English 494A: Honors Seminar
Professor Gillian Harkins
T/TH 9:30-11:20 AM Room TBD
Office Hours: T/TH 12-1 PM in 506-A Padelford Hall or zoom by appointment
English Honors Seminar:
Postmodern / Fiction
Course Description: What is postmodernism? Or perhaps we should ask, what was postmodernism? In the later twentieth century, critics coined the term “postmodernism” to describe a cluster of cultural and aesthetic experiments allegedly marking the end or limits of modernist representation. Few agreed on what precisely characterized postmodern arts and culture, or whether indeed something distinct or new was happening at all. Much of this discussion depended on how, or even whether, any given critic defined “modernism” as a cultural/aesthetic mode or more generally its tether to “modernity” as a broader historical concept. Debates about postmodernism foundered repeatedly on the question of modernity writ large: had the world-systems wrought through capitalism, colonialism, nationalism, and imperialism reached some kind of crisis-point? If so, was this an “end” of some kind, in which case for what or for whom? Or was this merely a transformation without a predictable future, in which case what modes of living or forms of being might be emergent or resurgent? Were cultural forms and aesthetic modes relevant to these broader changes, and if they were, what kinds of critical responses helped clarify the ways “fiction,” for instance, participated in world-historical changes of this kind?
This Honors seminar will return to these debates about postmodernism from the vantage points of 2025-26. We will primarily read later twentieth century works speculating on the ways a changing world impacted arts and ideas, with a specific focus on literary fiction and its alleged role in revealing or remaking relations of power in moments of dramatic and declared change. Our core readings will be novels alongside critical and philosophical writings about modernity and its privileged modes of representation. Our aim in revisiting postmodernism will be to consider its relevance to our more recent present, including a possible turn to works written in the twenty-first century which explore similar themes and questions. Our method is to engage these works in ways that develop your research skills and leave time for you to practice the course’s research skills in preparation for the Honors Thesis in Spring.