Interpretari 2018 (1) [627721]

1 Universitatea Babeș -Bolyai, Cluj -Napoca , Facultatea de Litere
Anul universitar 20 17-2018, Semestrul I I

INTERPRETARI DE TEXTE – CONF. DR. CARMEN BORBELY
[anonimizat] , [anonimizat]

An introductory (two -semester) practical course to contemporary British novels in the context
of postmodern theory.

I. Bibliografia obligatorie:
PRIMARY TEXTS:
The reading assignments for each class session – i.e. the novels under discussion – are
COMPULSORY . I will leave 2 copies (at least) of each novel at the Library. However, should
you feel bound by time constraints or heavy workload for your other classes, please insist on
the sections or chapters suggested .

1. Jean Rhys: Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)
2. John Fowles: The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969)
3. Salman Rushdie: Midnight’s Children (1981)
4. Julian Barnes: A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989)
5. Margaret Atwood: The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
6. Angela Carter: The Bloody Chamber (1972)

BIBLIOGRAFIA SECUNDA RA = OPTIONALA :
 Baudrillard, Jean (1994) Simulacra and Simulation Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press
 Calinescu, Matei (1987) Five Faces of Modernity. Modernism, Avant -Garde, Decadence, Kitsch,
Postmoder nism Durham: Duke University Press
 Connor, Steven (1997) Postmodernist Culture. An Introduction to Theories of the Contemporary Oxford:
Blackwell
 Hutcheon, Linda (1989) The Politics of Postmodernism London & New York: Routledge
 Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism, Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism London & New York:
Verso
 Lyotard, Jean Francois (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge Manchester University
Press
 Malpas, Simon (2005) The Postmodern New York: Routledge
 McHale, Brian (19 87) Postmodernist Fiction Routledge
 McHale, Brian (1992) Constructing Postmodernism New York: Routledge

Course Schedule

Weeks 1, 2:
PRESENTATION OF COUR SE SYLLABUS. INTRODU CTORY SESSIONS

TOPICS:
Defining the postmodern. The critique of representation. Microtheory and micropolitics
(Lyotard, Foucault, Deleuze). The decentred & fragmented subject: multiplicity, plurality,
indeterminacy. Modernity/Postmodernity. Lyotard and the emancipation/speculative

2 metanarratives. Jameson and the cultural logic of lat e capitalism. Baudrillard and the culture
of hyperreality: simulation and simulacra. POST modern ISM: the cultural, artistic, literary
epiphenomenon of postmodernity. McHale and the change of dominant.

Weeks 3, 4:
JEAN RHYS – THE ANXIETY OF INFLU ENCE IN WIDE SARGASSO SEA

Rhys and the ‘anxiety of influence’. WSS and Jane Eyre. Alternative histories/ anti -histories.
Textual worlds. Madness. Essentialist and constructivist narratives.
Hybridity. Creolisation. Liminality. The third space of enunciation. At the boundary:
epistemological/ontological dominants.

Weeks 5, 6:
JOHN FOWLES AND THE TEXTUAL WORLD ‘UNDER ERASURE’ – THE
FRENCH LIEUTENANT’S WOMAN (1969)

PAY SPECIAL ATTENTIO N TO CHAPTERS : 1,2,3,6,7,8,9,10, 13,16,18,20,28,35, 44,60,61

POSSIBLE TOPICS:
– historiografic metafiction – metafictional tendency to blur the boundaries between story –
telling and history – techniques (intertextuality, parody, pastiche, self -reflexivity,
fragmentation, the rewriting of history, frame breaks)
– processes of history -writi ng and fiction -writing – assumptions about narrative and about
the nature of mimetic representation
– postmodern gaming – disruptions of fiction -reality boundaries – everything is text,
discourse – including history – deliberate anachronisms, crisscrossings of temporal layers,
multiple endings
– ontological dominant – constructions of identity of self, text, world ; authorial intrusions
– rewriting Victorian novels – fiction writing as recycling the past (historical, cultural,
literary)

Weeks 7, 8:
SALMAN RUSHDI E AND THE HYBRID POS T-COLONIAL TEXT –
MIDNIGHT’S CHILDREN (1981)

PAY SPECIAL ATTENTIO N TO CHAPTERS :
Book One: The perforated Sheet, Mercurochrome, Hit -the-spittoon, Under the Carpet, A
Public Announcement, Tick, tock
Book Two: The Fisherman’s Pointing Fi nger, Snakes and Ladders, All -India Radio, Love in
Bombay, My Tenth Birthday, The Kolynos Kid, Jamila Singer
Book Three: The Buddha, Abracadabra

POSSIBLE TOPICS:

