Cosmic Systems and Pynchon's 'Against the Day' - AAAA3ST335

• Title: Kosmické systémy a Pynchonovo 'Against the Day'
• Guaranteed by: Department of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures (21-UALK)
• Faculty: Faculty of Arts
• Actual: from 2011
• Semester: winter
• Points: 2
• E-Credits: 4
• Examination process: winter s.:
• Hours per week, examination: winter s.:0/2, Ex [HT]
• Capacity: unknown / unknown (unknown)
• Min. number of students: unlimited
• 4EU+: no
• Virtual mobility / capacity: no
• State of the course: not taught
• Language: English
• Teaching methods: full-time
• Is provided by: AAA500335
• Guarantor: doc. Erik Sherman Roraback, D.Phil.

Annotation

OBJECTIVES
This seminar explores one major late-style work of twenty-first century prose fiction in English, Against the Day (2006), the
most recent novel work (1220 pp.) from the contemporary avant-garde American novelist-recluse Thomas Pynchon (1937-
present). Critical and theoretical matter will also be enlisted in our collective enterprise of encountering Against the Day.
Emphasis will be placed on questions of what precisely are the diverse forms of culture illuminated through Against the Day?s
modes of representation in regard to questions of aesthetics (including of aesthetic pleasure), of epistemology (i.e., of
knowledge), of ethics (and so by extension of evil), and of ontology (i.e., of selfhood and of subjectivity). Moreover, the
notion of ´modernity´ and of how it functions in, and is critiqued by, Pynchon´s novel, with the aid of various theoretical
perspectives (the baroque modern as theorized by Erik Roraback, Niklas Luhmann?s social systems theory, the Frankfurt
School, Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, and so on), will be pursued as objects of critical focus.

ASSESSMENT
To receive credit for the seminar students will be required to have no more than three absences and to submit a final essay
of 2000-2500 words that will be graded písemná práce. (Specialization students will need to produce another longer final
essay of 3000-3500 words that will be graded písemná práce.)

Last update: Nájemníková Hana, Mgr. (28.03.2012)

Literature

MATERIAL

Pynchon: Against the Day (2006)

_____ . "Foreword" (2003) to Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell

_____ . The Crying of Lot 49 (1965, general reference)

_____ . Gravity's Rainbow (1973, general reference)

_____ . Mason & Dixon (1997, general reference)

_____ . V (1963, general reference)

_____ . Vineland (1989, general reference)

Selections from the following critical and theoretical texts will be available in a course-reader or will be adduced by the instructor in the class:

Roland Barthes: The Pleasure of the Text (Le plaisir du texte 1973, trans. 1975).

Leo Bersani: "Pynchon, Paranoia, and Literature" in The Culture of Redemption (1990) pp. 179-99.

Eric Cassidy: "Cyberotics: Markets, Materialism and Method in Pynchon and Deleuze" in Pynchon Notes 34-35 (1994) pp. 107-28.

William Dawers: "That Other Sentimental Surrealist: Walter Benjamin" in Pynchon Notes 20-21 (1987) pp. 39-60.

Niklas Luhmann: Observations on Modernity (trans. 1998).

Erik S. Roraback: A component part of a work in progress with the working title of The Unconscious of Modernity; or, Thinking Benjamin's Angel of History thru a Literary and Philosophical Baroque, 1610-2010

Last update: Nájemníková Hana, Mgr. (28.03.2012)

Teaching methods

seminář

Last update: Nájemníková Hana, Mgr. (28.03.2012)