106-080 Post-War American Fiction

Credit Points

HECS Band

Coordinator

Prerequisites

Usually admission to the Postgraduate Diploma or Fourth Year Honours in English, see Honours entry.

Semester

Subject Description

This subject provides for a critical study of a number of highly influential fictional works in the post-war period. Each writer is chosen on the basis of stature and the representative nature of their writing, whether it be modernist, postmodernist, humanist or political. The subject is also concerned with selected post-war literary 'movements', such as Beat writing, the rise of 'black' writing, and New Journalism, and with the reaction to them in cultural debates. On completion of the subject students should have gained, through a close study of a significant body of post-war American fiction, an understanding of the representation of specific social and cultural issues, including racial, political, gender and aesthetic.