25/03 – kl 10-12 – Room E203 (Aktersalongen)
Berndt Clavier, Senior Lecturer, Malmö University
Pale Kings of the bios politikos: Wallace, Barth, Pynchon and the Politics of Literary Form

Berndt Clavier holds a PhD degree in American Literature but has also published in various other fields, including migration studies and cultural studies. In 2007, he published John Barth and Postmodernism: Spatiality, Travel, Montage (Peter Lang). The seminar is a continuation of that work and addresses the way literary form might be understood as a technē for the crafting of ethics and politics. The focus of the seminar is on the ways the cultural and historical techniques of the novel may be brought to bear on recent American postmodernist fiction, Wallace’s posthumous The Pale King (2011), Barth’s The Development: Nine Stories (2008) and Every Third Thought: A Novel in Five Seasons (2011), and Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge (2013).