Paranoid Hermeneutics explores paranoia, not as a medical condition but as a hermeneutic approach coinciding with a modernist and postmodernist fascination with all-encompassing sign systems. The seminar has three interrelated points of focus.

1) It develops a paranoid hermeneutic model, placing paranoid interpretation and paranoid imagination in historical context, and investigating this cultural phenomenon alongside key moments in American literary culture after World War II; 2) it traces a late history of the American novel (from the 1950s to the present day); and 3) it interrogates the rumours surrounding the death of the novel, while examining the genre’s continued relevance, resilience, and capacity for self-reinvention in the face of a changing literary marketplace.

The course will engage with six novels from the American tradition that thematize the currency of the genre after modernism or question its relevance in contemporary literary discourse. Is the novel still a powerful literary form in the 21^st Century, or has it run its course? What are its defining conventions?

The discussion will focus on current philosophical issues such as “the nature of subjective experience”; “the power of media”; “the state of the nation state” and “the relation between fiction and reality”. We will ask whether the novel can still teach us something new and pertinent about these matters. Authors included in the syllabus are Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth, Mark Z. Danielewski, David Foster Wallace, and David Mazzucchelli.

Syllabus:

• Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
• Historical Interlude: Paranoid America & Three Films
• Philip Roth, Operation Shylock
• Critical Interlude: The Death of the Novel
• Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
• David Foster Wallace, The Pale King
• David Mazzucchelli, Asterios Polyp

Course outline:

1. Introduction: The Death of the Novel (early diagnoses)
2. Four Types of American paranoia (cold-war, drugs, technology, government)
3. Nabokov, Pale Fire

--Paranoid Hermeneutics and Modernity
--The Modernist Quixotic Novel --Interrogating Genre
--Paratext: Limits of the Book/Text
--Overpatterning and the Limits of Overinterpretation
--Themes: Fate, Chance and Afterlife

4. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49

-- Drug Culture in the 60s
-- Entropy and Information
-- Herneneutics vs Revelation: the epileptic word
-- Gender Politics

5. Historical Interlude

-- Notes on Paranoia and Cold-War American History
--Four Types of American paranoia: the Five Moments

• The 50s: the red scare and McCarthyism; the 50s: suburbia and the American dream; the 60s: bomb-scare (duck and hide); the 60s: new drug culture; the 70s: Watergate; the 70s: surveillance; the 80s: bomb-scare

-- Three Films

• The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
• The Conversation (1974)
• Class gets to choose another one from the list

6. Philip Roth, Operation Shylock

--Playing with Doubles
--Paratext and Paranoia
--Roth: Rhetoric, Discourse and Truth

7. Critical Interlude: Notes on the Death of the Novel

-- The Novel 3.0
--Ortega y Gasset

8. Danielwsky, House of Leaves

--Notes on Genre
--Materiality
--The Uncanny

9. David Foster Wallace, The Pale King

--Paranoid novel or antidote to paranoia?
--The Great American Novel… about the ’80s
--Stories of the IRS

• Big government
• Boredom and addiction

--Addiction and TV
--New sincerity and contemporary art

9. Mazzuchelli, Asterios Polyp

--Playing with doubles
--The campus novel
--Materiality of the graphic novel