ENGL 90912 - Contemporary Conceptual Literature

Institution:

University of Notre Dame

Subject:

English

Description:

Anyone who looks beyond best-seller lists quickly sees that 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 seems to parallel 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 tend to expand the definition of literature rather than close it down to accepted conventions: fiction, poems, electronic and other hybrids whose authors have adopted much of the idioms, rhetorical strategies, or styles of earlier conceptual, modern and postmodern work, either self-consciously or not, as they engage with contemporary thought, and social formations, even as they move further from ideas of originality, the oppositional stance of the avant-garde, and other assumptions that informed earlier writing. 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); The Jirí Chronicles (Debra Di Blasi); Europeana: A Brief History Of The Twentieth Century (Patrik Ourednik); The Blue Guide to Indiana (Michael Martone). 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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