Prompt 1: Jack (J.A.K.) Gladney and Heinrich

Note: Pick one of the following four prompts about White Noise (Jack (J.A.K.) Gladney and Heinrich, The Most Photographed Barn in America, Try a Toyota Supra, and The Cradle of Misinformation) and write a well thought out, analytical response.  200-400 words, due by midnight on Monday 4/4.

1)      Analyze the following quote from Ch. 4 in the context of the novel at large thus far:

“I am the false character that follows the name around” (17).

In Ch. 6, Jack and his son from another marriage, Heinrich, have a conversation about the weather.  Well, Jack attempts to have a simple conversation about the weather, and Heinrich turns it into a phenomenological debate.  Here’s an excerpt:

“Just give me an answer, okay, Heinrich?”

“The best I could do is make a guess.”

“Either it’s raining or it isn’t,” I said.

“Exactly.  That’s my whole point.  You’d be guessing.  Six of one, half dozen of the other.”

[…]                                                                    

“It’s the stuff that falls from the sky and gets you what is called wet.”

“I’m not wet.  Are you wet?”

“All right,” I said.  “Very good.”

“No, seriously, are you wet?”

“First rate,” I told him.  “A victory for uncertainty, randomness, and chaos.  Science’s finest hour” (24).

At the end of the chapter, we have this scene of Jack lecturing about Hitler:

“When the showing ended, someone asked about the plot to kill Hitler.  The discussion moved to plots in general.  I found myself saying to the assembled heads, ‘All plots tend to move deathward.  This is the nature of plots.  Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games.  We edge nearer death every time we plot.  It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.’

“Is this true?  Why did I say it?  What does it mean?” (26).

There’s no need to frame this prompt further.

Prompt 2: The Most Photographed Barn in America

In Ch. 3, Murray (the pop culture professor who wants to establish Elvis Studies in the same way Jack’s formed Hitler Studies) takes Jack to THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA.  He explains:

“We’re not here to capture an image, we’re here to maintain one.  Every photograph reinforces the aura.  Can you feel it, Jack?  An accumulation of nameless energies” (12).

And:

“They are taking pictures of taking pictures” (13).

How does this scene shape the novel at large, and what is DeLillo saying about postmodern life through this scene?

Prompt 3: Try a Toyota Supra

There’s a complex relationship between consumer goods and the characters in this novel.  Further, TV and radio ads insert themselves into the narrative as if they were characters themselves; often advertisements (mostly catch-phrases, jingles, etc) appear as dialogue within an ongoing conversation.  Consider Ch. 17 (though it happens throughout the novel, not just in this chapter), when the catch-phrases “Try an Audi Turbo” and  “Try a Toyota Supra” pop up on in a conversation about, well, nothing really.

Analyze the role of consumer goods, TV, radio, and commercial advertisement in White Noise.

Prompt 4: The Cradle of Misinformation

Following that Ch. 17 conversation, we have Murray’s theory of misinformation:

“The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation.  There must be something in family life that generates factual error.  Over-closeness, the noise and heat of being.  Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive.  Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts.  Facts threaten our happiness and security.  The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become.  The family process works toward sealing off the world.  Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate” (81-82).

No framing necessary here, either.

Mirroring and Alterity

Note: Pick one of the following three prompts to answer (Mirroring and Alterity, Badiou and Identity, or Everybody Knows).  As always, 200-400 words, due by 10pm Monday 3/14.

We discussed the concept of "Mirroring" and "Alterity" in lecture yesterday, specifically w/r/t the scene in which Nelson Primus berates Coleman ("Faunia is not from your world" p. 80).

What other examples of mirroring do you see throughout the novel?  What role do these mirrors play?  What might Roth be saying about self-awareness through the dramatic irony of so many mirror characters/scenes?  Further, we discussed how Primus's attitude toward Faunia mirrors Coleman Silk's attitude towards Tracy Cummings, but does Primus's condemnation of Coleman's association with Faunia mirror something else, as well?

Prompt Two "Badiou and Identity"

Analyze/react to the following argument:

As pointed out in Badiou’s Metapolitics, “All resistance is a rupture with what is.  And every rupture begins, for those engaged in it, through a rupture with oneself” (7).  It can certainly be argued that Coleman’s fight with the department over the “spooks” incident—the other event which changed the course of his life—began with his fight against himself, his resistance against, or avoidance of the problems in early to mid-twentieth century America with respect to the race he was born into.  This rupture wasn’t just over fighting against being born black, it was fighting to be free of such labels of race at all.  That he chose to live the lie of a white (Jewish) man was due to the outside world’s insistence on such labels.  He had to have one, so he picked the one that allowed him to live more freely than had his previous label; the label that alleviated some of the oppression he felt by being a member of a small group by no choice of his own.

