Course Description
In one of his essays, Jorge Luis Borges imagines an ancient Chinese encyclopedia that orders animals not by our familiar categories, but by the following classifications: 1) belonging to the emperor; 2) embalmed; 3) tame; 4) suckling pigs; 5) sirens; 6) fabulous; 7) stray dogs; 8) included in the present classification; 9) frenzied; 10) innumerable; 11) drawn with a very fine camel-hair brush; 12) et cetera; 13) having just broken the water pitcher; and 14) that from a long way off look like flies. As Borges’s encyclopedia points out, the way we order the world is partly a function of what we know, or hold to be important. But what we know is also dependent on how we order the world: what we look for, and how we articulate it. And so it is with that articulation known as postmodern fiction. Variously defined -- 1) fiction of a global economy; 2) fiction by previously suppressed voices; 3) non-existent; 4) fiction that is theory-driven; 5) any text written after 1945; 6) fiction that blurs the line between high and low culture; 7) any thing bad; 8) fiction that foregrounds its constructed nature; 9) fiction about the nature of being; 10) fiction about fiction -- our operating definition will start from the position that how a story is told is as important as what story is told, and in postmodern fiction, how the story is told is part of the story. That is, while acknowledging that there is no such thing as postmodernism, only postmodernism(s), we will focus on stories and novels whose aesthetic form embodies the inward turn to language that has transformed all fields of inquiry, and all segments of society, over the last 30 years: fiction whose form arose from and contributed to the questioning of assumptions about how meaning is made, and the implications for the creation of knowledge, power, history, gender, politics, art, ideas of self, and, of course, of literature.

Tentative Reading List
The reading list roughly follows one chronology of postmodern fiction. It ranges from the formal experimentation of authors who rediscovered language as a system of signs on the canvas of the page, and the book as a material object, to those authors who emphasized the role of language in the formation of a society’s reality, and therefore literature, to the absorption of these ideas by more mainstream authors. Although the list is now in flux, it will probably contain many of the below titles:

Course Packet (a few short fictions and seminal texts)
Double or Nothing by Raymond Federman.
If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino.
City of Glass by Paul Auster.
Love in a Dead Language by Lee Siegel.
A Form of Taking It All by Rosmarie Waldrop.
Wittgenstein’s Mistress by David Markson.
Dra— by Stacy Levine.
Galetea 2.2 by Richard Powers.
Dictionary of the Khazars by Milorad Pavic.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers.
Natural History by Maureen Howard.
House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski.
Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson.
 

Course Requirements
Two short papers, midterm, and final.