S15 - ENGL052B.01 - Core: US Fiction-1945-Present
Topic outline
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Download or print and consult these materials weekly. Includes both a course description and a syllabus of all the weekly assignments.
Note: we'll also be regularly using the Blog.
SEE ALSO THE BRIEF THEORETICAL AND SPECULATIVE ESSAYS BELOW (articles and a web link to a TED talk) THAT WILL BE RELEVANT FOR ALL THE BOOKS WE'LL READ THIS SEMESTER. THEY TAKE VERY DIFFERENT, BUT I BELIEVE COMPLEMENTARY, APPROACHES TOWARD UNDERSTANDING BROAD RECENT DEVELOPMENTS BUT IN FICTION AND IN THE WORLD WE'RE LIVING IN.
Also included below are some guides toward writing better papers on literature: how to craft a strong thesis, and how to use textual evidence in making an argument. Please consult these before writing paper #1--especially if this course is your first or second Swarthmore English course.
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Who's your WA? download and keep this file for your reference. Includes handy email addresses. Correct as of Feb. 12. Email Prof. Schmidt if you find any errors.
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Updated 19 January 7pm.
DOWNLOAD AND/OR PRINT THIS DOCUMENT AND CONSULT IT WEEKLY FOR ALL READING ASSIGNMENTS. Students are responsible for reading and understanding the English 52B Course Requirements. If you have any questions about these, please consult with Prof. Schmidt.
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Reposted here 29 January; please download this current copy and consult it.
For guidelines on crafting a good post, see the English 52B syllabus.
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I recommend you read all files included here; all are brief but offer very good advice for writing strong College-level English literature papers.
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Includes a list of the assigned and optional readings, plus a brief description of all of the books. All books are available via the Swarthmore College Bookstore. For a complete description of the English 52B course requirements and the syllabus, see the accompanying file.
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There's a reason why this talk by one of the authors we're reading this semester has earned over 1 million (!!) views on YouTube.
Listen and learn. What she says applies not just to her fiction, but to the very reason why we read fiction and listen to poetry.
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by Louis Menand. from The New Yorker, Jan. 5, 2015.
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By William Deresiewicz. Published in The Atlantic magazine, December 28, 2014.
Recommended general reading for English 52B. I disagree with the author's claim that these 3 categories of artist are entirely separate from each other and occupy distinctly different historical periods. But I think you'll find this essay stimulating reading—as I did—and helpful as we get to know all the artist-writers we'll look at this semester, from Jack Kerouac through Ruth Ozeki, Sandra Cisneros, Thomas Pynchon, and Gary Shteyngart.
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Please read summaries of these 2 important recent meditations on literature, empathy, and the interdependent self. Jen, a superb contemporary U.S. novelist who's been featured in both English 52B and my short story course (English 71D), argues that Western fiction, especially U.S. fiction, has far too often conceived of narrative as the story of the individual self against the world. She argues that particularly now we need stories about how to understand healthy vs. unhealthy interdependence, stories of the self linked to others. Palumbo-Liu, a U.S. literary critic and cultural studies theorist, asks why when we talk about empathizing with others in fiction or in life we emphasize sameness rather than listen to difference. Why? (My students often say, "I liked this book because the characters were very relatable." What does that mean, really? That we only are interested in the stories of others when we think they are like us?)
Jen's and Palumbo-Liu's ideas, briefly elaborated here, will be relevant for all the books we read in U.S. fiction this semester.
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TV’s New Girls’ Club, By LILI LOOFBOUROW
"Great shows used to be about fallen masculinity. Now they’re about collaboration and resilience. What changed?"
This essay focuses on influential TV shows from The Sopranos and Breaking Bad to Orange Is the New Black, but its reflections on character, plot, and story-telling techniques are very relevant for considering post-World War II U.S. fiction as well.
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Two fine short essays putting this question in historical context and giving us some smart and useful answers.
Authors: Cheryl Strayed and Adam Kirsch
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"Brief Thoughts on Arrogance": a short New Yorker essay on book reviewing BY ALEXANDRA SCHWARTZ. Adapted from this year’s acceptance speech for the Nona Balakian Citation for Excellence in Reviewing, awarded by the National Book Critics Circle.
