Wrapping Up

If you haven't yet gotten started on your final essay, remember that all of the information on the assignment can be found in the link in the sidebar to the right. The links for "MLA Resources" and "Making Effective Arguments" are also well worth looking at, along with the portion of our syllabus regarding the response papers (specifically, what an argument should and shouldn't contain). If you have any questions, you can always drop me a line.

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The end of the semester is a great time to consider nominating an English professor who's made an impact on your time here at UC for the William C. Boyce Award for Outstanding Teaching. It's very quick a easy to nominate someone (either here or by e-mail to english-artsci@uc.edu) and as a two-time Boyce nominee and one-time winner, I can tell you first-hand that a little appreciation goes a very long way.

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I'd also be remiss if I didn't plug my spring courses. With any luck, I'll see some of you down the line!

Poetry: Sound, Media, and Performance (ENGL 3015-001 / DMC 3111-003)

Tues/Thurs 12:30–1:50

Poetry and Sound will trace the growing focus placed upon considerations of both sound and media in contemporary poetics. Potential areas of study might include performance and sound poetry, voice, aura and phonetics as well as audio documentation and dissemination of poetry through various media.

Prose Poetry & Flash Fiction Workshop (ENGL 3033-002)

Tues/Thurs 2:00–3:20

This course will explore the related cross-genre forms of prose poetry and its newer variant, flash fiction (a.k.a. short short fiction, microfiction, etc.), analyzing the characteristics each genre shares and what differentiates them. In addition to reading literary works in each genre, you'll experiment with writing your own pieces in these forms and consider the role of characterization, plot, imagery, and music in each.

Introduction to Literature (ENGL 2075-001)

Tues/Thurs 9:30–10:50

The course catalog says: "An introduction to the distinctive character of the major literary genres (drama, poetry, prose) with close attention to the techniques of interpretation and the fundamentals of literary theory. This course fulfills an HU BoK requirement. It does not replace nor substitute for ENGL 3000." I say: we'll consider how both canon and curricula are constructed, explore pragmatic questions regarding issues that are likely to arise in the classroom, and get hands-on experience in course design. In short, this is the new version of 3000 for Education majors.

Week 15: Valeria Luiselli's "Faces in the Crowd" (2012)

As I stated in my opening note, one remarkable characteristic of our new century as American readers is that our tastes have grown increasingly multicultural, both within and beyond our national borders. Satrapi and Smith are two fine examples of foreign books that captivated large American audiences, and the work that they did nearly a generation ago has helped set the state for today's breakout voices, including Mexico's Valeria Luiselli.

Luiselli has taken the literary world by storm: in 2014 she received the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" award, and still not having reached that age, she's published four books in two different genres — the essay collections Sidewalks (2013) and Tell Me How It Ends: an Essay in 40 Questions (2017); and the novels The Story of My Teeth (2015) along with her debut, Faces in the Crowd (2012) — all of which have been well-received, with Teeth being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Because it's the new millennium, books and authors make trailers now, and in the film above, Luiselli offers her own introduction to Faces in the Crowd, telling us that the novel "is told in four different times and by two different narrators." She continues: 

The first narrator is a woman, probably in her early forties, with two children in a house in Mexico City and a husband, whom she's slowly drifting away from. And the other narrator is a Mexican poet, who in fact existed and lived in New York in the 1920s, his name was Gilberto Owen. He narrates, almost from his deathbed in the 1950s, and he tells the story of his youth in New York, as does the woman narrator, the first narrator, tells the story of her youth in New York when she was working in a publishing house and trying to find the new Bolaño, and she comes across Gilberto Owen's poetry. He recorded the minute details of his everyday life in Harlem, which was a neighborhood that I had arrived to, and it was a neighborhood that sorta didn't have any depth for me — I had just arrived, I was a newcomer to it — and his letters became a sort of mirror for my own experience of the beighborhood and gave that neighborhood a depth it didn't have.  

I started writing a novel from the viewpoint of Gilberto Owen, sorta trying to record and imagine that area in the 1920s. At some point, I got married, I became pregnant, I planted a tree, and the rest of the chicles attached to growing up. When I finally went through the phase of pregnancy, which was a for me a very traumatizing phase because I didn't write, I didn't read, I didn't even watch movies, I just slept, basically. When I finally got through that I started writing again and I took out this material from the archives I had but it didn't seem as alive as it had once seemed. It sorta seemed absurd to carry on writing as nothing had happened so I had to find a viewpoint and a different tone to somehow go back into that material and I started intervening in it.

