Fiction and Drama in the Postmodern West Course Description

Course Title: Fiction and Drama in the Postmodern West

Course Prerequisites: An Introduction to Literature

Course Follow-ups: American Literature; British Literature

Credit: 2.0

Total Semester Credit Hours: 32

Lecture Hours: 32

Experiment/Computer Hours: 0       

School: School of Foreign Studies

Major: English

Course Description:

After the Second World War, the literary boom in the west was marked by a great number of postmodernist authors. Postmodernist literature was the most prolific in America with outstanding novelists such as Nabokov, Kerouac, Heller, Vonnegut, Pynchon, and Morrison. The British postmodernists included Lodge, Byatt, Carter, Drabble and Fowles. The French representatives in new fiction were Grille, Sarraute and Duras; Eco and Calvino in Italy and Llosa in Peru were also excellent spokespersons in postmodernist literature. The novelists mentioned above exposed the nature of modern wars and western politics. Fiction and Drama in the Postmodern West aims to combine fiction with reality to explore politics, history and culture in western countries and to enhance Chinese graduates’ critical thinking and international perspectives.

Textbooks and Course Materials:

1.      胡全生. 英美后现代主义小说选读[M]. 上海：上海外语教育出版社，2014. (Hu, Q. Selected Readings of British and American Postmodernist Fiction. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, 2014.)

2.      陈世丹. 美国后现代主义小说详解[M]. 天津：南开大学出版社，2013. (Chen, S. A Study of American Postmodernist Fiction. Tianjin: Nankai University Press, 2013.)

Written by: Jing Xingmei