Week 6: Final Papers

As we discussed on Wednesday, please post your final paper topic idea for your last blog write-up: what texts will you use, what angle will you take? What do you imagine your "so what?" to be? If you are still deciding, what possibilities are you considering?

Week 5: Revising History

As we have discussed, a noted postmodern convention is the rewriting and retelling of history. How do Alexie and Silko rewrite history through their literature? To what end? Be sure to point to specific passages and/or techniques used by the authors that demonstrate your claims.

Week Four: Modernism and Masculinity

The protagonists in Fitzgerald’s “Winter Dreams” and in Hemingway’s “The Snows of Kilimanjaro” are both male. How are these male characters represented by the authors, respectively? How is masculinity and/or American masculinity characterized? What, if anything, strikes you as modernist in these representations?

Week Three: Thinking through postmodern aesthetics

In the intro to the “Breaking the Frame” section, the editors offer the following observation about postmodern writers: they “create ruptures, gaps, and ironies that continually remind the reader that an author is present” (1). In reflecting on the excerpts from Vonnegut and Pynchon, discuss how these authors make their presence known as the authors of these texts. What other examples of conventional disruptions or stylistic choices pop out at you as a reader, and what do you make of them?

Write-ups due by Monday 7/6/09 at noon.