Week 5.1: Henry James, Daisy Miller

 Reading:
James, Daisy Miller, 389-99

Study Questions:
1. What does Winterbourne mean when he says, "You were right in that remark that you made last summer. I was booked to make a mistake. I have lived too long in foreign parts"? Why does he say it? What is his mistake?


2. What are we to make of Daisy Miller's death?

Week 4.1: Henry James, Daisy Miller

Reading:
Henry James (324-7), Daisy Miller: A Study, 342-61
James, "The Art of Fiction," 584-6

Study Questions:
1. Discuss how Daisy Miller achieves much  its dramatic tension through point of view. What seems to be the central conflict of the text?

2. The Norton Anthology refers to James's international theme. Often times this takes the form of opposing American innocence to European corruption. How might we see this at work in Daisy Miller?

Week 15.2: Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Reading:
Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad, 234-340 (not as long as it seems)

Discussion Questions:
1. "Time's a goon!" How does this theme of decline, of being beat up by time, apply nationally and to nature in the last two chapters of the book?

2. Recall in the first chapter that in describing Sasha's efforts with her therapist, Egan writes, "[T]hey were writing a story of redemption, of fresh beginnings and second chances" (8-9). For a book about decay, there are a number of happy endings. How does the book manage this tension in the end?   

Week 15.1: Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Reading:
Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad, 186-233

Study Question:
1. Bring in four passages, two from each chapter, that exemplify the themes that we have discussed in the book thus far. Explain your reasoning with each of these passages. Make sure to transcribe the passage in full before your explanation.

Week 13.2: Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Reading:
Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad, 39-83

Study Questions: 
1. In "Gold Cure," the second story we discussed from last session, Bennie evaluates the history of rock music as one of diminishing returns. If the high watermark of authenticity was the punk rock of the late 1970s, the present moment of "Gold Cure" is one of thoroughgoing banality. Digitally produced, all the music sounds perfect and all of it is garbage. In "Ask Me if I Care," the narrator, Rhea is an old high school friend of Benny's and a collaborator in his band, The Flaming Dildos. How does she also marshal a discourse of authenticity but how does she also show the instability of such a discourse? How do we know if we are authentic?

2. There are several moments in "Safari" when the narrator breaks up the action to inform the reader of what will eventually happen to the characters long after the events of the story/chapter. Why do you think Egan does this?

Week 14.2: Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Reading:
Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad, 137-85

Study Questions: 
1. Both "Selling the General" and "Forty-Minute Lunch: Kitty Jackson Opens Up About Love, Fame, and Nixon!" concern themselves with the public relations industry. How does this speak to the theme of authenticity that we have discussed previously?

2. Both these stories focus on Kitty Jackson. What does the juxtaposition of the two chapters do?

Week 14.1: Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

 Reading:
Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad, 84-136

Study Questions:
1. Bosco, decrepit old rocker, declares in "From A to B" that, "Time's a goon, right? Isn't that the expression?" (127). Clearly, this made-up expression is important to the novel given the work's title. What does it mean that time is a goon? What is a goon? How does this expression help clarify the themes of the novel, particularly in the previous chapters?

2. A Visit from the Goon Squad has been described as a "networked" novel, meaning that it builds its meaning through the social network of the characters. Draw a map of the relationship between all the characters that we have encountered thus far. Grades will be determined on the basis of completeness and legibility.

Week 13.1: Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad

Jennifer Egan (b. 1962) is the author A Visit From the Goon Squad, which won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, and the LA Times Book Prize. Egan's novel consists of a series of interrelated short stories that document the lives of people involved in the music industry. The short stories date back from the 1970s to the near future.

Reading:

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad, 3-38

Study Questions: 
1. Using internal evidence from the book, including citing book pages and passages, establish when each of these short stories takes place?

2. Opening chapters of a book tend to be contractual. They tell you what type of book you are about to read and hopefully, they teach you how to read the book. What sort of things seem important to this book? 

Week 15.2: Jarett Kobek, I Hate the Interent

Reading:
Jarett Kobek, I Hate the Internet, 231-done

Study Questions:
1. If Jack Kirby is the secret "central personage" of I Hate the Internet, then the Russian-emigre novelist and "philosopher" Ayn Rand is perhaps the secret central antagonist of the entire novel.  Is it, like, totally ironic that J. Karacehennem has his John Galt moment at the end of the novel, or is like, the irony, like totally, that I Hate the Internet is just as didactic as Rand's novels? Or is all fiction, in some way, didactic?

2. Am I bad person for asking these questions about the Internet on blogger? Are you a bad person for reading them?

Week 14.2: Jarett Kobek, I Hate the Interent

Review posted on Kobek's website

Reading:
Jarett Kobek, I Hate the Internet, 115-66

Study Questions:
1. The novel is primarily interested in the glaring moral contradictions surrounding the ideology of the Internet. How does the novel make this point?

2. On page 144, the narrator lists the various things that people are outraged about on the Internet. What is the emotional tenor of the novel? What is the relationship between the dominant emotional feeling of the novel and outrage?

Week 14.1: Jarett Kobek, I Hate the Internet

Reading:
I Hate the Internet, 55-114


Study Questions:
1. For a novel that would seem primarily interested in technology (the internet, social media), I Hate the Internet is also surprisingly interested in the ways in which fiction influences capital. What are the ways in which literature and the realm of ideas influence Silicon Valley?

2. Why does Kobek insert the chapter about Ellen? What is it's function?

Week 13.2: Jarett Kobek, I Hate the Internet

Reading:
Jarett Kobek, I Hate the Internet, 1-54

Study Questions:
1. Why is Jack Kirby the central personage in the novel? What does it mean for the novel? What does it mean for you? The state of current literary and cultural production?


2. How does the structure of the novel reproduce the structure of the experience of surfing the Internet? How does it make it a "bad" novel?

Week 13.2: Jarett Kobek, I Hate the Internet

Week 15.1: Jarett Kobek, I Hate the Internet

The novelist Bret Easton Ellis, reading I Hate the Internet in bed

Reading:
Jarett Kobek, I Hate the Internet, 167-230

Study Questions:
1. How seriously are we to take Christine's neo-pagan devotion to the executives of Silicon Valley? What is the logic behind it?

2. I Hate the Internet is a self-confessed "bad novel" because it does not conform to the literary conventions propagated by the likes of Jonathan Franzen (worth reading despite the abuse he takes here and elsewhere) and the late modernists of the 1950s--those covertly funded by the CIA. With this in mind, what are we to make of the missing chapter in the book? How should we differentiate it from the fake Buzzfeed list inserted later in the book?