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.

Week 2: Whitman and Faulkner

As we discussed last week, Whitman is writing during the era identified as the American Renaissance. Leaves of Grass, from which comes "Song of Myself," was first published in 1855 (only a few years before the civil war). Faulkner, on the other hand, is considered a writer of the Southern Renaissance, a movement which occurred during the modern period (between WWI and WWII, almost a century later). What do you make of the work of these two American artists? Some questions to consider in developing your reflection: What American themes and issues do they address in their work and how? What similarities and differences do you observe in their narrative and style? What differences? What cultural and historical circumstances seem important in contextualizing these authors and their work?

Week One: pomo conversations

Prompt: what struck you as interesting and/or significant in Berube's essay?