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Contemporary American Fiction

ENGL 274.302
instructor(s):
W 2-5

This course explores the themes of creativity and self-fashioning in postwar North American fiction.  During this period, art responded to vast changes in notions of identity by proliferating outrageous “thought experiments”: postmodern pastiche, feminist science fiction, memoir-novels, high and popular pornography, and the graphic novel.  Using Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a touchstone, we will observe the model monsters in narratives by Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Ursula Le Guin, Toni Morrison, Marilynne Robinson, Katherine Dunn, Margaret Atwood, Philip Roth, Art Spiegelman, Frank McCourt, Candace Bushnell, and Christopher Bram. 

fulfills requirements