(Very) Contemporary American Fiction – English 90FC
Tuesdays: 9:45 AM - 11:45am, Barker 018 Prof. Andrew Warren ([email protected])
Thirty years ago David Foster Wallace described his generation as obsessed with “a social Now that admits neither passion about the future nor a curiosity about the past.” This course reads some of the most vital work being done in American fiction to ask how we today experience, or want to experience, time. What kinds of temporal lags or leaps does fiction afford us? Why and whence this obsession with the Now? How are questions of identity knitted to our histories, present circumstances, and hopes for the future? Each book is paired with a review or critical essay; a major assignment will a creative project exploring your own experience of time, both in the course and out.
Textbooks (in the order in which we’ll read them)
Tony Tulithamutte, Private Citizens (2016) - 978-0062399106 Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere (2017) - 978-0735224292 Sheila Heti, Motherhood (2018) - 978-1627790772 Tommy Orange, There There (2018) - 978-0525520375 Luis Alberto Urrea, The House of Broken Angels (2018) - 978-0316154888 David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (2011) - 978-0316074223 Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719) – Penguin - 978-0141439822 Valeria Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth (2015) - 978-1566894098 Paul Beatty, The Sellout (2015) - 978-1250083258 George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (Audiobook, 2017) N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (2015) - 978-0316229296 Richard Powers, The Overstory (2018) - 978-0393635522 Recommended: Time (Hackett Readings in Philosophy), ed. Carl Levenson & Jonathan Westphal
Schedule
(Introduction (readings will be handed out in class – א T 9/4 - Week Three sonnets: John Keats, “Bright Star” (1819), Terrance Hayes “American Sonnet for My Past and Future Assassin” (2018 – 22 & 81) David Foster Wallace, “A Radically Condensed History of Postindustrial Life” (1999)
Due by Thursday, 4pm: Close Reading of a (very) short piece of fiction – see handout or website
I. A History of the Present
T 9/11 - Week A – Lag – “Right now everything progressed so slowly that by the time we arrived at the future is was the present again” Tony Talithamutte, Private Citizens (2016) David Foster Wallace, “Fictional Futures of the Conspicuously Young” (1987) Tony Talithamutte, “Why There’s No ‘Millenial Novel’” (2016)
T 9/18 - Week B – Near History & the Everyday – “bells, real bell-bottoms, not the back- again retro ones from Delia’s catalogue but the actual thing, with wide flares, the denim- thin tissue of decades of wear” Celeste Ng, Little Fires Everywhere (2017) Yoon Sun Lee, Modern Minority: Asian American Literature and Everyday Life (2013), 3-26
T 9/25 - Week C – (Very) Near History – “Tony isn’t going anywhere. And somewhere in there, inside him, where he is, where he’ll always be, even now it is morning, and the birds, the birds are singing.” Tommy Orange, There There (2018) Alexander Manshel, “The Rise of the Recent Historical Novel” (2017)
Personal Reflection #1 – Due 9/28
T 10/2 - Week D – Biological Time – “What will I do with all this time? But time is not what you do something with—time does something with you” Sheila Heti, Motherhood (2018) Rei Terada, “The Life Process and Forgettable Living” (2011)
II. Haunted Time
T 10/9 - Week E – Finitude – “the clock, the clock, chipped away at his existence” Luis Alberto Urrea, The House of Broken Angels (2018) Jacques Derrida, Learning to Live Finally: the Last Interview (2004)
Close Reading Due – 10/12
T 10/16 - Week F – Simultaneity – “what if all the infinitely dense and shifting worlds of stuff inside you every moment of your life turned out now to be somehow fully open and expressible…” Rivka Galchen, “The Region of Unlikeness” (2014), David Foster Wallace, “Good Old Neon” (2004), Jorge Luis Borges, “El Aleph” (1938), Saint Augustine of Hippo, Confessions XI (AD 397, in Time 6-28) Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Volume 2 (1984), “Games with Time,” 61-99 Film Screening: Arrival (2015)
T 10/23 - Week G – Memory – “every love story is a ghost story” David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (2011), up through Chris Fogle monologue Marcel Proust, from Swann’s Way (1919; in Time, 1-5) Walter Benjamin, “The Image of Proust” (1934)
T 10/30 - Week H – Slow Time – “Bliss—a-second-by-second joy and gratitude at the gift of being alive, conscious —lies on the other side of crushing, crushing boredom” David Foster Wallace, The Pale King (2011) Maurice Merleau-Ponty, “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945)
Personal Reflection #2 – Due 11/2
III. The Untimely
T 11/6 - Week I - Wait, What Is the Contemporary? – “Having mastered this difficulty, and employed a world of time about it, I bestirred myself to see, if possible, how to supply two wants.” Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719) Giorgio Agamben, “What Is the Contemporary?” (2011)
