Eng 320 Fall 2009-Contemporary American Literature

Alison Bechdel and Fun Home

2009-11-30T08:48:00.000-08:00

Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic was named one of Time magazine's 10 best books of the year in 2006. Prior to the publication of her graphic novel-cum-memoir, Bechdel was best known for her comic strip, "Dykes to Watch Out For," which was syndicated in a number of alternative publications throughout the country. In Fun Home, Bechdel persists in exploring some of the themes she first examined in her strips, particularly gender and sexual orientation, as well as the trials and tribulations of a smart and witty young woman in America. However, Bechdel's memoir is an even more personal and poignant account--both of growing up gay and simply growing up. Bechdel's book, alongside David Foster Wallace's essays and short stories, asks us to look at the future of contemporary American literature. Will the "great American novel" be something other than a traditional novel? Have we moved past the genre of the novel onto more hybrid literary forms, such as the graphic memoir of Spiegelman and Bechdel?

Robert Coover and The End of Books post

2009-11-21T17:14:00.000-08:00

Your homework assignment for Monday asks that you read the article, "The End of Books," by Robert Coover and make a blog posting of 1-2 paragraphs with your response to the material. You can access the reading here, by clicking on the title above, or by going to the course documents page on Blackboard. Please post your material before class on Monday.

As for directions on the assignment: I am not looking for a formal response, but you want to make sure that your response is based in part on the text you read. So, it's definitely great to include your thoughts on a whole host of topics related to the questions Coover and/or David Foster Wallace raise, but make sure you refer some of them back to the reading. Please write me with any problems posting or completing the assignment. I look forward to reading your work and having an opportunity for you to share your thoughts with your classmates outside of class!

*****Just a note, too: I noticed that a lot of you were posting about the fact that hypertext literature hasn't become too popular since Coover wrote about it in the early 1990s. I wondered if future posters could also address the larger questions Coover brought up and that dovetail more with the rise of Kindle and the like, i.e. will books as physical artifacts in the traditional sense ever die?***

For the interested: Check out the following article about the Kindle by Nicholson Baker. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/08/03/090803fa_fact_baker

David Foster Wallace and A Supposedly Fun Thing...

2009-11-21T17:13:00.000-08:00

David Foster Wallace's recent death shocked critics and readers alike; since 1987, Wallace had been producing some of the most avant-garde and challenging prose in American fiction. For class, we'll be looking at his non-fiction in A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, as well as a few of his short stories from Brief Interviews with Hideous Men. Wallace is most renowned, however, for his 1079 page magnum opus, Infinite Jest, which was published in 1996. In Infinite Jest and in his earlier novel, The Broom of the System, David Foster Wallace pushed at the boundaries of the genre of fiction and challenged readers by introducing them to extended footnotes that threatened to take over the stories he was telling and lengthy, punctuationless sentences that carried the reader into Foster Wallace's own unique system of mental processes and associations.

Foster Wallace's presence in American fiction will be sorely missed. Time magazine named Infinite Jest one of its "All Time 100 Greatest Novels" and critic David Ulin called him "one of the most influential and innovative writers of the last 20 years." Foster Wallace was also known as a kind and generous teacher, who taught creative writing and English classes at Pomona College in California for a number of years prior to his death.

Philip Roth and The Human Stain

2009-11-10T14:58:00.000-08:00

Philip Roth is one of America's most prolific and successful authors. Many critics have marked him as a likely recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature at some point during the coming years. When the New York Times asked hundreds of the most prominent critics, writers, and editors to pick the best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years, six of Roth's novels made the top spot repeatedly. The essay accompanying the results of this survey stated that "[i]f we had asked for the single best writer of fiction over the past 25 years, [Roth] would have won."

Roth was born in 1933 and grew up near Newark, NJ--much like the protagonists of The Human Stain and many other Roth novels. Roth was recognized as a great writer at a young age, publishing Goodbye, Columbus in 1959 (when he was just 26). After receiving the National Book Award for this volume in 1960, he went on to publish a number of other texts that form the fundament of postwar American literary fiction. From 1969's Portnoy's Complaint to 1979's The Ghost Writer to more recent works, such as American Pastoral (1998), The Plot Against America (2004), and The Human Stain (2000), Roth has managed to write books richly evocative of the era in which his readers live.

