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?

Slave Narratives

An important intertext for Toni Morrison's Beloved is the slave narrative. In class, we went over the first page of The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, one of the most celebrated memoirs detaling slavery from the inside in the United States. However, it's equally important to remember that there were a number of former slaves still alive in the United States well into the twentieth century--many of whom told their stories via oral narratives. For some fascinating stories about what it was like to live as a slave in this country, please check out these narratives collected by members of the WPA (Works Progress Administration) during the late 1930s. Keep these stories in mind as we read further in Beloved.

Slavery Timeline

Below you will find a timeline of events relating to the history of slavery. In order to understand Beloved better, it's helpful to get a sense of the historical backdrop in which the novel is taking place.

Slavery Timeline

Courtesy of www.africanaonline.com

1501 African Slaves in the New World Spanish settlers bring slaves from Africa to Santo Domingo (now the capital of the Dominican Republic).

1522 Slave Revolt: the Caribbean Slaves rebel on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, which now comprises Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

1562 Britain Joins Slave Trade John Hawkins, the first Briton to take part in the slave trade, makes a huge profit hauling human cargo from Africa to Hispaniola.

1581 Slaves in Florida Spanish residents in St. Augustine, the first permanent settlement in Florida, import African slaves.

1619 Slaves in Virginia Africans brought to Jamestown are the first slaves imported into Britain’s North American colonies. Like indentured servants, they were probably freed after a fixed period of service.

1662 Hereditary Slavery Virginia law decrees that children of black mothers “shall be bond or free according to the condition of the mother.”

1705 Slaves as Property Describing slaves as real estate, Virginia lawmakers allow owners to bequeath their slaves. The same law allowed masters to “kill and destroy” runaways.

1712 Slave Revolt: New York Slaves in New York City kill whites during an uprising, later squelched by the militia. Nineteen rebels are executed.

1739 Slave Revolt: South Carolina Crying “Liberty!” some 75 slaves in South Carolina steal weapons and flee toward freedom in Florida (then under Spanish rule). Crushed by the South Carolina militia, the revolt results in the deaths of 40 blacks and 20 whites.

1775 American Revolution Begins Battles at the Massachusetts towns of Lexington and Concord on April 19 spark the war for American independence from Britain.

1775 Abolitionist Society Anthony Benezet of Philadelphia founds the world’s first abolitionist society. Benjamin Franklin becomes its president in 1787.

1776 Declaration of Independence The Continental Congress asserts “that these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States”.

1783 American Revolution Ends Britain and the infant United States sign the Peace of Paris treaty.

1784 Abolition Effort Congress narrowly defeats Thomas Jefferson’s proposal to ban slavery in new territories after 1800.

1790 First United States Census Nearly 700,000 slaves live and toil in a nation of 3.9 million people.

1793 Fugitive Slave Act The United States outlaws any efforts to impede the capture of runaway slaves.

1794 Cotton Gin Eli Whitney patents his device for pulling seeds from cotton. The invention turns cotton into the cash crop of the American South—and creates a huge demand for slave labor.

1808 United States Bans Slave Trade Importing African slaves is outlawed, but smuggling continues.

1820 Missouri Compromise Missouri is admitted to the Union as a slave state, Maine as a free state. Slavery is forbidden in any subsequent territories north of latitude 36°30´.

1822 Slave Revolt: South Carolina Freed slave Denmark Vesey attempts a rebellion in Charleston. Thirty-five participants in the ill-fated uprising are hanged.

1831 Slave Revolt: Virginia Slave preacher Nat Turner leads a two-day uprising against whites, killing about 60. Militiamen crush the revolt then spend two months searching for Turner, who is eventually caught and hanged. Enraged Southerners impose harsher restrictions on their slaves.

1835 Censorship Southern states expel abolitionists and forbid the mailing of antislavery propaganda.

1846-48 Mexican-American War Defeated, Mexico yields an enormous amount of territory to the United States. Americans then wrestle with a controversial topic: Is slavery permitted in the new lands?

1847 Frederick Douglass’s Newspaper Escaped slave Frederick Douglass begins publishing the North Star in Rochester, New York.

1849 Harriet Tubman Escapes After fleeing slavery, Tubman returns south at least 15 times to help rescue several hundred others.

1850 Compromise of 1850 In exchange for California’s entering the Union as a free state, northern congressmen accept a harsher Fugitive Slave Act.

1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin Published Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel about the horrors of slavery sells 300,000 copies within a year of publication.

1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act Setting aside the Missouri Compromise of 1820, Congress allows these two new territories to choose whether to allow slavery. Violent clashes erupt.

1857 Dred Scott Decision The United States Supreme Court decides, seven to two, that blacks can never be citizens and that Congress has no authority to outlaw slavery in any territory.

1860 Abraham Lincoln Elected Abraham Lincoln of Illinois becomes the first Republican to win the United States Presidency.

1860 Southern Secession South Carolina secedes in December. More states follow the next year.

1861-65 United States Civil War Four years of brutal conflict claim 623,000 lives.

1863 Emancipation Proclamation President Abraham Lincoln decrees that all slaves in Rebel territory are free on January 1, 1863.

