpret the material in writing assignments.
These outcomes will be assessed using the final research paper.