The book we'll be reading in class--The Human Stain--is one of Roth's more recent, but it manifests many of the themes that have preoccupied the author since the beginning of his career. The complexities of race in America is a primary subject in the novel, as is the relationship between men and women and the way they negotiate the vagaries of power in their sexual relationships. Roth is also deeply interested in the links between autobiography and writing, as well as those between the family and the individual, in The Human Stain. As you read The Human Stain, think of how its rendering of race and ethnicity compare to that portrayed in Beloved. What picture of contemporary America emerges in Roth's novel? What does it say about race, gender, and the academy--not to mention the links between Jewish and African American identity as symbolic poles in America's self-fashioning?

Toni Morrison, Margaret Garner, and Beloved

2009-11-01T18:46:00.000-08:00

Tomorrow, we'll begin talking about Toni Morrison's seminal 1988 novel, Beloved. Beloved is a book rich with Cincinnati history. It fictionalizes the life of runaway slave Margaret Garner into a magisterial narrative about love, human rights, and our ability to truly "own" the lives we lead. Some of you might be familiar with the story of Garner. She was a slave on a plantation in Kentucky during the 1850s and escaped from her masters with her young children by night from Covington across the Ohio River into the Union enclave of Cincinnati. When slave-catchers reached the home where she and her children were hiding, Garner killed one of her children and attempted to kill the others rather than allow them to be returned to a life of slavery. An America already at odds over the issue of slavery was captivated by the story of Garner and her subsequent trial, which posed fundamental questions about liberty, personhood, and the law. When Junot Diaz was asked by Newsweek to name the 5 books of fiction that were most important to him, he placed Beloved at the top of the list, saying that "[y]ou can't understand the Americas without this novel about the haunting that is our past."

Thomas Saterwaite Noble, "The Modern Medea" (1867)--painting based on Margaret Garner

Toni Morrison based Beloved loosely on the Garner narrative. She also wrote the libretto for an opera on the subject of the runaway slave's life, entitled Margaret Garner. Beloved and Margaret Garner are just two examples of Morrison's interest in tracing the history of black life in America. She is one of the most important authors of the twentieth century and a major force in popularizing African American fiction, both as a writer and editor of other writers work during her time in the publishing industry. Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize, but many other novels by Morrison were justly celebrated--from The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon, two earlier works, to Paradise and the recently-released A Mercy. She is also famous for her many works of literary and social criticism, including Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. In 1993, Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

"Papa Doc" Duvalier and the Dew-Breaker

2009-10-26T09:13:00.000-07:00

Today, we began to discuss the many ways in which The Dew-Breaker references the history of Haiti and particularly the repercussions of dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier's reign on the Haitian people. All the characters in Danticat's book of linked stories suffer from their associations with the violence of Duvalier's Haiti and attempt to understand how to live with the decisions they made in a society where every individual was either "hunter or prey," as Ka's father describes it in the first story of the collection. I gave you an outline of Papa Doc's place in Haitian history in class, but I'm providing you with the following links to get more acquainted with him as you read The Dew-Breaker. Please post any comments on the book or the interplay of history in the lives of the characters in Danticat's book below.

List of Duvalier links:
Papa Doc's Wiki page

Another article on Duvalier reign

Site about Haitian history

Edwidge Danticat and the Dew-Breaker

2009-10-26T06:15:00.000-07:00

Edwidge Danticat spent the first twelve years of her life in Haiti before moving to a Haitian-American community in Brooklyn. Danticat was educated at Barnard College and Brown University and came to prominence at a very young age with the publication of her first book, Breath, Eyes, Memory in 1994. Attaining widespread critical praise upon its publication, she became the first Haitian-identified author to achieve renown in the United States and the acceptance of her work is seen to mark the beginning of a belated opening of American literary culture to the stories of women and people of color.

Danticat's writing focuses on a number of themes we've discussed in class--from the power of the past to the importance of telling stories in order to construct an identity. Her work also often represents another theme fundamental to our work in class, her sense of feeling pulled between a number of cultures: Haitian and American; black and white; English- and French Creole- speaking; the political and the literary.

The Dew-Breaker is a particularly interesting book to read alongside The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao because it shares many of the central preoccupations of Diaz's novel (not to mention the fact that Danticat and Diaz are good friends). However, Danticat's book more directly addresses the questions about torture and human rights that Diaz's introduce. Also, unlike Oscar Wao, The Dew-Breaker is not a conventional novel, but a series of linked stories that function much as a novel does. As you read, think about how Danticat's choice to render the narrative in this way affects your experience of The Dew-Breaker. What are your first impressions of the book?

