ENGL 90706 - Literature as Contemporary Art

Institution:

University of Notre Dame

Subject:

English

Description:

Beyond the best-seller lists, there's a wild west of writing out there where anything goes. In fact, judging by the variety of contemporary writing practices and materials, the use of language as an art medium parallels visual art where the mainstream is conceptual and can just as easily be video as it can be made of tennis shoes or DNA. In this class we will be reading works that play with language, as indie music plays with sound, rather than closing it down to commercial conventions: fiction, poems, electronic and other hybrids whose authors have adopted much of the idioms or rhetorical strategies of earlier conceptual, modern and postmodern work as they engage with contemporary thought and contexts that have emerged alongside the maturation of global networks, the biotech revolution, and social formations that make our world what it is today. Variously called experimental, conceptual, avant-garde, hybrid, postmodern, innovative, extreme, alternative, e-, anti-, or new literature, our readings will include works from the collaborative flash poems of Heavy Industry, to the visual-text hybrids of Johanna Drucker, to the reworking of pulp "Nurse Betty" novels by Stacey Levine. Tentative reading list: The People of Paper (by Salvador Plascencia); Electronic Literature Collection (Katherine Hayles, et al eds.); Love in a Dead Language (Lee Siegel); Frances Johnson (Stacey Levine); Wittgenstein's Mistress (David Markson); City of Glass (Paul Auster); Notable American Women (Ben Marcus); Altmann's Tongue (Brian Evenson); Camera (Jean-Philippe Toussaint); Vacation (Deb Olin Unferth); Europeana: A Brief History Of The Twentieth Century (Patrik Ourednik); The Blue Guide to Indiana (Michael Martone); 2666 (Roberto Bolaño). Course pack of short fiction and poetry. Course requirements: 2 short papers, 1 long. Short quizzes. Midterm, final.

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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