                In effect, by the end of his life, Coleman Silk’s identity is hardly able to be broken down to one simple, direct answer.  Rather, much like in Badiou’s “ontology of pure multiplicity,” he is not a one, Coleman Silk is instead a multiple “radically without oneness, in that [he himself] comprises multiples alone.  What there is exposes itself to the thinkable in terms of multiples of multiples… in other words, there are only multiples of multiples” (Theoretical Writings 47-48).  He remains a Classics professor to some, a Jewish man to others, an ex-lightweight boxer undefeated in the gyms of Newark to those who knew him in high school, a racist to two perhaps misguided students, a black man who turned his back on both his family and race, a father who was making a fool of himself with a younger woman, a man who could never get over the grave injustice done to him by the university, and so on and so on. 

Can there be one singular, consistent identity for such a man?  Or, as it seems, should the critic trying to make sense of it all relent and give up on trying to establish a singular identity?  In the ontology of pure multiplicity, Badiou states, “We will not concede the necessity of reintroducing the one.  We will say it is a multiple of nothing.  And just as with every other multiple, this nothing will remain entirely devoid of consistency” (48).  Coleman Silk’s identity, then, becomes that of a chimera—a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, multi-experiential being conflated into a multiple of nothing.  Or, in other words, a human being.

Prompt Three "Everybody Knows"

"Three rows down from me, Coleman, his head tipped slightly toward hers, was talking to Faunia quietly, seriously, but about what, of course, I did not know.

Because we don't know, do we? Everyone knows... How what happens the way it does? What underlies the anarchy of the train of events, the uncertainties, the mishaps, the disunity, the shocking irregularities that define human affairs? Nobody knows, Professor Roux. 'Everyone knows' is the invocation of the cliche and the beginning of the banalization of experience, and it's the solemnity and the sense of authority that people have in voicing the cliche that's so insufferable. What we know is that, in an uncliched way, nobody knows anything. You can't know anything. The things you know you don't know. Intention? Motive? Consequence? Meaning? All that we don't know is astonishing. Even more astonishing is what passes for knowing."

-The Human Stain, 208-9

Analyze this quote in terms of the novel at large.  Things to focus on might be: 1) The role of speculative narration and mirroring (w/r/t Nathan Zuckerman).  2) How this quote shapes the narrative.  3) How the role of the speculative narrator complicates/adds to the reader's conception of Coleman Silk.  4) The knowing/not knowing paradox.

The “Picaresque” character of William Henry Devereaux, Jr.

In Jamie McCulloch’s “Creating the Rogue Hero: Literary Devices in the Picaresque Novels of Martin Amis, Richard Russo, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Steve Tesich” (International Fiction Review, Vol. 34, No. 1, 2007), McCulloch writes:

It's not just because picaresque heroes are more fun than other characters that I love them. It's not just the dissolute behavior that I find so appealing. And it's not just the dubious company they keep or the adventures they embark upon that I find so satisfying. All of these things make for a pretty good story. But what makes them really worthwhile is the romantic sense of sadness and futility that haunts them all—their honest recognition of their own shortcomings that gives them emotional weight and makes them resonate. Disappointingly, like young Hal in Henry IV, Part I, who eventually deserts Falstaff, all rogue heroes must grow up and assume a certain amount of responsibility. Often they settle down, give up their aimless wandering, and find a home. Unfortunately, settling down can mean letting go of "the impossible dream." We wish their peregrinations would never end, and so by nature the picaresque novel, whose trappings are ribald excess, is also fraught with a deep sense of loss and sorrow. We must not forget, however, that what makes the picaresque so much fun are the comic possibilities of an errant hero in pursuit of something impossible. He is at once noble and pathetic, a delight to spend time with and to laugh at, and heroic in his blindness to the humbling reality that confronts him wherever he goes.

[…]

A more scholarly approach to balancing the serious and the humorous in the picaresque is to mock the early romances just as Cervantes set out to do. The romance tradition is ripe for parody as are those who pursue "the impossible dream." In Russo's Straight Man, Hank has a not-so-subtle Cervantes-esque dream: "In my dream I am the star of the donkey basketball game. I have never been more light and graceful, never less encumbered by gravity or age. My shots, every one of them, leave my fingertips with perfect backspin and arc toward the hoop with a precision that is pure poetry, its refrain the sweet ripping of twine. And remember: I'm doing all this on a donkey" (364). Metaphorically shooting from his ass, Devereaux is weightless, ageless. The image is steeped in the mock heroic, an English professor as warrior is comic enough in itself—a man like the man of La Mancha riding a donkey while competing in a sports event is wonderfully absurd. At the same time, the dream is sadly romantic in the same sense that Don Quixote is a sadly romantic man—a man who sees the world as he chooses, not as it is.

