EN 8573: Literature after 1900: The Fiction of Paul Auster

Fall 2009/ Monday 3-5:30        Patteson

This seminar will examine most of Paul Auster's major novels, from his mindbending New York Trilogy to his most recent book, Man in the Dark. Since the beginning of his career Auster has exploited conventional narrative strategies (the detective novel, the picaresque, the autobiography, etc.) to discover new ways of exploring the psychological and even metaphysical functions of storytelling. One of his characters says, "Everybody make words," and that simple insight appears again and again in Auster's fiction as a way of coping with a human reality constantly on the verge of extinction. There is no novelist out there today who believes more strongly in the indivisibility of literature and life.

The class will also consider the broader questions of his status as a uniquely American writer (maybe the truest contemporary heir to the great figures of the American literary renaissance) and his problematic place within the postmodemist movement.

In 2006 Auster became only the fifth English-language writer to be awarded the Prince of Asturias Prize in Literature, the Spanish world's equivalent of the Nobel (along with Arthur Miller, Susan Sontag, Doris Lessing, and Margaret Atwood). Many thoughtful critics in the U.S., and most in Europe, consider him our greatest living novelist.

The course will include one oral presentation, a seminar paper at the end of the semester, and a big test, also at the end.

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The texts we will use are as follows:

  
The New York Trilogy (1987)
In the Country of Last Things (1987)
Moon Palace (1989)
Leviathan (1992)
Timbuktu (1999)
The Book of Illusions (2002)
Oracle Night (2003)
The Brooklyn Follies (2006)
Travels in the Scriptorium (2006)
Man in the Dark (2008)		 cartoon 2