Most of the undergraduates who will take ‘Postmodern Fictions’ this year will have been
born in 1985 or after, and all but one of the module’s primary texts were written before their
lifetime. Far from being ‘contemporary’, these texts were published in another world, before
the students were born: The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Nights at the Circus, If
on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (and Blade
Runner), White Noise: this is Mum and Dad’s culture. Some of the texts (‘The
Library of Babel’) were written even before their parents were born. Replace this cache
with other postmodern stalwarts – Beloved, Flaubert’s Parrot, Waterland, The
Crying of Lot 49, Pale Fire, Slaughterhouse 5, Lanark, Neuromancer,
anything by B.S. Johnson – and the same applies. It’s all about as contemporary as The Smiths,
as hip as shoulder pads, as happening as Betamax video recorders. These are texts which are just coming
to grips with the existence of rock music and television; they mostly do not dream even of the possibility
of the technology and communications media – mobile phones, email, the internet, computers in every
house powerful enough to put a man on the moon – which today’s undergraduates take for granted.