From there she goes on to discuss the essential multicultural nature of Harlem, which was only starting to develop — alongside the Harlem Renaissance — as Owen found himself in New York. Nevertheless, he found himself caught in-between cultural circles, and this spirit is a big part of what Luiselli tried to cultivate in her novel.

Here's our schedule for Faces in the Crowd:

• Mon. November 27: pgs 1–53 
• Wed. November 29: pgs 54–105
• Fri. December 1: pgs 106–146

And here are a few additional readings that might be interesting:

• Mina Holland reviews the novel for The Guardian: [link]
• Hector Tobar reviews the book for The Los Angeles Times: [link]
• Stephen Piccarella reviews the book for Electric Lit: [link]
• "Smashing Snow Globes: A Writer On Essays, Novels And Translation" on NPR's "All Things Considered": [link]
• Luiselli on translating the stories of detailed immigrant children in Rolling Stone: [link]

Class Canceled 11/6 Due to Professor Emergency

I greatly regret that I need to cancel class on Monday. Our basement has taken on about 4-5 inches of water so far, and the night isn't yet over. I'm afraid I'll need to be here tomorrow to work with the crew that will be pumping the water out and clearing our drain lines. We'll roll Monday's readings and respondent(s) over into Wednesday's class, and that, I suppose will be the totality of our very short week together!

Weeks 12–14: Zadie Smith's "White Teeth" (2000)

There is perhaps no more auspicious a literary debut in recent memory than Zadie Smith's White Teeth (2000), and that achievement is made even more astounding when you consider that she finished the novel alongside her undergraduate education.

A sprawling saga tracing the lives of three families in London from WWII up to the early 90s, White Teeth is emblematic of both Smith's own family tree (like Irie, her father is British and her mother is Jamaican) and the contentious nature of immigration in England, where chicken tikka masala is hailed as the national dish, yet skinheads blame the nation's woes on foreigners. Britain's colonial history is central to this narrative, with key figures hailing from Jamaica (Clara and Hortense) and Bangladesh (Samal and Alsana), and there's an equally foundational emphasis on religion with Jewish, Muslim, and Jehovah's Witness beliefs being espoused by various characters.

The paperback edition of White Teeth was

issued in several different colors, which

feels like a litmus test of the reader's per-

sonality. Which color did you get? Did
you choose it? How do you feel about it?

All of these ideologies cross-pollinate in the most fruitful of ways, setting up dynamics that drive the novel forward: immigrants weigh the benefits of assimilation vs. isolation, of the value of tradition vs. the unique benefits of a new nation; faith battles with science, and within itself struggles with fundamentalism vs. a more worldly belief system; there's tension between parents and children, and between the person one once was vs. who they are now; and all of this interplay can be read through frames of race, class, and gender.

One last bit of context here, which is perhaps the hardest one for you to adapt your minds to: the contemporary setting of the novel is practically a prelapsarian state compared to now. It's very much shaped by the era of Cool Britannia and premillennial optimism — a time of intense national pride and at the same time, an embracing of multiculturalism. That doesn't mean that there aren't struggles, but compared to post-9/11 international politics, everything feels dewy and innocent. It's difficult for me to fully remember the spirit of those times and I regret that it doesn't feel like we'll return to that state of grace anytime soon.

All of this complexity takes quite a bit of space to unfold — as Michiko Kakutani observes in her New York Times review, White Teeth "is not one of your typical small, semiautobiographical first novels. It's a big, splashy, populous production reminiscent of books by Dickens and Salman Rushdie ...  a novel that's not afraid to tackle large, unwieldy themes" — and that's precisely why we've been rationing classes on shorter texts to leave space for a something of this grand scale. This book will carry us very close to the end of the semester, but it's well worth the time and effort that will take. Here's how our classes with White Teeth will break down:

• Mon. November 6: chapters 1–4
• Wed. November 8: chapters 5–6
• Fri. November 10: NO CLASS — Veterans Day (observed)
• Mon. November 13: chapters 7–10
• Wed. November 15: chapters 11–12
• Fri. November 17: chapters 13–15
• Mon. November 20: chapters 16–18
• Wed. November 22: chapters 19–20

Here's our final set of supplemental readings:

• The New York Times published two reviews of White Teeth by Anthony Quinn [link] and Michiko Kakutani [link]
• Sarah Lyall also interviewed Smith for The Times around the time of the book's release: [link]
• Smith won The Guardian's First Book Award in 2000. Here is Stephen Moss' review: [link]
• Simon Hattenstone interviewed Smith for The Guardian in conjunction with her First Book Award win: [link]
• Daniel Soar reviews the novel for The London Review of Books: [link]
• John Lanchester reviews the book for The New York Review of Books: [link]
• "Zadie Smith says using social media would threaten her writing," a recent article from The Guardian: [link]

Your Final Essays

We've already gone over the basics of this assignments a number of times, so there shouldn't be anything too surprising here. The main goal here is twofold: 1) for you to find a topic that allows you to work closely with a subject that you find interesting and rewarding, and 2) for you to explore that topic over the breadth of a number of the texts we've read this semester, making an effective argument for its varied manifestations over time. For you to be able to do that you're going to need to choose a topic capacious enough to accommodate a complex analysis, and one which will appear across enough of our books to provide sufficient evidence.

