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 as a lesbian and simply growing up. Bechdel's book 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?

Charles Burns and Black Hole

Charles Burns inaugurates our move into studying graphic novels as a force in contemporary American literature. Burns was an early innovator in the comics genre. He first came to prominence through his contributions to graphic novelist Art Spiegelman's influential comics journal, Raw. Burns also contributed some of his earliest concoctions to the alternative music 'zine, Sub Pop. In addition to publishing a number of short stories and graphic works, Burns has contributed artwork to the Iggy Pop album Brick by Brick, crafted illustrations for a number of periodicals (such as The Believer and The New Yorker), and drafted the visuals for choreographer Mark Morris' re-writing of The Nutcracker. Having met and befriended Simpsons creator Matt Groening at Evergreen State College, Burns is also the tongue-in-cheek inspiration for C. Montgomery Burns.

Raised primarily in the Seattle area, Charles Burns returns to the Pacific Northwest for his serial, Black Hole. Black Hole began appearing as a comic book in 1995, but wasn't entirely completed and published in a one volume book format until 2005. Combining impressive skills as a visual artist with a keen ear for story, Burns' surreal Black Hole combines surrealistic images with a story about the metaphorical plague of teenager-dom.

James Frey, A Million Little Pieces, and the Controversy about Autobiography

For our next class, we'll be reading James Frey's controversial addiction memoir, A Million Little Pieces. Published in 2003, Frey's memoir went on to be one of the most celebrated books of the year, was translated into 31 languages, and, eventually, became one of Oprah's book club picks. Accusations about Frey fictionalizing details of his story came to light in 2006--primarily from the website The Smoking Gun, which provided extensive proof of Frey's many lies and prevarications.

Frey's work, despite its thorny reception, provides an ideal vehicle to talking about the links between memoir and fiction, the construction of the autobiographical 'I,' the public's voyeuristic interest in addiction chronicles.

Dave Eggers and A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

My apologies for this posting appearing late in the game; I thought I had posted a Dave Eggers introduction earlier in the week, but found that Blogger had eaten my homework (or something of the sort).

Dave Eggers was born in Boston in 1970, and spent his early years living in an upper middle class suburb outside of Chicago. As A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius details, Eggers was thrust into a premature adulthood by the early death of both of his parents, leaving him with responsibility for his much younger brother Toph. Viewed as the consummate Generation X author, Eggers is known for his satirical magazine Might, as well as the popular (and still extant) publication, McSweeney's. In addition to A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Eggers has also published the novels You Shall Know Our Velocity and What is the What, in addition to the short story collection How We Are Hungry.

Alternately celebrated and denigrated for its self-consciousness and high-ironic style (the latter of which Eggers disputes vehemently) upon publication, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius remains polarizing a number of years after it appeared. In the context of our class, AHWOSG ushers in our discussion about the increasingly thin line between memoir and fiction in late twentieth/ early twenty-first century America at the time that it asks questions about the relationship between postmodernism and affect, sentimentality and techniques of formal distanciation, and the rise of the memoir as a genre that is often seen to supercede the novel (in popularity, if not always in critical praise). What do we make of the phenomenon surrounding the pubilcation of this work? What about McSweeney's, 826 Valencia, the superhero store in Brooklyn, and the Believer--disparate endeavors that have all come to rest under the Eggers brand?

Introducing Joseph O'Neill and Netherland

Half-Turkish and half-Irish, Joseph O'Neill was born in County Cork, Ireland in 1964. Raised in Ireland and the Netherlands, and trained as a barrister in England, O'Neill has nonetheless become a permanent fixture (along with his wife, the noted critic and Vogue editor, Sally Singer) in the Chelsea Hotel in New York. A large portion of Netherland, published in 2008, is set in the (in)famous Chelsea and uses the hotel to establish the ramparts of the bohemian community its protagonist finds in the wake of 9-11 and his wife's desertion.

O'Neill's most celebrated novel, Netherland garnered rave reviews from the New York Times Book Review and made its way onto the Times' yearly top ten list. Prior to Netherland, O'Neill had published two novels, but was best known for his non-fiction account of his family, Blood-Dark Track. Netherland manifests a similar preoccupation with family history, alongside an interest in the aftermath of trauma, personal and collective. As you read Netherland, compare it to Saturday. How do both novels deal with depicting the world after the great historical rupture of 9-11? How does an interest in the private realm co-exist with a concern with more public forms of grief in these works? What do you make of novelist Zadie Smith's criticism of the novel? Most importantly: what do we make of the fact that we're reading the same book as our new President?

Ian McEwan and Plagiarism Accusations

For your perusal, another interesting story about McEwan that was circulating a few years back...

Ian McEwan and Saturday

With Ian McEwan and Saturday, we are straying across the Atlantic to provide a point of comparison to the American fiction we're reading this quarter. McEwan, like Roth, has been fairly prolific. Born in 1948, he has produced not only Saturday (2005) and the award-winning Atonement (2001), but also a long list of earlier works that earned him the title of "Ian Macabre." In The Cement Garden (1978), Enduring Love (1997), and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), McEwan explores themes such as incest and the "enduring" love of a stalker for his prey. Also manifest in these early works is McEwan's growing preoccupation with the battle between reason and unreason, science and religion, and chaos and ethics--themes that will find their culmination in the work we'll be reading for class.

In many ways, McEwan's career, and particularly his work in Saturday, illustrate a return to ethics and a new humanism in twenty-first century letters. Hailed as one of the first great works composed subsequent to 9-11, Saturday has also consistently come under fire for its adherence to the tenets of formal realism and its reliance on traditional humanistic discourse as an antidote to the "barbarism" of the terrorists' threat. How might we read McEwan's rendering of the life of Perowne? What does the style of the novel and its interest in science and reason say about McEwan's discursive preoccupations? What does it say about the rupture that terror can create in the everyday? Is it, as Banville argues, a somewhat conservative novel? Can a novel be conservative?