“EVERYTHING I’VE EVER LET GO OF HAS CLAW MARKS ON IT”
~David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

Wherever you are in life, meaning can be tough to find. Sometimes it can seem like you’re not supposed to care deeply about anything. Like it’s uncool or cliche to try to develop genuine connections with people, ideas.., your classes. In this class, we’ll analyze that situation, and learn what we can do about it. We will both explore and create metamodernism, because that word is by no means solidified in academic discourse. This class will focus on narratives and nonfiction as a vehicle for understanding ideas, as opposed to just reading a bunch of critical theory. We’ll start with some movies to set your expectations for the course. We’ll then learn to recognize major characteristics of modernist and postmodernist thought in literature. Finally, we’ll take on metamodernists like David Foster Wallace and Haruki Murakimi and view them through the lens of thinkers like Lacan and Foucault. By the end of the course you will be able to recognize postmodernist tendencies in the world around you and you will have the tools necessary to respond to them.

Attendance, short weekly writing assignments, and a final paper will make up your grade. The weekly assignments are not formal essays and will not be graded on style or correctness. Instead, I welcome your stream of consciousness thoughts on the question of the week.

The application has two questions. One is "Why do you want to take this class?". The other is more creative. Feel free to answer as briefly or as verbosely as you see fit.