Prescribed Texts

• Film Kiss, Kiss, Bang, Bang
• Cormac McCarthy The Road
• Roland Barthes Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes
• Dambudzo Marechera House of Hunger
• Course Reader (supplied on registration)

In the first section of the course, we examine the phenomenon of the postmodern, using its most typical form: the visual. We look at the film, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, which collages mainstream Hollywood film with consumer culture, using narrative constructions and directorial techniques reminiscent of avant-garde film directors of the 1960s. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’s combination of the ‘radical’ and the popular, its endless referentiality, its deliberate and playful contrivance and its obsession with surface and image mark the film as typically postmodern.

A further aspect of the contemporary is addressed in The Road. This 2006 novel by American writer Cormac McCarthy offers a post-apocalyptic reading of the present. The narrative follows the journey of a father and his young son over a period of several months, as they cross a landscape blasted by an unnamed cataclysm that has destroyed all civilization and, apparently, almost all life on earth.

In such an environment, what space might be claimed for the writer, and the writing of ‘the self’? We tackle this question using the conceptually and formally provocative work of Roland Barthes. Having announced “The Death of the Author” (1968), Roland Barthes then set outto write an autobiography – by definition, an author-centred genre. In Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes we encounter self-representation through the blind-spot, as im/possible project.

Dambudzo Marechera, (1952-1987), was a Zimbabwean novelist who won critical acclaim for his collection of stories entitled The House of Hunger (1978) a powerful account of life in his country under white rule.