There's no exact formula of how many books you need to bring into the discussion, but I'd think that three might be a good minimum. The more important thing is that you explore your topic with appropriate depth and then muster whatever evidence is necessary to make your most effective case. Thinking in terms of the classic five-paragraph essay you should aim to have at least three facets to your argument, and then each of those should be addressed as completely as possible. Use the evidence that works best where it works best: you don't need to use the same books to address every sub-point, and it's totally fine if you use a book for one point and then don't use it again. While it should be clear from what I've just said, let me be explicit: pretty much the only sane way to organize this essay is thematically, not chronologically or moving book by book through the readings.

As for the specific topic you choose — and I hope you're not just thinking about this now — one of the following general themes might suit you well:

• Race
• Gender
• Class / Money
• Violence (including War)
• Faith
• Justice / Injustice
• Age / Coming of Age
• Mortality

Or something a little more specific and weird might be more appealing:

• Food
• Alcohol (and/or Drugs)
• Motherhood
• the Kitchen
• Gossip
• the Media (print, television, radio, movies, etc.)
• Sexuality
• Mental Illness
• Work
• Fidelity / Infidelity
• Rural vs. Urban Life
• Accidents

That's twenty potential topics, but I'm open to any others that you can come up with. That said, I strongly recommend that you e-mail me with your proposed topic and a general blueprint of how you might handle it, so I can vet it and/or make suggestions before you get too far into the writing process.

Technical Details

Here are a few important guidelines for your final essays — fail to meet these requirements and, well, you'll fail(!):

• Length: 6–8 double-spaced pages minimum — that's full pages, and not counting your works cited list, so to be safe, make sure your piece goes on to page 7. Another reasonable minimum would be 2000 words. If the spirit moves you and you find yourself writing a longer piece, please don't feel constrained by the 8 page limit (that's just a general ballpark length to aim for). On the other hand, if you hand in a paper that's less than 6 full pages, you'll automatically receive an F (so don't do that).

• Formatting — particularly since you're sending your file to me electronically, it would not be wise to play around with margins, get cutesy with font sizes, etc. 12 point Times New Roman is lovely and easy on the eyes, to boot. Barring that, Cambria or a similar serif typeface (serifs, don't ya know, are those little decorative doohickeys at the ends of the letter) will be fine. I'm partial to the restrained elegance of Goudy Old Style (but that's just me).

• MLA citations and works cited list — you'll find links to MLA resources here. Don't forget that you need to cite paraphrases and summaries of source texts in addition to direct quotations.

• No block quotes — there is, perhaps, no greater comfort to the unprepared last-minute writer than the block quote — just cram it all in there, making no attempt to trim the text (or disguise the fact that you're cutting and pasting from Wikipedia). In formal essays of lengths longer than what you're being asked to deliver here, I might allow students to use one block quote in their essay, but there's no reason whatsoever for block quotes in a final project like this. Trim quotes to their essentials and/or interweave them throughout your sentences.

• Due date — Tuesday, December 5th at 6:00PM. Please send your final to me at my gmail address (which is my last name [dot] my full first name at gmail.com) as an attachment. When I get your paper, I'll download it to make sure that it opens without issue and then write you a little note confirming that I've received it. Don't forget that late assignments will be docked accordingly. The absolute latest I can accept a paper is Monday, December 11th.

Weeks 10 and 11: Marjane Satrapi's "The Complete Persepolis" (2000)

For our last three books we're jumping into a promising new literary millennium, particularly for multicultural female voices. We'll begin with Marjane Satrapi's The Complete Persepolis, a collected edition of her two-volume graphic narrative, which started publication in 2000 and concluded in 2004.

While in the 1950s, Fredric Wertham condemned comics for their Seduction of the Innocent, by the 1980s — largely due to the groundbreaking impact of Art Spiegelman's Maus (published serially from 1980 to 1991, with its first collected volume coming out in 1986) — they were gradually coming to be seen as not just a valid literary form, but one which can accomplish things that static texts cannot. Nowadays, it's not uncommon to see graphic novels on college reading lists, not to mention entire classes devoted to the genre. It's worth noting, however, that Satrapi disdains the sanitizing nature of that term, preferring that her work be called comic books: "People are so afraid to say the word 'comic.' It makes you think of a grown man with pimples, a ponytail and a big belly. Change it to 'graphic novel' and that disappears. No: it's all comics."

