| Wes Chapman English House 205 556-3090 wchapman@iwu.edu |
MW
2 - 3 TTh 10 - 11 and by appt |
Jean-François Lyotard characterized postmodernism as a state of “incredulity towards metanarratives.” In this view, our overarching explanations of the world—scientific, religious, historical, political, etc.—no longer function. It is perhaps ironic, then, that incredulity towards metanarratives has led to postmodern novels of such immense size and scope as to be called encyclopedic. In this course, we will study two such novels, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow, to see why a writer might be skeptical of metanarratives and how narratives of any kind can be constructed when narrative itself is open to question.
Doris Lessing, The Golden Notebook
Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow
Steven Weisenburger, A Gravity's Rainbow Companion,
2nd ed.