1865 Slavery Abolished The 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution outlaws slavery.

Toni Morrison, Margaret Garner, and Beloved

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 soon to be 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.

History and "Papa Doc" Duvalier in The Dew-Breaker

In class on Friday, we discussed 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 character's 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

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 Interview about Genre

Junot Diaz originally conceived of Oscar Wao as being not unlike a comic book. Read this interview with Diaz for more.

Scifi, pop culture, and the novel

Yesterday in class we discussed the many ways in which Junot Diaz uses speculative fiction, scifi, and fan fiction culture in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao . This movement toward integrating what has traditionally been known as pop culture with literary fiction is an increasingly powerful one in contemporary American fiction. Some of you have mentioned how much you like Michael Chabon, the author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay and Wonder Boys. If you're interested, read the following article for some more information about the subject. What do you think of this movement? Are there other books you've read that bring in topics usually associated with what many call "genre fiction"?

Introducing Junot Diaz and the American Novel Beyond America

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.

Junot Diaz will be reading at Miami University in the Spring, so stay tuned!

Forum for posting comments on Coover reading

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. I will print out the responses and we will discuss them, along with the end of Galatea 2.2, in class.

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 Powers 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!

ADDENDUM: In case you are having trouble accessing the Coover reading on the NY Times website (sometimes they require a password if you're not on an institutional computer), I'll put a Word document version up on our Blackboard site, as well.

Ninth Letter and Galatea 2.2

Click here to see a video collaboration between Richard Powers and the artists at Ninth Letter Journal created in order to celebrate Galatea 2.2.

The Author is Dead; Long Live the Machine

At least that's what Erika T. Carter's creator says on "her" website... In class today, we discussed Powers' Galatea 2.2 and paid a visit to Ms. Erika T. Carter, machine-poetess extraordinaire. Take a few minutes to draw up some of your "own" Erika poems and to think about how the creation of poetry generation software like Erika affects our idea of writing and of authorship. Do we own what we write? Is most writing appropriation or "plagiarism" anyway? Can a computer think the way that we do? How do these questions come up in Galatea 2.2?

Here's more information on the creation of a fake poetry anthology, Erika's newest project, and the controversy it is engendering.

If you're interested in reading/experiencing writing that playfully uses the internet, but is written by a real, live person, check out The Jew's Daughter or Eunoia, two examples.

If you're interested in poetry or experimental writing (something I'm happy to integrate into class if you'd like more), you'll find a great resource at PennSound. The site is even edited and administered by one of our very own new professors here at UC, Michael Hennessey.

DeLillo and Terrorism

One last point on DeLillo before we leave him forever for Richard Powers: I've been thinking a lot about how differently the term "terrorist" functions today than it did when DeLillo was writing (in the case of Mao II in 1991). At this point in American history, "terrorist" has come to function as a disturbingly politicized catch-all term that is employed during the presidential election to cast aspersions on candidates or call into question people's patriotism. Does DeLillo use the term in a similar way? We didn't end up talking much about the political valences of his use of "terrorism," but I think it's important to note that he is writing in a time before it had quite the meaning it does today in American politics and culture. A lot to think about as we finish with DeLillo and move on to Powers.

Open Forum on DeLillo

A few of you have been sending me some great responses (negative and positive) to Mao II, so I thought I'd create a final forum for discussion of the text before we move on to Galatea 2.2. So, if you have perspectives on DeLillo you'd like to share or points of interest, please post them here. Also: if you read the posts of your classmates, please feel free to respond to them. I look forward to the conversation!

Pygmalion and Galatea

Falconet--Pygmalion et Galatee (1763)

The sculpture above depicts the famous Pygmalion myth. The myth of Pygmalion was first related in Ovid's Metamorphosis. Ovid tells the story of the sculptor Pygmalion, who creates a statue so beautiful he falls in love with it. The statue, carved of ivory, is named Galatea. As Pygmalion becomes increasingly obsessed with the statue, he ceases to be interested in the real world or the real women in it. Eventually, seeing his love for the statue, the gods give the statue life and allow Pygmalion and Galatea to marry.

The Pygmalion myth has influenced many subsequent works of art and literature--from the 18th century sculpture depicted above to Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2. In class, we'll discuss why and how Powers chooses to make this Greek myth so central to his novel.

Richard Powers

Our next work is by noted postmodern novelist, Richard Powers. Powers is famous for focusing much of his work on the role of technology and science in American culture. Powers worked as a computer programmer before he became a novelist and studied physics, as well as English, in college. In Galatea 2.2, Powers updates the Pygmalion story for the e-generation. Galatea 2.2 tells many different stories; it's part modern-day fable, part romance, part scifi experiment, and part playful postmodern meta-fiction. In class, we'll use Powers' fascinating work to open up questions about whether the computer has superseded the novel, whether the university functions as an appropriate place to study literature, and whether a novel that stars its own author is a novel at all.

Salman Rushdie and the Fatwa

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.

Warhol

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

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.




Links: Wiki article

BBC article on mass weddings

Welcome and DeLillo

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'll be reading 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. Please read 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. I look forward to using DeLillo's essay as a springboard to talk about some of these exciting issues! Don't worry if the piece is a little hard to understand at moments; we'll use class and this blog to unpack the important parts.