3 – narrating the nation: memory and competing narratives of the nation – individual (minor)
v. ‘grand narratives’ of truth, the nation, history – undoing the self -justifying narratives of
both imperialism & post -imperial nationalism
– history conceived as an overwhelming superabundance of experience, a tumult of
competing voices – ‘chutnification’ of h istory – intended distortions of fact, chronology
– hybrid identity – mongrel – multiplicity of lives and fates quarrelling inside Saleem
Sinai’s body – relationship between self and otherness
– grotesqueness – parody, pastiche – breaks down distinctions betwe en genres, modes of
discourse, linguistic levels – impurity, hybridity, heteroglossia

Weeks 9, 10:
ATOMIZING HISTORY: J ULIAN BARNES – A HISTORY OF THE WOR LD
IN 10 ½ CHAPTERS (1989)

PAY SPECIAL ATTENTIO N TO SECTIONS :
II. 1 The Stowaway; 3 The Wars of Religion ; 5 Shipwreck; Parenthesis; 10 The Dream

POSSIBLE TOPICS:
– the end of history/ progress? – post-history?
– problematics: narrating (hi)stories: Interrogation of ideology (questioning "grand
narratives," problematizing closure, valorizing instability, suspec ting coherence, and so forth)
– circular process: progress leads only to more progress –dissolves the very meaning of
progress as a forward movement in history and as smth qualitatively different from what
precedes it
– history – broken down into an infinity o f histories that can no longer be combined into a
single narrative – micro -histories

Weeks 11, 12:
POSTMODERN FEMINIST DYSTOPIAS: MARGARET ATWOOD – THE
HANDMAID’S TALE (1985)

PAY SPECIAL ATTENTIO N TO CHAPTERS :
I (Night), II (Shopping), VI (Household), XIV (Salvaging), Historical Notes on ‘The
Handmaid’s Tale’

POSSIBLE TOPICS:
– dialogic rewriting of Orwell’s 1984 – dystopian projections of totalitarianism
– Foucauldian structure – panopticon (carceral archipelago) – ubiquitous exercise of
surveillance re placing the scenic, public display of corporal punishment (marks great
epistemic shift inaugurating age of modernity)
– Foucault: regimes of Power/Knowledge – Subjection = becoming a subject of power +
subjectification, acquiring a sense of subjectivity – Human identity = discursively constructed
within a network of surveillance, power, control
– competing versions of “truth” – epilogue – postmodernist repudiation of grand utopian
narratives ; utopia – dystopia – heterotopia (provisional/transitional)

4 Weeks 13, 14:
ANGELA CARTER AND THE ‘MICROPOLITICS OF DE SIRE’ – THE
BLOODY CHAMBER (1972)

POSSIBLE TOPICS:
TOPICS:
Cupid & Psyche v. Beauty & the Beast; the Animal Groom; Rewriting older stories and
myths; reworking the "Beauty and the Beast" motif; Carter’s citat ional technique: the
appropriation and subversion of folk and fairytale sources; spectatorship and gendered models
of looking; scopophilia and fetishism; the masculinisation of the spectator position (the
dynamics of looking) v. static female ‘to -be-looked -at-ness’; looking (dominant/subject
position) and being looked at (submissive/ object position);

Bibliography:
Compulsory –
▪ Angela Carter: ‘The Tiger's Bride’ in The Bloody Chamber (1979)
▪ Angela Carter: ‘The Company of Wolves’ in The Bloody Chamber (1979)

MODUL DE EVALUARE :
CLASS PARTICIPATION AND ATTENDANCE : required ( 80%). Penalties will not be imposed for
your first 3 absences; thereafter, the 10% from your final course grade will drop one grade for each
session missed. Excessive absences may, neve rtheless, result in failure of the course.
LEADING CLASS DISCUS SION : Students may sign up individually or in pairs to give presentations
of a particular novel and to initiate discussion for one of the sessions. Students leading discussion will
be directed in advance as to the focus of their discussion questions.
WRITTEN ASSIGNMENTS : 2. The first will be a shorter (mid -term) class assignment (probably at
the beginning of December), requiring you to comment on a topic discussed in the previous seminars
(2 pages maximum). The final paper will be a more comprehensive research paper (5 -10 pages) on a
topic of your choice in connection with our readings (typed or word -processed with standard double –
spacing). Late papers will be penalized one grade for each misse d deadline. Suggested date for
handing in your essays: last but one week in the semester (January).

GRADING :
CLASS ATTENDANCE : 10%.
PARTICIPATION IN CLASS DISCUSSIONS : 20%.
MID -TERM TEST : 20%.
END -OF-TERM PAPER : 50%. NOTA BENE : Outstanding presentati ons and class contributions will
exempt those students from having to write this paper.

III. Detalii organizatorice, gestionarea situațiilor excepționale:
Plagiarism will entail failure of the course.

IV. Bibliografia opțională:
GUIDE TO THE READING MATERIAL:
You do NOT have to read the Optional texts . However, you may choose to do so, since they gi ve
you relevant material in the theoretical area for writing your essays.