This Is Not For You: Getting Lost in the Postmodern Labyrinth with Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Le

This is not for you. 

Five words on an empty page. This is how Mark Z. Danielewski’s novel House of Leaves (2000) tries to lure us in … or keep us out? What follows is a tour-de-force through a paradoxical reading space—bigger on the inside than on the outside, riddled with secret tunnels, footnotes that spiral across the page, and layers of commentary by an odd cast of readers who have wandered these strange hallways before you. An intensely visual text that radically expands what a book can do, House of Leaves has attracted a cult following as a daring example of postmodernist experimental fiction. Part riveting found-footage gothic story about a suburbian family home that contains an impossible labyrinth behind a closet; part metafictional satire of postmodern literary theory; part road trip through the weird undergrounds of the American experience, and part detective quest that sends you scrambling for the next clue, its multi-layered, paradoxical narrative structure feels like an M.C. Escher print and mirrors the logic of hypertext. Getting lost in its labyrinthine paths is an adventure, shaped by what Roland Barthes in his famous essay The Pleasure of the Text has invoked as the “text of bliss:” “the text that imposes a state of loss, the text that discomforts, unsettles the reader’s historical, cultural, psychological assumptions, the consistency of their tastes, values, memories, brings to a crisis their relation to language.” 

Coupled with selected secondary readings, drawn from the history of postmodern literary theory, we will spend the whole semester finding our way through a single novel: Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves. Purchasing a physical copy of the book is required.

Copies are available at Read the Room Coffee and Books, (https://readtheroomcoffee.de, Hauptstrasse 42-44, Dresden)

For more info, check out: "Five Minutes with Mark Z. Danielewski - An Interview on House of Leaves".