Ateneo - UPO

Humanism-Modernism-Posthumanism (in 10 Moves)

TEXTS (for every class, read discuss 1 story & part of 1 novel)
3 novels
1925 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, The Great Gatsby ISBN# 9780743273565
1929 Larsen, Nella, Passing
1955 Highsmith, Patricia, The Talented Mr. Ripley ISBN# 9780393332148
1965 Pynchon, Thomas, The Crying of Lot 49 ISBN# 9780060913076
7 stories
Bierce, "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" (1890)
Hemingway, "Hills Like White Elephants" (1927)
O’Connor, "Good Country People" (1955)
Baldwin, "Sonny’s Blues" (1957)
LeGuin, "Those Who Walk Away from Omelas" (1973)
O’Brien, "The Things They Carried" (1990)
Everett, "The Appropriation of Culture" (2004)

Fiction published in the U.S. after the Civil War has an extraordinary—perhaps even bewildering—diversity of themes, formal strategies, and voices. Any generalizations one might offer for this vast collection of texts is therefore somewhat contrived, and any survey is necessarily selective. Nevertheless, this course is organized by three interpretive frames that will allow us sketch out the contours of American literary and social history and serve as guides for reading and writing: the first, Fiction in the Post-Bellum Era, emphasizes humanism as social dislocation and crisis; the second, New Voices and Formal Innovations, emphasizes modernism as literary and cultural difference; the third, Multiple Identities, focuses on representations of posthumanism as virtually becoming across identities, bodies, and cultures. Expect to write one capstone essay of 7-8 pages (2100-2500 words). Discussion will focus opening up new critical and theoretical lines of inquiry about literature, about culture, and about critical and interpretive practices. Along the way, we will delineate some useful maps of the issues and motives of literary and cultural theory that will expand the ways you read literary, social, and cultural texts.