{Mourning Time – “his current state of sorrow was not uniquely his, not at all, but, rather, its like had been felt, would yet be felt, by scores of others, in all times, in every time, and must not be prolonged or exaggerated” Start listening to George Saunders, Lincoln in the Bardo (2017), Audiobook Nishida Kitarō, An Inquiry into the Good (1911), 68-84}
T 11/13 - Week J – Time is Out of Joint – “considering its antiquity, the overall condition is good… Significant flattening of the point leads one to conclude that its original owner, Mr. Plato, talked and ate continuously” Valeria Luiselli, The Story of My Teeth (2015) Elizabeth Grosz, The Nick of Time: Politics, Evolution and the Untimely (2004), 1-16
T 11/20 - Week K – Comic Timing – “the defendant is in abject violation of the Civil Rights Acts of 1866, 1871, 1957, 1964 and 1968, the Equal Rights Act of 1963, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, and at least six of the g—d---- Ten Commandments” Paul Beatty, The Sellout (2015) Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), 1-25
Critical Application Due
IV. Catastrophe & Deep Time
T 11/27 - Week L – Eschatology – “Let’s start with the end of the world, why don’t we? Get it over with, and move on to more interesting things…” N.K. Jemisin, The Fifth Season (2015) Lee Edelman, from No Future (2004)
Meeting with me to discuss final project ideas
T 12/4 - Week M – Ecological Time (I) – “Now is the time of chestnuts.” Richard Powers, The Overstory (2018) Dipesh Chakrabarty, “The Climate of History” (2009)
Reading Period - Week N – Ecological Time (II) – “She clicks on a Florida bald cypress one and a half millennia older than Christianity, killed a few months ago by a flicked cigarette” Richard Powers, The Overstory (2018) Peter Brooks, “Freud’s Masterplot” (1977)
Final Project Due – last day of reading period
Assignments and Grading
Attendance & Participation (35%): this is primarily a discussion-based course, and your attendance and active participation is crucial. Part of this grade will be connected to two presentations. You will sign up for them during the second week of classes: • Prose Comparisons (10%): These are five-minute presentations which close read the prose style of that week’s reading against that of another author. These PC’s are meant to bring the prose we’re reading into relief against a wider background of writing in English. You should choose the compared work, and photocopy for us no more than one page of it; it could come from an influence on that week’s author, from something you’ve read in another class (say, from Woolf, or a Victorian novel), or from something equally contemporary. Each presentation should be accompanied by a handout of no more than one side of one page, and that handout should be the focus of the presentation. You can format the handout however you like, but it must contain a good chunk of primary material we can look at: type out a bunch of that week’s sentences and sentences from the other author; juxtapose paragraphs side by side; diagram how the sentences work in the two authors. You get the idea. Be sure to include page numbers. Try out new techniques / ideas. • The “Ten-Hundred Words” (10%): Your job in the presentation is to break down an article’s basic argument, and provide us with three important quotations that we can discuss as a group. Breakdown summaries should last no more than five minutes (= about 500 words), though the discussion of the quotations may last longer. Also, there’s a catch – presentations must be written using only the “ten hundred” most common words in the style of Randall Munroe’s Thing Explainer: Complicated Stuff in Simple Words (2015). You’ll do what he does, but with a critical essay, not a space rover. It’s actually incredibly fun. Response Papers (30%): • Personal Reflections (10%): Two page-long, singled-spaced reflections on your own experience of time – in reading our texts, and in other aspects of your life. Due on 9/28 and 11/2. • Close Reading (10%): A two-page, single-spaced close reading of a passage or two from one of the first four novels – due on Friday, 10/12 • Critical Application (10%): A two-page, single-spaced reading that employs a critical methodology dealing with time. That methodology can be something we’ve read in class, or you can pick something else, with or without my help – just run it by me first. Due before Thanksgiving Break. Final Project (35%): A ten-page, doubled-spaced piece of writing that critically and creatively engages with the themes and readings from the class. This should not be a standard academic paper, though it can use aspects of such papers (say, close readings, arguments, footnotes, etc.). The paper should be distinct from your response papers and presentations, but can arise from them. Around Thanksgiving break you will meet with me to discuss your ideas for the form and content of your project.