Answer these questions 2. Why does Kurt Vonnegut have such trouble writing about the events in Dresden—events which he witnessed? How does he solve this problem? 3. In Le Guin’s story “She Unnames Them,” what is the significance of naming? What does it mean for a thing to have or not have a name? 6. A general question: we have now had a quick overview of the last century of American literature. What have been your overall impressions? What have you learned? What authors will you be most inclined to continue reading? What holds American literature together? What direction is American literature moving in?

Postmodern American Narratives Time does not permit, in this course, a full discussion of postmodernism, a movement in literature and other arts which has dominated much of the last half century. If the domestic realism which marked our other readings last week can be said to derive more or less directly from the modernism of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, however, the works of Vonnegut, Le Guin, Speigelman and Pynchon represent what comes after modernism and realism, a fiction crafted in a world marked by genocide, terrorism, madness and fear. At the same time, postmodernism can also be playful, inventive, and even optimistic. Perhaps the simplest way to explain postmoderism is this: In traditional, realistic fiction, a coherent self is portrayed in a coherent world. In modernism, the self remains coherent but is now placed in a world which no longer makes sense, which has become fragmented, confusing and alienating. In postmodernism, the world is still this way, but the self itself has also become incoherent. Everything--the self, the nation, religion, history, relationships--is recognized as a form of fiction, something created and maintained through an act of willful self-delusion. The boundaries between different artistic forms are blurred and ultimately disappear altogether; they, too, are fictional. Thus, it has become possible in recent decades for comic books, once dismissed as being fit only for children, to be recognized as a serious literary form worthy of close study. Science fiction, too, has been freed from its marginalized state; Vonnegut, Le Guin, and (to a lesser degree) Pynchon were all once dismissed as “merely” science fiction writers, but are now recognized as being important American authors in their own right. Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, excerpted here, is a serious treatment of war, but it is also a wildly comic science fiction novel involving time travel, alien zoos, and explicit sexuality. Such combinations would have once been impossible, but in postmodernism they become commonplace. The works you will be reading this week are challenging, but one thing binds them together: they are stories about the difficulty of telling stories. Kurt Vonnegut wants to write about his experiences in World War II, but he does not know how to do so without glamorizing battle in a way he does not intend, so the book becomes the story of how he goes about trying to write the book. Art Spiegelman wants to document his father’s experiences in the Holocaust, but he knows that he can never truly capture what his father went through, so he highlights the artificiality of his attempt by presenting it as a comic strip in which the Nazis are cats and the Jews are mice. Pynchon and Le Guin tackle similar problems in more abstract ways; they want to tell stories, but they recognize that telling a story is inherently a manufactured distortion of experience.