Literatures of memory : history, time and space in postwar writing

Part 1: postmodernism and the death of the past - history and postmodernity, everyday practices of history, fear of the past; the ethics of historical fiction - postmodernism and historical fiction, postmodern history and ethics; memory's realism -metamemory in Pat Barker's "Regeneration", identity and trauma, social memory; practising spacetime - the relativistic physics of memory - Margaret Atwood's "Cat's Eye", science and social time, making time for diversity, the spatialization of history. Part 2: staged histories - radical theatre in Britain and America, 1968-1988 - staging history, "Hammering on the Pipes of the Tenement" -David Hare and Howard Brenton, agitprop versus realist history -John McGrath, herstories - Caryl Churchill and Timberlake Wertenbaker, African-American theatre - August Wilson; poetry as memory - the autobiographical lyric in contemporary British and American poetry - Sarah Maguire - "Spilt Milk", Robert Creeley -"I Keep to Myself Such Measures", Jorie Graham - "What the End is For", Lyn Hejinian - "Yet We Insist that Life is Full of Happy Chance", from "My Life"; histories of the future - American science fiction after the Second World War - the future's relation to the present, governing the future - Isaac Asimov's "Foundation Trilogy"; fictional cities and urban spaces - contemporary fiction and representations of the city - architects of theoretical and social space, Thomas Pynchon's urban imaginary in "The Crying of Lot 49", Paul Auster's "The New York Trilogy", simulation city.