Gary Shteyngart

Gary Shteyngart was born in the USSR in 1972 and moved to the U.S. when he was seven years old. Like many of the authors we've read during this quarter, Shteyngart had a complex relationship to his immigrant status--always feeling both Russian and American. Most of his work focuses on these feelings of alienation and otherness.

Shteyngart has published three acclaimed novels--The Russian Debutante's Handbook, Absurdistan, and A Super Sad True Love Story. All three novels share a dark, satirical edge, an interest in international intrigue, and a commitment to absurd fictional conceits and complicated plot devices.

Shteyngart’s latest novel has been called a dystopia. Look up this concept and describe 1-2 other dystopian texts you’ve experienced (books,movies, comics, etc.). How is the novel a dystopian one?

Danticat and The Dew-Breaker

Edwidge Danticat spent the first twelve years of her life in Haiti before moving to a Haitian-American community in Brooklyn. Danticat was educated at Barnard College and Brown University and came to prominence at a very young age with the publication of her first book, Breath, Eyes, Memory in 1994. Attaining widespread critical praise upon its publication, she became the first Haitian-identified author to achieve renown in the United States and the acceptance of her work is seen to mark the beginning of a belated opening of American literary culture to the stories of women and people of color.

Danticat's writing focuses on a number of themes we've discussed in class--from the power of the past to the importance of telling stories in order to construct an identity. Her work also often represents another theme fundamental to our work in class, her sense of feeling pulled between a number of cultures: Haitian and American; black and white; English- and French Creole- speaking; the political and the literary.

The Dew-Breaker is a particularly interesting book to read alongside The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao because it shares many of the central preoccupations of Diaz's novel (not to mention the fact that Danticat and Diaz are good friends). However, Danticat's book more directly addresses the questions about torture and human rights that Diaz's introduce. Also, unlike Oscar Wao, The Dew-Breaker is not a conventional novel, but a series of linked stories that function much as a novel does. As you read, think about how Danticat's choice to render the narrative in this way affects your experience of The Dew-Breaker. What are your first impressions of the book?

Blog post on Diaz here

Look up the concept of “intertextuality.” How does Diaz use intertexts/ allusions in his novel? How do they go along with the work’s larger themes?

Diaz interview about genre

Junot Diaz originally conceived of Oscar Wao as being not unlike a comic book. Read this interview with Diaz for more.

Junot Diaz and the American Novel Beyond America

For the next week or so, we will be exploring The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Diaz. Oscar Wao, published in 2007, is Diaz's first novel; he published his award-winning book of short stories, Drown, ten plus years ago. Since its publication, Diaz's novel has gone on to win a bevy of prizes, including the vaunted Pulitzer.

Diaz's novel introduces a number of questions we will focus on during this portion of the quarter. Most prominently, the novel asks us to think about the American novel outside of the continental United States. Diaz is Dominican-American and his novel moves smoothly between the Dominican Republic and the U.S., the past and the present, with ease. Diaz's novel represents a move toward a different concept of the nation and citizenship in the nation. It also asks us to think a lot about the form of the novel--as we have been doing thus far in class. Oscar Wao is littered with footnotes that threaten to take over the novel and texts that interweave with Diaz's main narrative. Like Mao II, Diaz's book also asks us to think about the intersection of history and literature; Diaz provides us with a graphic, politicized history of the Dominican Republic at the same time that he gives us a fable about a fat, nerdy Dominican boy in the U.S. who can't get a girl to date him. How do personal and world history intertwine here?

Art Spiegelman and Maus

When Art Spiegelman published MAUS I in 1986, he transformed the medium of comics and greatly affected the American literary world. His work experimented with the traditional form of the comic strip at the same time that it altered forever the content associated with the medium. Spiegelman's choice to depict the Holocaust and its aftermath in a medium often associated (rightly or wrongly) with children, cartoons, and simple caricature changed both the landscape of the comic and that of Holocaust representation. Comics or "comix," as Spiegelman dubbed them, were suddenly taken much more seriously than ever before. MAUS I and II appealed to a broader audience than did the conventional comic strip. When MAUS won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 (after the publication of the second volume in the series), Spiegelman's work drew even greater attention. Since the publication of this magnum opus, he has become one of the comix medium's greatest advocates, traveling the country with his Comix 101 presentation and arguing for the importance of the form.

Spiegelman was born in 1948 in Stockholm, Sweden. His parents, Anja and Vladek, who appear as central characters in MAUS, were refugees, survivors of the concentration camps and World War II. Using the medium of the comic and the figures of the cat and mouse to represent Nazi and Jew respectively, MAUS tells Spiegelman's parents' stories, as well as his own. After getting his start by editing and writing for the graphic magazine RAW, in which early drawings from MAUS were serialized, Spiegelman went on to draw covers for The New Yorker for a number of years, eventually falling out with the editors due to the political nature of many of his drawings.