Satrapi's story is unique among our semester's reading, in that it's our first and only non-fiction selection, however any tale, whether true or invented, still needs artistry to help it take shape, so our analysis needn't be any different. Moreover, her coming-of-age story that forms the heart of Persepolis will easily stand alongside many of the similar narratives we've encountered this term. At the same time, while many of those stories are relatively modest in scope, Persepolis is much more closely aligned with The Unbearable Lightness of Being in that its intimate relationships between characters and the reader are set against broader historical currents. In Satrapi's case, the 1979 fundamentalist Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988) are major factors, along with her student experience in Austria and her eventual life in France, and within these settings, her identity as a woman and a Muslim, her artistic temperament, and the clash between liberal and conservative — as well as (Middle-)Eastern and Western — political and cultural values.

Here's how we'll make our way through Persepolis. Don't sweat the number of pages — graphic novels . . . or rather, comic books . . . read much more quickly than novels:

• Fri. October 27: introduction; "The Veil" to "The F.14s" (3–86)
• Mon. October 30: "The Jewels" to "Tyrol" (87–179)
• Wed. November 1: "The Pill" to "The Veil" (180–245)
• Fri. November 3: "The Return" to "The End"  (246–341)

And here are a few supplemental links for your browsing enjoyment:

• "God Looked Like Marx," Fernanda Eberstadt's New York Times review of Persepolis 1: [link]
• Boris Kachka reviews Persepolis 2 for New York: [link]
• Andrew D. Arnold reviews Persepolis 1 for Time: [link]
• Publishers Weekly reviews of Persepolis 1 [link] and 2 [link]
• Emma Watson interviews Satrapi about the graphic novel for Vogue: [link]
• Joshua Bearman interviews Satrapi for The Believer: [link]

In 2008, Satrapi directed a film adaption of Persepolis. You'll find the trailer below:

Weeks 9 and 10: Banana Yoshimoto's "Kitchen" (1988)

Banana Yoshimoto (née Yoshimoto Mahoko) is every bit as enigmatic as her pen name (chosen for her love of banana flowers, and for the sake of being intentionally androgynous). Though she comes from a famous family — her father is a well-known poet; her sister a manga artist — she is very guarded about her private life. Nevertheless, she's enjoyed a long and fruitful literary career (no pun intended) that started with her debut novel, Kitchen (1988), which (not unlike Lispector's auspicious beginnings as "Hurricane Clarice") occasioned a phenomenon known as "Bananamania" in her native Japan, where the book's gone through more than sixty printings. Beyond her own shores, Kitchen has been translated in thirty countries, and in 1993, when it first appeared in an English translation, the Japanese Foreign Minister handed out copies to the press covering the summit, seeing it as a book that could speak to youth worldwide.

Kitchen is frequently paired with "Moonlight Shadow," a novella Yoshimoto published the year before her debut. Both books center on young female characters dealing with loss: in the latter, Satsuki loses her boyfriend in an automobile accident; in the former, Mikage struggles with the loss of her grandmother, which leads her into new domestic situations. As the title suggests, Mikage's grief is mitigated by her love of all things culinary. What we find here is a sort of pop existentialism, and interestingly enough, during a time when anti-Japanese sentiment was at its height in the US, Yoshimoto's characters are obsessed with American culture (as was the author herself, who first found inspiration in the non-horror work of Stephen King). At its heart, Kitchen takes inspiration from universal sorrows while demonstrating how an author's unique perspective can conjure up new conclusions.

Here's how we'll make our way through Yoshimoto:

• Fri. October 20: Kitchen, "Kitchen"
• Mon. October 23: Kitchen, "Full Moon"
• Wed. October 25: "Moonlight Shadow"

And here are some supplemental links you might find useful:

• Elizabeth Hanson reviews the novel for The New York Times: [link]
• Peter Reader reviews the book for The Independent: [link]
• Kirkus reviews the book: [link]

Weeks 7–9: Milan Kundera's "The Unbearable Lightness of Being" (1984)

