Proseminar Realism and Experiment in the 1980s Banville Ishiguro and Swift Modul 8a 8b

During the 1980s, a development within the British (and in Banville's case Irish) novel which aimed to combine the experimental search for new modes of narration with established means of literary representation began to emerge. While this tendency has been variously described as postmodernist, postmodern realist, experimental realist or historiographic metafictional and manifests itself in a wildly disparate range of styles, forms and content, a certain common interest in subjects such as narrative, history, identity and memory can be discerned. The three novels by Booker Prize winners John Banville, Kazuo Ishiguro and Graham Swift all stem from this period and are linked not only by sharing the areas of interest that have been described as characteristic for British fiction in that period, but by the narrative technique employed and their combination of both realism and experiment as well. In the course of the seminar we will examine how the texts deal with their chosen subjects, how they reflect on the narrative construction of meaning and how they critically comment on received concepts and dichotomies. Towards that end theoretical approaches such as the unreliability of narration, models of identity and memory theory will be introduced and discussed during the course, and their applicability evaluated. John Banville, -The Book of Evidence- (Picador, 1998). ISBN 0-330-37187; Kazuo Ishiguro, -A Pale View of Hills- (Faber and Faber, 1999). ISBN 0-571-16283-5; Graham Swift, -Waterland- (Picador, 2002). ISBN 0-330-49187-3; further material will be made available during the course of the seminar. VoraussetzungenOrientierungskurs Literaturwissenschaft LeistungsnachweisOral presentation and research paper (12-15 pages). FB 02 Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften Uni Kassel SS2006 Anglistik/Englisch FB 02 Geistes- und Kulturwissenschaften Dr. Degenring Folkert