Annotation
20TH-CENTURY INTERNATIONAL EXPERIMENTAL FICTION – PART 2
David Vichnar, PhD (david.vichnar@ff.cuni.cz)
Office Hours: by appointment
Elective M.A. Course; Programme in Critical & Cultural Theory;
Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (Room 1)
COURSE DESCRIPTION
The two-semester course aims to survey the 20th-century experimental fiction written outside the English language, and yet one with important ties to and overlaps with the Anglo-American fiction of the times. Part Two of the course will focus on no fewer than 21 writers active post-war.
Just as the postwar Anglophone literature is hard to conceive without such innovators as Christine Brooke-Rose, B.S. Johnson, Vladimir Nabokov and Thomas Pynchon, these figures are in turn impossible to understand without a grasp of the influence of the French Oulipo group, the New Novel, of Latin American magic realism, or such maverick figures as Arno Schmidt and Italo Calvino.
The course will again start by surveying arguably the most vital literary tradition of the French postwar avant-garde, and within a broadly comparative framework in mind then go on to cover the experimental developments in the German, Spanish & Portuguese, Italian and Latin American literary traditions.
Authors covered include Ignacio de Loyola Brandão, Roberto Bolaño, Gabriel Cabrera Infante, Italo Calvino, Julio Cortázar, Hélène Cixous, Hubert Fichte, Carlos Fuentes, Elena Garro, Juan Goytisolo, Pierre Guyotat, José Lezama Lima, Giorgio Manganelli, Catherine Millet, Georges Perec, Julián Ríos, Alain Robbe-Grillet, Arno Schmidt, Philippe Sollers, Luisa Valenzuela, and Peter Weiss.
FURTHER INFORMATION
For information regarding the syllabus and grading, please consult the course Moodle page: https://dl1.cuni.cz/course/view.php?id=8765