Author: Professor Sample

Writers and Dictators

Several years ago Don DeLillo archived all of his notes, drafts, manuscripts, correspondence and various other written material (up to 2003) at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, located at the University of Texas at Austin.

I’ll talk more about this archive in class, but I wanted to send you the link to a New York Times Book Review article that DeLillo had cut out and included in his research materials for Mao II: “Writers and Dictators” by Michael Levitas, then the editor of the book review. Presumably, then, the article had inspired some of DeLillo’s thinking about his novel. In particular, DeLillo had highlighted the closing paragraph:

A bleak prognosis, but perhaps no worse than that of a younger Argentine writer, Martin Caparros, who is 31: ”There’s a difference between the 60’s people and us,” he said. ”They thought the novel would change the world. We don’t know what will change the world, but it won’t be the novel.”

This pessimism — that the novel can no longer change the world — is something we’ll have to address in class.

Premodernism, modernism, postmodernism, antipostmodernism

While we’re all struggling with how Beloved challenges our notions of what counts as “postmodern,” I think it’s helpful (as some of you already have done) to go back and look at some of the various theoretical conceptions of postmodernism we’ve encountered. Hassan and Harvey are good places to begin. Here’s something else I read recently that might be helpful (or perhaps confusing). Louis Menand recently wrote in the New Yorker about Donald Barthelme, an undeniably postmodern writer. But what, Menand asks, is postmodernism again?

Postmodernism is the Swiss Army knife of critical concepts. It’s definitionally overloaded, and it can do almost any job you need done. This is partly because, like many terms that begin with “post,”  it is fundamentally ambidextrous.  It can mean, “We’re all modernists now. Modernism has won.” Or it can mean “No one can be a modernist now. Modernism is over.” (Louis Menand, “Saved From Drowning: Barthelme Reconsidered,” New Yorker 23 Feb 2009: 68-76)

The funny thing about this division and its anchoring in modernism is that it seems to exclude Toni Morrison. In a sense, she precedes it all. With her emphasis on folklore, mythology, and oral storytelling, she really seems to be pre-modern. (Is that what antipostmodern means?)

Or is being pre-modern actually a kind of postmodernism (in that it is antogonistic to modernism)?

Reading House of Leaves against itself

The great paradox of House of Leaves is that the house in the book remains “virtually inviolate to interpretation” (60), while the book itself goes to great lengths to anticipate every conceivable interpretation of itself.

Therefore many of my interpretative approaches toward the text tend either to getting entirely outside the novel (e.g. the mapping project) or to reading the book very literally against itself. In the myriad of made-up and real intertextual references, for example, can we find some surprising framework that casts the novel in a new light?

I’m very interested in the recurring presence of anxieties and phobias in the novel. Karen Green, we find out, has a history of claustrophobia, and one footnote even references her “results on the Sheehan Clinician Rated Anxiety Scale as well as Sheehan Phobia Scale” (59, f69). These are, it turns, out, real clinical diagnostic tools. I’m toying with the idea that we could take something like these real-world rubrics and somehow use them as a lenses to look at House of Leaves. Below is a summary of the Sheehan Disability Scale (SDS), which psychologists often have patients use to self-report their social anxieties. Does something like this have any interpretative potential, or is it just a false lead?

[scribd id=12694609 key=key-1efh2rnfipbnh0f8vuuv]

Welcome to ENGL 660

Welcome to the class blog for the Spring 2009 English graduate seminar “American Postmodernism.” If you are a student in ENGL 660, you can register for the blog, something you’ll need to do before the first week of classes is over.

Even if you don’t want to register yet, you can still browse this site, which will play an essential role in our course this semester. Of particular interest will be the course guidelines and the day-to-day class calendar.