Schwartz's main points are very relevant for writing good Swarthmore papers on literature too. Pay particular attention to paragraph #4, which begins "I like the floor metaphor especially…."
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READ APPROXIMATELY HALF OF DHARMA BUMS FOR OUR FIRST CLASS ON TUESDAY, JANUARY 20th. FINISH THE NOVEL FOR THURSDAY, JAN. 22.
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…plus excerpts from a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr., against the Vietnam War, 1967. Compare King's critique of American values to those expressed by Ginsberg in 1957. With this juxtaposition, I'm not suggesting that the Beats influenced King. Rather, the opposite. Of all the influences important to the Beats—including Buddhism, jazz, and avant-garde writers like Rimbaud and Whitman—the influence of the 1950s Civil Rights movement is too often neglected.
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A short home-movie style film, probably by Robert Frank, the famous photographer (The Americans) and filmmaker (Pull My Daisy).
It's unusual to see Kerouac hanging out with kids, impersonating being comfortable as a family man (he wasn't).
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Check out these photos! His mother dressed Ernest in girl's clothes, called him Ernestine, and had him grow his hair long--until Hemingway was 6 years old and rebelled. Oak Park, Illinois (a suburb of Chicago), early 20th century.
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3 pieces with biographical and other info on Nora Ephron. You can also explore the Wikipedia page on her life and career if you'd like.
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Excerpted from I REMEMBER NOTHING: And Other Reflections by Nora Ephron Copyright © 2010 by Nora Ephron.
Link copies from The Huffington Post.
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"Raised near the mountains of Sandpoint, Idaho, novelist Marilynne Robinson remembers sensing God's presence there long before she had a name for him. 'I was aware to the point of alarm of a vast energy of intention, all around me,' she writes, 'barely restrained, and I thought everyone else must be aware of it.' Perhaps they were, but in a culture in which 'it was characteristic to be silent about things that in any way moved them,' the young Robinson was, in her deepest experiences, alone…."
by Thomas Gardner, Christianity Today, 2010
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…includes Robinson's comments on Housekeeping (1980), on the occasion of the publication of her newest novel, Lila (2014).
Scroll down to find the Robinson section.
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on the occasion of the publication of her prize-winning novel, Gilead. By Meghan O'Rourke for The New York Times Magazine.
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Listen to the actress Olympia Dukakis describe how she learned how to "become" the transgender heroine Anna Madrigal in the TV production of Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City, a series of novels that began in the early 1970s, of which Michael Tolliver Lives is part. Her speech is eloquent and moving, well worth 20 minutes of your time.
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At the San Francisco Public Library, Oct. 30, 2014. Lasts 1 hr, but well worth your time if you're enjoying Michael Tolliver Lives and want to go deeper.
Maupin tells tales of the origins of Tales of the City, in the early 70s and beyond.
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stories from Woman Hollering Creek to read for Tuesday (just 2 short ones): Eleven, Barbie-Q. Re Eleven, see also the link below.
stories to read for Thursday:
Woman Hollering creek
The Marlboro man
Anguiano religious articles rosaries statues
Little miracles, kept promises
There was a man, there was a woman
Tin tan tan
Bien pretty.-
Not the best video or audio, but Cisneros' reading of this story is very powerful.
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Done around the time of publication of Woman Hollering Creek.
Allison is a powerful essayist and novelist who also, like Cisneros, values her working-class origins. Her most famous and influential work is Bastard Out of Carolina, featuring a tough young heroine named Bone.
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March 17, 19, 24: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Americanah (2013). Read chs. 1-15 for our first class; chs. 16-36 for our second; and chs. 37 to the end for our final class.
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The novelist Zadie Smith interviews Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie at the Schomburg Center for the Study of Black Culture in New York, 2014. Adichie reads part of ch. 1 of Americanah and you'll hear the narrative voice's capturing of the heroine Ifemelu's wit and humor. PS: there's a "Lost Signal" moment near the middle, but the signal's soon restored.
Also, if you haven't listened to it already, go to near the top of this 52B Moodle page for the link to one of Adichie's two famous TEDx talks, "The Danger of a Single Story."
