This course will engage works of contemporary American fiction, with particular attention paid to experimental narrative strategies and their effects, including non-chronological storytelling, metafictionality, and narrative omissions. Notably, the literature we will read is set during and/or in the aftermath of World War II and/or the Vietnam War. How do the novel's central characters understand their roles in American society before, during, and beyond wartime? We will consider the ways in which social movements, including the civil rights and women's liberation movements, informed these works of fiction and how such literature resonates in our current moment. Authors/texts studied will include John Okada's No-No Boy (1957), Joan Didion's Democracy (1984), and Susan Choi's American Woman (2003).