ENGL 40651 - Atmospherics: Twentieth-Century Fiction

Institution:

University of Notre Dame

Subject:

English

Description:

What do we mean when we say that something is "in the air"? Are we referring to messages transmitted over a broadcast network, the foment of revolution, the shifting winds of fashion, or a powerful critical trend? In this course, we will take up the atmospheric quality of each of these forms of cultural transmission as they appear in American fiction. In doing so, we will ask how they provide models of reading, receiving messages, and decoding information. Surveying a broad range of twentieth-century fiction through to contemporary digital narratives, we will discuss both technologies and techniques for "tuning in" to broadcast media, mass movements, and ideologies. What happens to the persons populating fictional narratives when they participate in, or are even constituted by, their relations to these communication networks? This course will survey a series of prose works from the American twentieth century, beginning with turn-of-the-century spiritualism and broadcast aesthetics (DuBois, Adams, Hopkins), moving to the realm of fashion, contagion and the zeitgeist (West, Porter, Cather), taking up the spirit of revolution in the sixties (Didion, Pynchon, rock), then discussing the idea of the "turn" in academic study through re-readings of James' The Turn of the Screw, and finishing with the future of the broadcast in what is sometimes referred to as "liquid modernity" (Markson, Baker). Short readings from media and cultural theory will accompany each topic. Students will be asked to put pressure on their conceptions of how the interaction styles that accompany media in the twentieth century and beyond might influence, derive from, or appear in the particular medium of literature across multiple flashpoints in the histories of technology and literary innovation. They will develop critical frameworks for analyzing media and narrative forms together, and use this attention to form to ask questions about the boundaries of modern selfhood and the consequences of information movement throughout the twentieth century and through to our contemporary moment.

Credits:

3.00

Credit Hours:

Prerequisites:

Corequisites:

Exclusions:

Level:

Instructional Type:

Lecture

Notes:

Additional Information:

Historical Version(s):

Institution Website:

www.nd.edu

Phone Number:

(574) 631-5000

Regional Accreditation:

North Central Association of Colleges and Schools

Calendar System:

Semester

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