We have traveled far and wide this semester, but our sixth novel presents us with a situation we haven't previously encountered: a country that no longer exists. Indeed, the Czechoslovakia that serves as the setting for Milan Kundera's best-known novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) has been replaced by the Czech Republic, and by the time of the book's publication, Kundera had moved on as well — he left his homeland in 1975 and lost his citizenship in 1979, eventually becoming a French citizen two years later. Arguably, one could consider Kundera a French novelist, since he's spent the past three decades writing exclusively in that language, and the author himself supports this characterization.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being centers around the tumultuous events of 1968 and their aftermath: specifically, the brief hope presented by the democratizing Prague Spring, which was swiftly crushed by a Warsaw Pact invasion (led by the USSR) in August of that year. Tomáš and Tereza are a young married couple: he's a brash womanizing surgeon, while she's still discovering herself both on her own and through their union. Sabina is Tomáš' mistress, and in time becomes a friend to Tereza as well. Through their experience of the revolutionary spirit of the times, Kundera offers us philosophical insights on life and its meaning, from the macrocosm of geopolitical clashes to the ways of individual hearts and minds.

Here's how we'll split up our time with Kundera:

• Fri. October 6: part 1, ch. 1–17; part 2, ch. 1–17
• Mon. October 9: NO CLASS — Fall Reading Days
• Wed. October 11: part 2, ch. 18–29; part 3, ch. 1–11
• Fri. October 13: part 4, ch. 1–29
• Mon. October 16: part 5, ch. 1–23
• Wed. October 18: part 6, ch. 1–29; part 7, ch. 1–7

And here are some additional resources you might find interesting:

• "Four Characters Under Two Tyrannies," E.L. Doctorow's review of the book for The New York Times: [link]
• John Bayley reviews the novel for The London Review of Books: [link]
• John Banville reconsiders the novel for The Guardian 20 years after its release: [link] 
• Kundera's "Art of Fiction" interview with The Paris Review takes place just as the novel is gaining international renown: [link]

Weeks 6 and 7: Heinrich Böll's "The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum" (1974)

With Heinrich Böll (1917-1985), we encounter our second Nobel Laureate of the semester, and the novel we'll be reading — The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum (1974), perhaps his best known book — is especially interesting in that it's the first book that he published after winning the prize in 1972.

Böll was a major figure in establishing West German culture in the aftermath of WWII, working as both an author and (with his wife, Annemarie Cech) a translator. His pacifist parents lamented the rise of the Nazi party and kept him out of the Hitler Youth, though eventually he was forced to serve in the German military, where he was wounded four times before eventually being apprehended by Allied forces close to the end of the war in Europe.

He took a chance on writing and in a cultural void left by the war's widespread devastation, quickly rose to national and eventually international prominence, largely due to his sympathetic depictions of the struggles of individuals set against a broader array of socio-political challenges. To the west, he was a symbol of rebirth after the scourge of Nazism, and he was tremendously popular within the Eastern Bloc for his criticisms of capitalism. Indeed, Böll's perspective was a singular and uncompromising one: while he remained a devout Catholic for his entire life he was condemned for his criticisms of the Catholic church, and his liberal ideals and disdain for authoritarianism made him enemies within West German conservative circles.

One such controversy helped shape The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum. In the early 70s, West Germany was shaken by the actions of the RAF (better known as the Baader-Meinhof Group, a cadre of leftist terrorists opposed to the government's authoritarian policies, widespread employment of former Nazis, and involvement in colonialist struggles). While reactionaries within the country called for swift justice, Böll was part of the minority of public intellectuals calling for due process the proper adherence to the country's democratic legal doctrines. In return, he was savaged in the media and branded a terrorist sympathizer. So too is the novel's titular heroine drawn into forces beyond her control and hounded by both a relentless police state and the sensationalist news media until, in short order, her simple and innocent life is destroyed.

Here's how we'll divide up our three classes on Böll:

• Fri. September 29: introduction and chapters 1–23
• Mon. October 2: chapters 24–40
• Wed. October 4: chapters 41–58

Here are some additional resources that might be helpful:

• "A Sorrow Beyond Dreams," The New York Times' 1975 review of this novel and Peter Handke's A Life Story: [link]
• Böll's 1972 Nobel Prize Commendation: [link]
• His speech upon receiving the Nobel Prize: [link]
• Böll's 1985 obituary in The New York Times: [link]
• A 2009 article in The Guardian about the loss of Böll's literary archives: [link]

Weeks 5 and 6: Bessie Head's "When Rain Clouds Gather" (1968)

The life of Bessie Head (1937–1986) was one filled with challenge and hardship, and yet these forces produced groundbreaking works of post-colonial African literature. We'll spend a few classes with her début novel, When Rain Clouds Gather (1968).

Born Bessie Amelia Emery to a white mother and a black father under unclear circumstances, she eventually entered into foster care when her mother took her own life. Rejected by her first family after the agency attempted to pass her off as white, she found a home with Nellie and George Heathcote, who she believed to be her real parents. This relative calm was shattered when her boarding school told her the truth and refused to let her go home to her family. She was devastated and turned to literature for solace.

