English 6/4933, Contemporary Literature: Imagining Infrastructure

Prof. Dan Punday MW 12:30 -1:45 Fall 2019

Infrastructure brings to mind the boring stuff of modern life: road construction, mass transit, waterline installations. What could be a less promising topic for contemporary literature?

And yet, infrastructure is going through a fundamental change that is transforming our relationship to home, community, and country. What Amazon happens to stock (and where its distribution centers are) is often more important than the stores in your home town. Sign up for a gmail or twitter account, and that can become your identity more than your home address. Geo-politically, the infrastructure of drone warfare and the ubiquity of Google ignore national boundaries. And these seemingly ephemeral technologies depend on very material, deeply problematic infrastructures--including power-hungry data centers and dangerous rare-earth mining.

In this class, we will read about infrastructure in general and then look at a range of novelists who have written about imaginary infrastructures. These include the imaginary mail system of Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, the mysterious portals that whisk immigrants around the world in Moshin Hamid’s Exit West, and the literal underground railroad in the Colson Whitehead novel of the same name. We’ll also read J.R. Carpenter’s poetic mediation on digital media infrastructure and its relationship to climate change.

The goals of this class are twofold: to explore the literary and cultural meaning of infrastructure today, and to investigate how infrastructures support certain kinds of storytelling more generally.

Likely texts include:

Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49 Moshin Hamid, Exit West Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad Catie Disabato, The Ghost Network Pamela Lu, Ambient Parking Lot J.R. Carpenter, The Gathering Cloud Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe