Week 12.1: Jhumpa Lahiri and Junot Diaz

Reading:
Jhumpa Lahiri (1691), "Sexy," 1692-1707
Junot Diaz (1708-9), "Drown," 1709-16

Study Questions:
1. What does it mean to be "sexy" in Lahiri's story "Sexy"? What is sexiness opposed to? How does this speak to the plight of the immigrant?

2. What does it mean to "drown" in Junot Diaz's story? Who is drowning? What are they drowning from?

BONUS:
Listen to Jhumpa Lahiri speaks about her experience of becoming American on NPR. 

Week 11.2: Thomas Pynchon and Raymond Carver

Reading:
Thomas Pynchon (1519-20), "Entropy," 1520-31
Raymond Carver (1531-2), "Cathedral," 1532-42

Study Questions:
1. How does the scientific concept of entropy become the controlling metaphor for Pynchon's story?


2. Pynchon and Carver are often thought to have occupied very different places in postwar American writing. What seems different about the two stories? What might seem similar between the two stories?

Week 11.1: Flannery O'Connor & Alice Walker

Reading:
Flannery O'Connor (1366-7), "A Good Man is Hard to Find," 1381-92
Alice Walker, "Everyday Use"

Study Questions: 
1. At the end of "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the Grandmother exclaims to the Misfit, "Why you're one of my babies. You're one of my own children." Although not literally true, how might it be true thematically?

2. Standard readings of “Everyday Use” position Wangero (Dee) as the character who fails to understand the true meaning of her heritage and Mama as the character who stands up for that meaning. How might you reverse (or at least trouble) that reading by focusing on Mama’s
control of the narrative, her possible control of Maggie, and her feelings of inadequacy when faced by her daughter?

   

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 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?