How does Spiegelman's medium affect his message in MAUS? Is there something sacrilegious about his representation of the Holocaust? Do we read his work as straight memoir, fiction, or some hybrid in-between genre? Has he chosen the appropriate

Post on Postmodernism here

Assignment: Look up various online definitions of postmodernism/

postmodernity. Using these definitions and our class discussion, write a

short blog response on your definition of the term/ how DeLillo expresses it in Mao II.

DeLillo and Terrorism

I've been thinking a lot about how differently the term "terrorist" functions today than it did when DeLillo was writing (in the case of Mao II in 1991). At this point in American history, "terrorist" has come to function as a disturbingly politicized catch-all term that is employed during the presidential election to cast aspersions on candidates or call into question people's patriotism. Does DeLillo use the term in a similar way? We didn't end up talking much about the political valences of his use of "terrorism," but I think it's important to note that he is writing in a time before it had quite the meaning it does today in American politics and culture. A lot to think about as we finish with DeLillo and move on

Salman Rushdie and the Fatwa

The second half of MAO II concerns Bill's attempts to free a writer being held hostage by a terrorist group. When DeLillo wrote MAO II, anxiety about the role of the writer in world terror was at an all-time high. Particularly, many writers worried about the fate of their fellow novelist, Salman Rushdie--a famous British-Indian author, who was sentenced to death after publishing The Satanic Verses (1988), a novel that playfully and irreverently represented the story of Muhammad, among its many other story lines.

Thankfully, the fatwa (death sentence) placed on Rushdie's head by the Ayatollah Khomeini, the then-leader of Iran, was never carried out. However, Rushdie suffered for many years under the fear of death and pursuit by a series of assassins bent on carrying out Khomeini's will. Rushdie's difficult situation greatly affected many writers during the period in which DeLillo was writing. What did it mean that someone would want to kill a writer for insulting a religious figure or deity? Did other writers need to live in fear? The case of Rushdie haunts MAO II.

Warhol

Even beyond inspiring its name, Andy Warhol's series of Mao portraits features prominently in Don DeLillo's novel, MAO II. Warhol was famous for many things--one of which was _being_ famous and drawing attention to the power of fame and celebrity in postwar American culture! Many of you have probably heard the phrase "15 minutes of fame" used to describe the fleeting nature of celebrity. Andy Warhol was the originator of the phrase, remarking in 1968 that: "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes." Later, Warhol commented that his prediction had been right. In many ways, Warhol imagined the culture we live in today long before its inception; he wouldn't have been surprised to see a world of fleeting celebrity, in which starring on reality television or internet porn could make anyone famous--even if for only a few minutes of time.

Warhol also prefigured a number of currents in the art world by becoming an expert in multiple media. He was a painter, a filmmaker, a writer, and an arbiter of style and taste. He was a fundamental part of the Pop Art movement that deeply influenced American art and culture.
For more on Warhol, check out these links:
Wiki page
Andy Warhol Museum
Andy Warhol Foundation
Interview with Ric Burns about Warhol doc
Pop Art Explained

“If you’re looking for Andy Warhol, don’t look any further than the surface of my paintings or the surface of me. There’s nothing behind there.”-Andy Warhol





Image of Warhol (on left) next to one of his artworks, an oversized replica of a Brillo box--part of his series of artwork devoted to making art objects out of everyday consumer products.

The Unification Church AKA The Moonies and MAO II

I wanted to give you some background information on the opening scenes of DeLillo's Mao II. The mass wedding narrated as the book begins is based on the real-life collective marriage ceremonies performed by Revered Sun Myung Moon. Moon founded the Unification Church in Korea and it has spread to a number of nations and now has over a million members. The Unification Church is often thought of as a cult and as an example of alternative religion that offers its followers a (sometimes problematic) means of losing their identity is the collective. Moon's followers are most commonly called "Moonies." Below, please find a photo of a mass wedding ceremony and some helpful links to understanding the beginning scenes of DeLillo's novel. On the sidebar of the blog, you'll see some more general links about DeLillo that might be helpful, as well.




Links: Wiki article

BBC article on mass weddings

Welcome and DeLillo

Welcome to Contemporary American Literature! For our first few classes, we will be exploring the work of Don DeLillo, who is famous for his ability to tap into some of the more disturbing currents of contemporary life. Long before the Twin Towers fell on September 11th, DeLillo was fascinated by the intersection of technology and terror in the twentieth century; in Mao II, and throughout his many works of fiction, he ponders what role the writer can have in such a climate. Can the writer compete with the terrorist? Whose narrative of the contemporary world will hold sway and sear itself onto the consciousness of its listeners? In the piece we read for class, "In the Ruins of the Future," written in October 2001, DeLillo asks some of these very questions with the urgency that many writers and artists and everyday people experienced in the immediate aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Center in Lower Manhattan. Please think of DeLillo's essay with an eye both to how his work can help us talk about Mao II and how it can lead us to some of the larger questions we will ask in our course.

Our course will be guided by the notion that history and literature are often inextricable: that is, we can't necessarily separate between the things that our favorite authors write and the events going on in the world around them. I am looking forward to our class this term!