Final Class of the Quarter and Paper Hints

Since tomorrow is our final class of the quarter, I thought I'd create an open forum for you to discuss any lingering thoughts you had about the books we've read together. Whether you have a question or a comment or a connection you'd like to make, it would be great to have you use this final opportunity to share. So, post away!

Also: we've discussed guidelines for the paper when I gave out topics in class. However, I wanted to remind you that you can and should email me as you prepare to complete your papers for next week. The papers are due December 10th by 5pm in my mailbox on the second floor of McMicken Hall. If you have any difficulties finding my mailbox, please ask at the English department office (Rm 248). The papers should be in 12 point font in Times New Roman or something similar, double-spaced, and should reach AT LEAST to the end of 5 pages if not over to the 6th or 7th page. You can write on one of the topics I gave you or on one of your own choosing. If you should opt to do the latter, make sure to email me to discuss. Papers that integrate quotes and evidence from the texts we've read to support their arguments tend to fare best grade-wise. Try to avoid block quotes (mega-quotes 5 lines or longer that take up too much space in such a short paper), but make sure that you are engaging with the specifics of the books more than more general themes or thoughts.

It's been a great quarter, and I've had a lot of fun talking to/ reading with you all! Have a lovely holiday break and keep in touch if you have any questions about the English program or grad school.

Alison Bechdel and Fun Home

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 novel? Have we moved past the genre of the novel onto more hybrid literary forms?

Forum for posting: Fun Home and the Graphic Novel

For Monday, please post your response to the questions we posed in class today: how does reading a graphic novel/memoir differ from reading a novel? how does Alison Bechdel's use of images affect our understanding of her narrative?

E Unibus Pluram and the Conquest of Cool

For those of you who liked reading David Foster Wallace's essay, "E Unibus Pluram," I recommend checking out The Conquest of Cool by Thomas Frank, the editor of The Baffler, a fascinating magazine of cultural critique. Frank's book is one of the first and the best to take on the phenomenon of co-optation--namely, the way in which advertising companies have harnessed dissent to sell products since the 1960s. We can discuss more about Frank and his work in class (he has recently taken to writing about politics in America, an offshoot of his earlier project on advertising). For an excerpt of The Conquest of Cool, click here. How does Frank's work intersect with that of David Foster Wallace?

David Foster Wallace and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again

David Foster Wallace's recent death shocked critics and readers alike; since 1987, Foster 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. Foster 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.

The One-Drop Rule

For more background on the one-drop rule, discussed in class on Wednesday, check out the following links and post your thoughts. How does this idea of race as immutable affect the discourse of passing? How does it come up/not come up in The Human Stain?

"Who is Black?," the commentary from a PBS special

An article, "The Invention of the One Drop Rule"

Philip Roth and The Human Stain

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?