Junot Diaz and The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

2009-10-15T20:33:00.000-07:00

For the next week or so, we will be exploring The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. Oscar Wao, published just this past year, is Diaz's first novel; he published his award-winning book of short stories, Drown, almost ten years ago. Since its publication, Diaz's novel has gone on to win a bevy of prizes, including the vaunted Pulitzer.

Diaz's novel introduces a number of questions we will focus on during this portion of the quarter. Most prominently, the novel asks us to think about the American novel outside of the continental United States. Diaz is Dominican-American and his novel moves smoothly between the Dominican Republic and the U.S., the past and the present, with ease. Diaz's novel represents a move toward a different concept of the nation and citizenship in the nation. It also asks us to think a lot about the form of the novel--as we have been doing thus far in class. Oscar Wao is littered with footnotes that threaten to take over the novel and texts that interweave with Diaz's main narrative. Like Mao II, Diaz's book also asks us to think about the intersection of history and literature; Diaz provides us with a graphic, politicized history of the Dominican Republic at the same time as he gives us a fable about a fat, nerdy Dominican boy in the U.S. who can't get a girl to date him.

This Is Your Life and Photography in MAUS

2009-10-15T17:16:00.000-07:00

In class on Wednesday, we watched a clip from the following This Is Your Life episode to open up discussion about the disjuncture between American and European experiences of the Holocaust, as well as 1950s America's awkward attempts to integrate genocide into technicolor television culture.

The full video is below for those interested. Take a look and comment if the spirit takes you.

Also: We didn't get a chance to finish talking about the last pages of MAUS. How dos the introduction of photographs in the last pages of Book II affect our reading of the text? How does the photograph compare to comix as visual media? Is Maus a text appropriately read as a piece of documentary, a remnant of a survivor's experience or something else? Also notice the ways in which the Spiegelman plays with the photograph as another object on the comix page. The many photographs of the Spiegelman family dead are piled atop one another as if they are dead bodies piled inside the gates of (M)Auschwitz and his father's photograph is a play on the many other meta-biographical elements of the book (the souvenir photo of Vladek is a fake, but a fake of something that really happened).

Maus on NPR

2009-10-07T07:55:00.000-07:00

Spiegelman has given a number of interviews, but his NPR material is particularly interesting. Click here to listen to Spiegelman on the rise of underground comix (like his own RAW) and some audio of Vladek Spiegelman, as well.

I will send my powerpoint via email, since Blogger is not a fan of my posting a document on this site.

Spiegelman fans, also make sure to check out his newer book, In the Shadow of No Towers, written about and in the wake of 9-11. Although the text begins as a book about the fall of the Twin Towers, it ends up becoming a meditation of the comix form and the possibility for visual and literary expression to be commensurate to the task of representing disaster.

Art Spiegelman and MAUS

2009-10-04T17:26:00.000-07:00

When Art Spiegelman published MAUS I in 1986, he transformed the medium of comics and greatly affected the American literary world. His work experimented with the traditional form of the comic strip at the same time that it altered forever the content associated with the medium. Spiegelman's choice to depict the Holocaust and its aftermath in a medium often associated (rightly or wrongly) with children, cartoons, and simple caricature changed both the landscape of the comic and that of Holocaust representation. Comics or "comix," as Spiegelman dubbed them, were suddenly taken much more seriously than ever before. MAUS I and II appealed to a broader audience than did the conventional comic strip. When MAUS won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 (after the publication of the second volume in the series), Spiegelman's work drew even greater attention. Since the publication of this magnum opus, he has become one of the comix medium's greatest advocates, traveling the country with his Comix 101 presentation and arguing for the importance of the form.

Spiegelman was born in 1948 in Stockholm, Sweden. His parents, Anja and Vladek, who appear as central characters in MAUS, were refugees, survivors of the concentration camps and World War II. Using the medium of the comic and the figures of the cat and mouse to represent Nazi and Jew respectively, MAUS tells Spiegelman's parents' stories, as well as his own. After getting his start by editing and writing for the graphic magazine RAW, in which early drawings from MAUS were serialized, Spiegelman went on to draw covers for The New Yorker for a number of years, eventually falling out with the editors due to the political nature of many of his drawings.

How does Spiegelman's medium affect his message in MAUS? Is there something sacrilegious about his representation of the Holocaust? Do we read his work as straight memoir, fiction, or some hybrid in-between genre? Has he chosen the appropriate vehicle for telling this story?

