Symptomatic Reading

• Set of interpretative paradigms derived from work of Louis Althusser
• Texts are "symptoms" of the environments in which they are produced
• This is sometimes manifested subconsciously within texts
• Literary-studies paradigm of critique

Post-Critical Approaches

• Spearheaded by Rita Felski and Bruno Latour in different disciplines
• Turns away from the mantra of critique
• Anti-political gesture in the literary space
• Criticism is that literary-studies's political readings are too formulaic

1. What do we mean by "American" literature?

2. What do we mean by politics?

3. What do we mean by politics in literature?

4. What texts/which novels?

5. Why 1960 to 2017? Long 1980s?

The Canon of Postmodern US Fiction

• The "Great White Male Narcissists"
• The politics of race and gender
• Black metafiction

Metafiction and Politics

• General assault on metafiction as a-political/nihilistic
• Cold war metaphor in Barth's Giles Goat-Boy
• Herero genocide in Pynchon's V. and Gravity's Rainbow
• Iraq War and 9/11 in later DeLillo

Critique and Labour

• Critique: the conditions of possibility
• But: what is the link between critique, critical thinking, and action?
• The labour of reading and writing: locutionary critique
• Big data and the threat to authorship