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?

Roth and American Pastoral

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 American Pastoral and many other Roth novels. He was recognized 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 he and his readers live. The book we'll be reading in class--American Pastoral--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. Dubbed the first of Roth's "American trilogy" (I Married A Communist and The Human Stain being the second and third members of the triumvirate), American Pastoral marks the birth of a new historically-conscious and socially- panoramic Roth at the same time that it continues to explore the relationship between men and women and the way they negotiate the vagaries of power in their sexual relationships, one of Roth's long-time themes. In American Pastoral, Roth is also deeply interested in the links between autobiography and writing, as well as those between the family and the individual, in American Pastoral. As you read American Pastoral, think of how its rendering of American culture compares to that put forward by Diaz and Danticat. What picture of contemporary America emerges in Roth's novel? What does it say about the conflict between Depression era and Vietnam era America, not to mention the links between Jewish American and American postwar exceptionalism?

Papa Doc and The Dew Breaker

The Dew-Breaker often 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'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

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. Educated at Barnard College and Brown University, she 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, this book made Danticat one of the first Haitian-identified author to achieve renown in the United States. 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'll discuss 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 novel introduces. 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's Top Book Picks

From Newsweek:

The Dominican-born author ("Drown") nabbed a Pulitzer for "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," his debut novel about a "ghetto nerd" striving to be the next J.R.R. Tolkien. His list:
My Five Most Important Books

1. " Beloved " by Toni Morrison. You can't understand the Americas without this novel about the haunting that is our past.


2. " Texaco " by Patrick Chamoiseau. The Caribbean masterpiece: it inspired nearly all of my first novel's literary experiments.

3. " Ceremony " by Leslie Marmon Silko. A profound survival story that becomes an act of healing in itself.

4. " Poison River " by Beto Hernandez. I have trouble describing how awesome this thing is: weird, sexy, tender, cruel and hopeful.

5. " Woman Warrior " by Maxine Hong Kingston. For immigrant writers, which in the end all of us are, this memoir is the Alpha.

A Book You Always Return To: Samuel R. Delany's "Dhalgren," which best captures that late '60s eruption that has shaped so much of what we call the Now.

A Book You Hope Parents Will Read To Their Kids: Richard Adams's "Watership Down," which is about the very thing kids dream of: that something small can still be a hero.

Reminder: Diaz at Miami University on Thursday at 8pm

As mentioned in the email I sent you last week, Junot Diaz will be giving a reading at Miami University on Thursday, April 2nd. He is appearing as part of their Translating Cultures: Latina/o and Latin American Writers Festival.

Diaz's reading will be at 8pm in the Heritage Room of the Shriver Center at Miami. If you're free on Thursday during the day, he is also participating in a panel on Contemporary Latino/a Fiction alongside writers Angie Cruz and Alex Espinoza at the Leonard Theater, Peabody Hall from 3-3:45 p.m.

Here's some more infomation about the Festival.

Welcome and Junot Diaz

For the next two weeks, 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 recent publication, Diaz's novel has gone on to win a bevy of prizes, including the vaunted Pulitzer. Oscar Wao 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. Diaz's novel represents a move toward a different concept of the nation and citizenship in the nation (something we will discuss in reference to Diaz, as well as to Edwidge Danticat, the next writer we'll read in class). It also asks us to think about the form of the novel--as we will do throughout class this quarter. Oscar Wao is littered with footnotes that threaten to take over the novel and texts that interweave with Diaz's main narrative. Like many postmodern works, Diaz's book asks us to think about the intersection of history and literature, the links between social and representational shifts. In Oscar Wao, Diaz provides us with a graphic and deeply politicized history of the Dominican Republic at the same time that he gives us a fable about a fat, nerdy Dominican boy in the U.S. who can't get a woman. How do these personal and collective narratives shape the novel? How do they point the way to a new future for the (transnational) American novel?