SoSe 23: HS-Studying the Present Moment: Now and Then: The Past and Presence of Historiographic Metafiction
Peter Löffelbein
Comments
Historiographic metafiction is a genre deeply invested in questioning notions of history, reality, textuality, and authorship. Dubbed a quintessentially postmodern genre, it includes texts like John Fowles’ The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1969), Graham Swift’s Waterland (1983), or Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover (1992), which challenge traditional divisions between (historical) fact and fiction, of what can be known and what has to be imagined.
With what has been called the decline of postmodernism in literature, the questions raised by these texts have shifted out of focus. What remains? This course asks how we are to read these texts today. We shall recapitulate the challenges of (and to) historiographic metafiction and discuss their relations to more contemporary texts – e. g. Ali Smith’s How To Be Both (2014), Sara Collins The Confessions of Frannie Langton (2021), or Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021) – that deal with the very same – or related – issues: How to tell history? How to represent reality? How to relate fact and fiction today?
This course complements MÜ 17387: Challenging Realities: (Historical) Fact and Fiction in Contemporary Theory
close12 Class schedule
Regular appointments