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LIT 2183 Milan Kundera and the Art of Fiction

M . W . .

1:30 - 2:50 pm

ASP 302

ELIT

The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1982) by the Czech/French writer Milan Kundera is regarded as an exemplification of the postmodern novel. This course will examine how Kundera’s idiosyncratic textual strategies explode traditional notions of character and fictional identity, and unsettle the comfortable boundaries between such oppositional categories as the fictional and factual, totalitarian and democratic, or Eastern and Western. It will discuss Kundera’s use of philosophy and history, placing his novels in the context of larger political issues, such as the question of Central Europe and the situation in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War. It will also consider matters of language and translation (cinematic as well). Additional readings will include a wide spectrum of Kundera’s works (The Joke, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Immortality), as well as his writings about fiction (The Art of the Novel, Testaments Betrayed). Each class is organized around supplemental texts by Nietzsche, Broch, Calvino, Fuentes, Rorty, Havel, Brodsky, Benjamin, and Huyssen, among others.