In time, she'd graduate and after a brief flirtation with teaching settle into a life as a journalist and got involved in anti-Apartheid politics, meeting her husband, Harold Head along the way. As she grew older and started a family, she increasingly felt the pressures of South Africa's oppressive, racist social system. She applied for and got a job in neighboring Botswana, but her homeland refused to grant her a passport, only offering her a one-way exit visa, and so she left her old life behind and applied for asylum. 

In a free and independent country, her literary inspirations flourished, however for most of her life she lived a relatively poor existence: while she built a house of her own (dubbed "Rain Clouds") with the royalties from her first two books, she wrote by candlelight, lived without a phone, and only got electricity late in her life. She also struggled with mental illness that resulted in several commitments and trouble with the authorities, to the extend that when she applied for Botswanan citizenship in 1977 she was denied. Nonetheless, it was freely granted two years later, as a sign of her growing role as a cultural ambassador for her adopted homeland and during the last decade of her life, she'd be celebrated in the US, Europe, Africa, and Australia, delivering lectures and giving readings.

There's a lot of Head's own experience in When Rain Clouds Gather, including the setting of Serowe that's common to her work, and protagonist Makhaya's flight from oppression in South Africa into the challenging life of a political refugee. We'll also find idealized racial harmony as white and black characters work towards a common goal, a deft depiction of the challenges between tradition and new ways of life, and a central romance that helps drive the narrative.

Here's how our four days with the novel will break down:

• Wed. September 20: introduction and chapters 1–3
• Fri. September 22: chapters 4–6
• Mon. September 25: chapters 7–9
• Wed. September 27: chapters 10–12

And here are a few additional resources you might enjoy:

• Kirkus reviews the novel upon its release: [link]
• Alan Ramón Ward's "Traumatic Divisions: the Collective and Interpersonal in Bessie Head's When Rain Clouds Gather" in Postcolonial Text: [link]
• A brief bio from the author's website: [link]

Weeks 4 and 5: Françoise Sagan's "A Certain Smile" (1955)

How might one sum up the tumultuous life of Françoise Sagan (1935–2004)? I think this opening paragraph from a 2008 article in The Guardian does an apt job: "She was a hedonistic, tomboy beauty who drove racing cars barefoot round Saint Tropez, won literary acclaim and took so many drugs that her pet fox-terrier overdosed from sniffing her handkerchiefs."

Like Clarice Lispector, Sagan won literary acclaim at an early age with her debut novel, Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness), published in 1954 when she was only 18 years old.  The book scandalized puritanical readers with its story, set during a fated summer on the French Riviera, of love triangles spanning two generations that eventually lead to the grave. Some judged it as a "vulgar, sad little book," that appealed to disaffected youth, while others saw an authentic depiction of the internal lives of a young post-war generation (n.b. protagonist Cécile is only seventeen at the time of the novel's events).

If Bonjour Tristesse is Sagan's best-known book, then why have I chosen Un Certain Sourire (A Certain Smile), her follow-up novel from 1956 instead? Simply put, if Bonjour Tristesse created the hype surrounding Sagan, then A Certain Smile proved that there was more there than mere hype. While there's a lot of common ground between the two books — both are centered on young female leads exploring a new world of love, lust, and fidelity, both cross generational lines — the general consensus seems to be that A Certain Smile is the stronger of the two (cf. the cover of our edition with a blurb from the Spectator hailing it as "decidedly better" than its predecessor). 

Like many of Sagan's novels, A Certain Smile would be adapted for the silver screen, and its title song would become a standard of sorts, covered by a diverse array of artists. Not bad for a book that a twenty year old wrote in two weeks! This raises an interesting question, as well, of genre or audience or taste, or other equally fraught terminology — the presence of a new foreword by Diane Johnson (respected contributor to The New York Review of Books, but also best known for Le Divorce, which was made into a Kate Hudson arthouse rom-com) reaffirms that as well. While some of our reading this semester falls under the aegis of heavy, serious literature (cf. Camus, Kundera) this is a book with literary merits that also appeals to more of a middlebrow audience. I say this not to prejudge the novel, but rather to more properly situate it — the much-beloved novels of Elena Ferrante are a good analogue for what The Economist called a "popsicle of a book."

