The central question of this course will be the relation between postmodernity, defined as large changes at the social, political and economic levels that challenge aspects of modernity, and postmodernism, as the cultural level: how do these large changes register in literature? The focus will be on literary texts that are explicitly in dialogue with accounts or ideologies of postmodernity and which raise the question of what kind of critical distance or relative autonomy there is, anymore, between historical or socioeconomic context and cultural text (a problem Charles Altieri has raised). We will do some readings that address the relation between postmodernity and postmodernism directly (possibly Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer [as context], Fredric Jameson, David Harvey, Donna Haraway, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Paul Gilroy) and some more historical readings on late capitalism or post-industrial society (Daniel Bell, Ernst Mandel) that track the emergence of these terms and their transformation into a discourse on network societies (Manuel Castells, Nick Dyer-Witheford, Yochai Benkler). The literary examples will primarily be drawn from science fiction, and texts will be selected from this list: Bruce Sterling, Distraction; Charles Stross, Accelerando or Halting State; Cory Doctorow, Makers or For the Win; Samuel Delany, Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand; Octavia Butler, Dawn; George Saunders, Civilwarland in Bad Decline; Pat Cadigan, Tea from an Empty Cup; Laura Mixon, Proxies; Raphael Carter, The Fortunate Fall; Dexter Palmer, The Dream of Perpetual Motion.

There will be some shorter writing assignment and probably some class presentations, but the main assignment for the course will be one final essay.