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]