Here's how we'll split up A Certain Smile over three classes:

• Wed. September 13: foreword; part 1, chapters 1–6
• Fri. September 15: part 1, chapter 7 – part 2, chapter 2
• Mon. September 18: part 3, chapters 1–6

And here are a few supplemental links for your reading pleasure:

• Kirkus reviews the novel: [link]
• Kati Nolfi reviews the book for Bookslut: [link]
• Richard Williams unpacks Sagan's life for The Guardian: [link]
• Jean Kerr parodied the novel as "Toujours Tristesse" in Harper's Bazaar not long after its release: [link]

Weeks 2 to 4: Clarice Lispector's "Near to the Wild Heart" (1943)

Born Chaya Lispector in what is now part of Ukraine, her family fled the Anti-Semitic pogroms that were all too common during the Russian Civil War when she was still an infant, settling half a world away in Brazil. Upon arrival, they took new names, with Chaya becoming Clarice. The young girl would be especially close to her mother — sick and paralyzed from violence she'd suffered in her homeland — and would make up stories to entertain her. This pall of tragedy amidst survival would deepen when Clarice's mother passed away when she was nine, and deepen further still when her beloved father died from surgical complications in her twentieth year.

She attended prestigious schools, learning in Portuguese along with her native Hebrew and Yiddish, and became interested in literature — as well as becoming a writer herself — after reading Herman Hesse's Steppenwolf at the age of thirteen. Lispector would eventually work as a journalist and circulate among Brazil's young literary generation, while also attending law school, and in 1943 published her first novel, Perto do Coração Selvagem (its title and epigraph come from James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: "He was alone. He was unheeded, happy and near to the wild heart of life"). 

It was an unmitigated success, a phenomenon described as "Hurricane Clarice," and would win her the Graça Aranha Prize for debut novels. Brazilian Poet Lêdo Ivo hailed it as "the greatest novel a woman had ever written in the Portuguese language," while also noting how foreign and un-Brazilian her prose sounded, and in the same fashion, critics would make connections between Lispector's voice and those of Joyce and Virginia Woolf, among others. One key reason for this is her prevalent use of both stream-of-consciousness narrative, as well as a preoccupation with interiority, which provide some semblance of order amidst a non-linear narrative.

Here's how we'll divide up our four classes on Near to the Wild Heart, which will have a long break in the middle:

• Wed. August 30: Benjamin Moser, "Hurricane Clarice" and Part 1, "The Father..." to "Joana's Pleasures"
• Fri. September 1: NO CLASS — You're Welcome
• Mon. September 4: NO CLASS — Labor Day
• Wed. September 6: Part 1, "... The Bath ..." to "Otávio"
• Fri. September 8: Part 2, "The Marriage" to "Lídia"
• Mon. September 11: Part 2, "The Man" to "The Journey"

And here are a few supplemental readings you might find interesting:

• Colm Toibin discusses Near to the Wild Heart and two other Lispector novels in The Irish Times: [link]
• JS Tennant reviews the novel in The Guardian: [link]
• Benjamin Moser reflects upon "The True Glamour of Clarice Lispector" in The New Yorker: [link]

If you're having trouble asking to join the Facebook group . . .

Try it again now. I've switched the settings from "secret" to "private," which will keep posts hidden but should allow you to see the group so you can request membership. As it turns out, secret groups can only be seen by people who've already been added as members. Sorry about any confusion!

Please Read: Making First Day Adjustments for the Eclipse

As you might've heard, there's going to be a pretty remarkable solar eclipse tomorrow afternoon, and while Cincinnati won't be in the path of totality, we're set to have 91% coverage of the sun at its apogee. That will be at 2:28 PM, just after our class is set to wrap up, but I'd like to try to end things by 2:00 or 2:05 at the latest so we can all witness this glorious event with ease.

We can do that if you do a few things in advance of our class meeting tomorrow:

• Read over the syllabus, book list, schedule, and the first few posts here on the blog.
• Come prepared with any questions you might have about.

I'll take a quick spin through the syllabus and book list tomorrow and set us up for Wednesday's first class on Camus, and if you've already acquainted yourself with those materials it'll go much more smoothly. I'll look forward to meeting you all tomorrow!

In the meantime, here are a few eclipse-related links:

• NASA's tips for how to safely view the eclipse: [link]
• a recent UC Magazine article on how faculty will be enjoying the eclipse: [link]
• the Cincinnati Observatory's page on the eclipse: [link]
• NPR's instructions on how to make an eclipse viewer: [link]
• another interesting NPR piece on how eclipses have changed history: [link]

Weeks 1 and 2: Albert Camus' "The Stranger" (1942)

We'll start our semester with our first Nobel Laureate: novelist, philosopher, journalist, and playwright Albert Camus (1913–1960). Born in French Algeria to French and Spanish parents, his early years were marked by poverty, which fostered a sense of sympathy to the plight of the region's colonial subjects. Throughout his life he'd advocate for greater equality for native Algerians though he stopped short of supporting total independence during the Algerian War of the mid-50s and early-60s. 

