Teaching the Postmodern: Fiction and Theory

Brenda Marshall's "Teaching The Postmodern" aims to provide an introduction to postmodernism accessible enough for the undergraduate reader and rigorous enough to inform and challenge the graduate student and professor. Designed for the classroom, "Teaching The Postmodern" reads both literary texts and theory. Marshall introduces the reader to key terminology and concepts: structuralism, poststructuralism, the critique of subjectivity, the critique of representation, intertextuality, historiographic metafiction, and counter-memory. Fiction by Italo Calvino, J.M. Coetzee, Michel Tournier, Christa Wolf, Salman Rushdie, Timothy Findley, and Toni Morrison roots the theory in practice. Taking on the notoriously inaccessible, "Teaching The Postmodern" sets out to demonstrate that postmodernism can be comprehensible, and even fun.