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Skin color codes: In a beautifully illustrated comic on The Nib website, cartoonist Ronald Wimberly relays the story of working with an editor who asked him to lighten the skin tone of a character he was working on, Melita Garner, who had been described as Mexican and African-American, a reporter, and Wolverine's ex-girlfriend. (Apparently later the narrative of her ethnicity changed, as you'll see.) Worth your time! Easy to imagine a blog entry by Ifemelu on this--
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Please use Word .docx format if possible when you upload your final draft. WA papers will be too hard to upload, so hand in to me personally the printed version with the WA comments. I'll use that when I read and comment on your online paper.
Turn in your WA'd draft with comments to PS either in class on the 19th or 24th, or by placing it by March 24 in the mailbox outside of my office, LPAC 206.
Late papers or papers submitted without a WA'd draft will receive a grade penalty, as the syllabus explains.
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March 26, 31, and April 2: Ruth Ozeki, A Tale for the Time Being (2013). Read approximately 1/3 of the novel for each of our 3 classes.
April 2: Ozeki is planning to visit our class!
April 2, 4:15pm: reading and talk by Ozeki. Required attendance for English 52B students.
For more information on Ozeki and A Tale for the Time Being, see:
http://www.ruthozeki.com/writing-film/a-tale-for-the-time-being/
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For our first class on Charles Johnson's The Middle Passage (1990), read chapters 1-6. (Though good luck stopping there: the book is very suspenseful.)
Each chapter is an "Entry" written in the slave-ship Republic's salvaged logbook by our protagonist anti-hero and ex-slave, Rutherford Calhoun.
For our second class, finish the novel (chs. 7-9).
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date: 1993, soon after Middle Passage won the National Book Award.
Excellent on Johnson's life and career, as well as relevant for readers of Middle Passage.
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in which he reflects on Middle Passage's development, and his whole career
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Incredibly helpful—and fun—annotations for just about every page of Inherent Vice. Produced by Pynchon's devoted world-wide fan base. Scroll down a little to see the promotional video for the novel--narrated by Pynchon himself! When released, this was one of the first-ever promotional videos made for a work of fiction. Scroll further down to discover the annotations, organized alphabetically or by chapter and page (your choice). This is your source for Pynchon's references to music, cool cars, and a thousand other things.
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by Anthony Lane. from The New Yorker, Dec. 15, 2014.
You may find many other reviews online of Anderson's movie.
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This is (intentionally?) somewhat hard to do… Is it just me, or does the ä sound like the vowel in "meh"? Oops, sorry, old-school irony at work. Must get more extro.
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Annotations prepared by Swarthmore students in English 52B, Spring 2013, and published (!) on my blog.
Fun and interesting--check them out. Includes annotation for "äppärät." It takes clicking on several links to get to the pdf itself--sorry.
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Because there are some similarities between Eddie Huang's parents (Taiwanese American) and Eunice Park's (Korean American), I recommend reading this article on the man whose memoir inspired Fresh Off the Boat, a new ABC comedy. By Wesley Yang, The New York Times Magazine, Feb. 9, 2015.
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"‘Out of My Mouth Comes Unimpeachable Manly Truth’: What I learned from watching a week of Russian TV."
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Here are some papers from our class that I judged to be A or A- papers. If you'd like to see what an A paper looks like, read from these and learn from them.
The strengths of their writing and their interpretive moves are obviously inspired in part by the particular authors they're discussing. But these papers' lively writing and powerful literary analysis--especially in dealing with quoted evidence and carefully presenting interpretive reasoning--provide a model to follow for any paper about literature.
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(from the optional reading discussion group)
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Use the link provided to upload paper #2. Use Word (.docx preferred). This paper does not need to be WA'd, but you're welcome to do so: just plan ahead. See syllabus for further instructions.
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See instructions on the syllabus and above for your options re this paper.
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Please use Word (.docx preferred) as the file format for your Final Exam essay. You have until the end of exam week (Saturday, May 16, 5pm) to complete and upload your exam essay. Please do not email me the exam, and don't use the pdf format (it's too hard to comment on in ways that everyone can access; we all seem to have different pdf "readers." Late exams will have a grade penalty.
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This is an open-book and -notes exam, and you may download and use it as a study guide long before your write your essay.
I recommend a minimum of 3 hours outlining your essay, finding quotations to use, and then writing it. You can take longer and you can break up your prep and writing sessions if you prefer.
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