This colonial dichotomy is also central to the plot of L'Étranger (The Stranger, sometimes translated as The Outsider) — Camus' first novel, published in France in 1942, and first translated into English in 1946 (we'll be reading Matthew Ward's 1989 translation) — which hinges on two key events: the death of Meursault the protagonist's mother, and his subsequent killing of an Arab shortly thereafter. While this might seem overly simple, it's anything but, largely due to the labyrinthine stream-of-consciousness nature of Meursault's first-person perspective and the absurd nature of his existence within its various contexts. While this philosophy is sometimes labeled as existentialist — i.e. exploring the challenges and responsibilities inherent to our having free will and self-determination — Camus was quick to dismiss any association with that movement, and even his youthful fervor for absurdism would fade after the publication of The Stranger and The Myth of Sisyphus (his great treatise on the question of suicide), both in 1942.

Here's how our three days with The Stranger will break down:

• Wed. August 23: translator's note and part 1, ch. 1–4
• Fri. August 25: part 1, ch. 5–part 2, ch. 2
• Mon. August 28: part 2, ch. 3–5

And here are a few supplemental resources that might of interest:

• Nicola Chiaramonte's 1946 review of the novel in The New Republic: [link]
• Claire Messud reviews Sandra Smith's recent translation of the novel in The New York Review of Books: [link]
• Alice Kaplan, "L’Étranger – Stranger Than Fiction" in The Guardian: [link]
• Ryan Bloom, "Lost in Translation: What the First Line of The Stranger Should Be" in The New Yorker: [link]
• Aaron Gwyn, "Albert Camus' Poker-Faced Stranger Became A Much Needed Friend" on NPR: [link]

Welcome to Our Class

By its very nature, the English major curriculum tends to stay away from works written in other languages. That's understandable, given both the overabundance of worthy texts within the English-language canon, as well as legitimate concerns about the quality and availability of translations for works from other tongues. Nonetheless, we find ourselves in a golden age for international literature where far-flung contemporary authors like Roberto Bolaño, Elena Ferrante, and Karl Ove Knausgård are read widely and justly celebrated by their readers. There's real value in expanding one's literary horizons, and I hope this will be a worthwhile experience for you.

There's not necessarily an overarching theme to the selections I've made, other than attempting to present a diverse array of perspectives. Europe is, as one might expect, well-represented with four selections, but our other six books come from the eastern and western extremes of Asia, and the northern and southern boundaries of Africa and Latin America. Our time frame extends from WWII to the present, and many of the books deal with questions of identity, particularly coming-of-age stories, with special emphasis placed upon female perspectives.

Our Course By the Numbers

Let's lay out the details of the course in the style of Harper's Index:

• number of weeks we'll be spending together  :  15
• number of days off during the semester  :  5[1]
• number of books we'll be reading  :  10[2]
• number of decades spanned by the reading list  :  8
• number of female authors  :  7
• number of male authors  : 3
• number of continents represented  :  5
• number of books originally written in English  :  2[3]
• number of Nobel Laureates in Literature  :  2[4]

A Note on our Class Size

As some of you already know, we had some last-minute upheaval in scheduling last week. Philip Tsang, one of our English Dept. colleagues, had trouble with his passport and visa while trying to reenter the country and was going to be delayed for some length of time. As a result, his section of this course — which many of you were signed up for — was canceled and you were asked to join this section once the enrollment cap was increased. This also necessitated the cancelation of my Contemporary World Poetry class, and some of you have joined this course from that one.

I'm grateful for your flexibility in this matter, and I'm sure that Philip and our chair, Leah Stewart, are as well. I don't necessarily anticipate much change in terms of how I'm planning on structuring and running the course with two small exceptions: 1) because I place great emphasis upon participation and discussion, you'll need to be vocal members of the class to distinguish yourselves among the masses, and 2) though I'm loathe to rely on them, we're probably going to have to have more quizzes than I typically like for the sake of providing more grade opportunities and to see what students are (or aren't) keeping up with the reading.

Notes

1. Cf. our class schedule. Also note that this includes one day that's not an official university holiday when I need to be out of town for a family event — this will mean you'll have an especially nice Labor Day weekend.
2. Cf. our book list for this and the next four points.
3. Specifically, those written by Bessie Head and Zadie Smith.
4. Albert Camus (1957) and Heinrich Böll (1972). One of the pleasures of teaching this course in the fall is that the Nobel Prize announcements will be made in early October, allowing us to see if another one of our authors might be honored (though I'd think Zadie Smith is the only one with a legitimate chance to win).