Mao II, Rushdie, and the Fatwa

2009-09-30T11:11:00.000-07:00

The second half of MAO II concerns Bill's attempts to free a writer being held hostage by a terrorist group. When DeLillo wrote MAO II, anxiety about the role of the writer in world terror was at an all-time high. Particularly, many writers worried about the fate of their fellow novelist, Salman Rushdie--a famous British-Indian author, who was sentenced to death after publishing The Satanic Verses (1988), a novel that playfully and irreverently represented the story of Muhammad, among its many other story lines.

Thankfully, the fatwa (death sentence) placed on Rushdie's head by the Ayatollah Khomeini, the then-leader of Iran, was never carried out. However, Rushdie suffered for many years under the fear of death and pursuit by a series of assassins bent on carrying out Khomeini's will. Rushdie's difficult situation greatly affected many writers during the period in which DeLillo was writing. What did it mean that someone would want to kill a writer for insulting a religious figure or deity? Did other writers need to live in fear? The case of Rushdie haunts MAO II.

2009-09-29T14:28:00.000-07:00

Even beyond inspiring its name, Andy Warhol's series of Mao portraits features prominently in Don DeLillo's novel, MAO II. Warhol was famous for many things--one of which was _being_ famous and drawing attention to the power of fame and celebrity in postwar American culture! Many of you have probably heard the phrase "15 minutes of fame" used to describe the fleeting nature of celebrity. Andy Warhol was the originator of the phrase, remarking in 1968 that: "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Later, Warhol commented that his prediction had been right. In many ways, Warhol imagined the culture we live in today long before its inception; he wouldn't have been surprised to see a world of fleeting celebrity, in which starring on reality television or internet porn could make anyone famous--even if for only a few minutes of time.

Warhol also prefigured a number of currents in the art world by becoming an expert in multiple media. He was a painter, a filmmaker, a writer, and an arbiter of style and taste. He was a fundamental part of the Pop Art movement that deeply influenced American art and culture.
For more on Warhol, check out these links:
Wiki page
Andy Warhol Museum
Andy Warhol Foundation
Interview with Ric Burns about Warhol doc
Pop Art Explained

“If you’re looking for Andy Warhol, don’t look any further than the surface of my paintings or the surface of me. There’s nothing behind there.”-Andy Warhol

Image of Warhol (on left) next to one of his artworks, an oversized replica of a Brillo box--part of his series of artwork devoted to making art objects out of everyday consumer products.

The Unification Church AKA the Moonies and Mao II

2009-09-26T11:45:00.000-07:00

I wanted to give you some background information on the opening scenes of DeLillo's Mao II. The mass wedding narrated as the book begins is based on the real-life collective marriage ceremonies performed by Revered Sun Myung Moon. Moon founded the Unification Church in Korea and it has spread to a number of nations and now has over a million members. The Unification Church is often thought of as a cult and as an example of alternative religion that offers its followers a (sometimes problematic) means of losing their identity is the collective. Moon's followers are most commonly called "Moonies." Below, please find a photo of a mass wedding ceremony and some helpful links to understanding the beginning scenes of DeLillo's novel. On the sidebar of the blog, you'll see some more general links about DeLillo that might be helpful, as well.

For more info, check out this mass wedding article from BBC and the Wiki on the Unification church.

Welcome and DeLillo

2009-09-26T11:43:00.000-07:00

Welcome to Contemporary American Literature! For our first few classes, we will be exploring the work of Don DeLillo, who is famous for his ability to tap into some of the more disturbing currents of contemporary life. Long before the Twin Towers fell on September 11th, DeLillo was fascinated by the intersection of technology and terror in the twentieth century; in Mao II, and throughout his many works of fiction, he ponders what role the writer can have in such a climate. Can the writer compete with the terrorist? Whose narrative of the contemporary world will hold sway and sear itself onto the consciousness of its listeners? In the piece we read for Friday's class, "In the Ruins of the Future," written in October 2001, DeLillo asks some of these very questions with the urgency that many writers and artists and everyday people experienced in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. Think of DeLillo's essay with an eye both to how his work can help us talk about Mao II and how it can lead us to some of the larger questions we will ask in our course.

Our course will be guided by the notion that history and literature are often inextricable: that is, we can't necessarily separate between the things that our favorite authors write and the events going on in the world around them. This tenet is central to DeLillo's work.