The course looks at a number of texts that explore paranoia, not as a medical condition but as a hermeneutic approach coinciding with a modernist and postmodernist fascination with all-encompassing sign systems. The discussion will focus on the following themes: the nature of subjective experience; the power of media; the relation between fiction and reality; entropy and semiotics; hyper-reality; the ontological status of hallucinations; artificial intelligence; the viability of the novel as a contemporary narrative genre.

Syllabus (Primary Sources):

• Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
• Philip Roth, Operation Shylock
• Three Films
• Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
• David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
• David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp