In this course, we will examine the attempts of various American writers to come up with alternatives to the conventions of realist narrative fiction that have dominated American literary history. We will read writers from the last half-century that have employed with modernist and postmodern techniques as metafiction, resistance of closure, authorial intrusion, collage, indeterminacy, pastiche, stream of consciousness, surrealism, defamiliarization, paradox, and hybridity. Selected writers will include John Barth, Donald Barthelme, Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum, Lydia Davis, Ben Marcus, David Markson, Carole Maso, Tim O’Brien, Thomas Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace, among others. Students will be responsible for weekly critical responses, two longer analytical papers, and several experimental fictions.