Contemporary British and American Fiction
American Studies Masters Program
Ileana Botescu-SireteanuLecturer, Ph.DAmerican Studies Program,
Transilvania University of [email protected]
Course description:
This course aims at offering a comprehensive outlook on
contemporary British and American fiction, focusing on the major
themes and modes of narration, as well as on the main aesthetic
changes that have occurred in the past few decades. In this
respect, it focuses on a selection of British and American writers
whose work illustrates the current transitions in contemporary
world literature.
Course Outline:
1. Postmodernism - a cultural conundrum. General presentation.
Postmodern Fiction2. Reconfiguring topologies: the treatment of
space and time: , Rushdie3. The Historiographic Metafiction.
History, the unreliable narrative: S. Rushdie4. Fantasy, the
Literature of Subversion: Ishiguro, Orwell5. The Hybridization of
Genres6. Irony, Parody and Pastiche. Intertextuality and Literary
Vampirism: Lodge, Barnes7. Social and Political Satire: Orwell,
Barnes8. The Dystopian Vein: K. Ishiguro9. The Nightmare of Future:
Orwell, Ishiguro10. The Postmodern Gothic: McEwan11. Narrating
personal histories12. Imaginary Homelands. Tracing Mythologie
List of British Authors:
Salman Rushdie: Midnights Children/The Satanic Verses/ShameKazuo
Ishiguro: Never Let Me Go/An Artist of the Floating World/The
Remains of the DayDavid Lodge: Nice Work!/The British Museum is
Falling Down/Changing Places/Small WorldIan McEwan: Atonement/The
Cement Garden/ The Comfort of StrangersJulian Barnes: England,
England/Flauberts ParrotGeorge Orwell: 1984/Animal Farm
Selected Bibliography:
CLINESCU, Matei:Five Faces of Modernity: Modernism, Avant-Garde,
Decadence, Kitsch, Postmodernism, Duke University Press, 1987
CONNOR, Steven:Postmodernist Culture: An Introduction to
Theories of the Contemporary, 2nd edition, Oxford: Blackwell,
1997Ed. FOSTER, Hal: Postmodern Culture, London & Sydney:
Pluto, 1985HABERMAS, Jurgen:The Philosophical Discourse of
Modernity, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987HARVEY, David:The
Condition of Postmodernity, London: Blackwell, 1989HUTCHEON,
Linda:The Poetics of Postmodernism, London and New York: Routledge,
1989
IRIMIA, Mihaela:Postmodern Revaluations, ed. Univ. Bucuresti,
1999The Stimulating Difference, ed. Univ. Bucuresti, 1998
JAMESON, Friedrich:Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late
Capitalism, Duke University Press Durham, 1991KROKER, Arthur, David
COOK: The Postmodern Scene: Excremental Culture and
Hyper-Aesthetics, Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1986LANE, R.,
MENGHAM, R, TEW, PH.: Contemporary British Fiction, Polity Press,
2003McHALE, Brian:Postmodernist Fiction, London & New York:
Methuen, 1987Constructing Postmodernism, Routledge, London,
1992
NEAGU, Adriana:The Rise and Fall of Postmodernism, LBUS, Sibiu,
2002
POWLING, Chris:Readers Who Dont, The University of Reading,
Earley, 2000
VARSAVA, Jerry A.:Postmodern Fiction, Mimesis, and the Reader,
Tallahassee: Florida State UP, 1990
VIANU, Lidia:British Desperadoes at the Turn of the Millennium,
ALL, Bucuresti, 1999
WAUGH, Patricia (Ed):Postmodernism. A Reader, London: Edward
Arnold, 1992
WAUGH, Patricia: Practising Postmodernism, Reading Modernism,
London: Edward Arnold, 1992