Analyze Hank as a Picaresque (lovable rogue) character.  Does Russo present Hank as a man in quest, a man whose quest is stalled, or is something else at work here?  Could the mid-life crisis Hank and many of his colleagues are undergoing be a postmodern quest in and of itself?  Is Hank Quixotic, and if so, what are the windmills he’s chasing?  If there’s no quest, is it Picaresque (side note: I really did not intend for that to sound like a Johnny Cochrane courtroom rhyme, but here we are…)?  Have I asked too many questions?  Why are you still reading?  Out of a morbid curiosity to see how this prompt ends?  Something else?

Straight Man and the Contemporary Campus Novel

In Robert F. Scott’s “It’s a Small World After All: Assessing the Contemporary Campus Novel” (MMLA Vol. 37, no. 1, Spring 2004), the following assessment of the subgenre of “Campus Novel” is made:

In terms of their prevailing formal qualities and stylistic tendencies, campus novels are essentially comedies of manners.  And, because these works tend to dwell upon the frustrations that accompany academic existence, they often call attention to the antagonistic relationships that exist between mind and flesh, private and public needs, and duty and desire.  As a result, despite their comic tone, most campus novels simmer with barely concealed feelings of anger and even despair as protagonists frequently find themselves caught between administrative indifference on one side and student hostility on the other.  Thus, even when campus novels are lightly satirical in tone, they nonetheless exhibit a seemingly irresistible tendency to trivialize academic life and to depict academia as a world that is both highly ritualized and deeply fragmented. (83)

Further:

At the heart of most campus novels stands the much-maligned figure of the college professor.  Indeed, although there are notable (though few) exceptions, the professorial protagonists in recent campus novels are more often than not depicted as buffoons or intellectual charlatans.  Among the well-established stereotypes, for example, are the absent-minded instructor, the wise simpleton, the lucky bumbler, the old goat, and the fuddy-duddy.  Far removed from the inspiring figures of the kindly Mr. Chips or the dedicated seeker of knowledge, fictional academics—males in particular—are more likely to emerge as burnt out lechers with a penchant for preying on their students or their colleagues’ spouses.  In his analysis of the images of higher education in academic novels of the 1980s, John Hedeman convincingly contrasts the generally positive images of professors prevalent in academic novels of the 1960s, those figures “who wanted to make a difference in the world beyond their cloistered campus,” with the protagonists in the 1980s who “have given up caring even about their own disciplines.”  Maintaining that “[s]elf-doubt, self-absorption, and self-hate” characterize most recent fictional depictions of professors, Hedeman soberingly describes these protagonists as “average men and women with average abilities who live empty, unhappy lives” (152). (qtd. in Scott 83)

Do you agree with this assessment?  Why the shift from the “positive” depictions of professors of the 60s to the more contemporary campus novels?  Are these depictions realistic fiction, satiric send-ups, or is there something else at work here?  Further, what of the depictions of students in campus novels (no winners there...)?

Boredom and Metafiction

This prompt is for Group 1 (Avery-Leblanc)

Due Monday Feb 7^th by 10pm (200-400 words)

In addition to dark humor, satire (largely Menippean, but I’ve mentioned Horatian and Juvenalian), and 18^th century wit (specifically Voltaire’s), we’ve briefly discussed postmodernism—specifically postmodern metafiction (as seen in Wolff’s “Bullet in the Brain”).

In the Wolff story, we had a man unable to distinguish between the written word and real life human interactive dialogue.  In Ames’ “Bored to Death,” we see a similar metafictional move (though not identical).  In the story, we have a man who’s both deathly bored with his life and immensely interested in the detective fiction (Noir) books he’s reading.  Answer one of the following prompts:

1)      What role does metafiction play in the story?  Further, this story is Noir-ish, but would certainly not fit in the genre itself.  What is Ames doing with the genre?

2)      Just as with the Wolff and Woody Allen stories we’ve read, boredom plays a large role in “Bored to Death.”  We’ve not discussed the boredom as plot device/motivating force thus far… but with this story, it’s unavoidable.  In an 1843 essay (“Crop Rotation”), philosopher Soren Kierkegaard writes, “Strange that boredom, so still and static, should have such power to set things in motion” (227).  Analyze the role of boredom in these three stories, and life in the postmodern era in general.

Woody Allen's Comic Structure

This prompt is for Group 2 (Lee-Wright)

Due Monday Feb 7^th by 10pm (200-400 words)

 “Humor is crafted ambiguity, and ambiguities do not easily yield certainties.”

-Elliott Oring

 “The perils of analyzing Allen should be obvious: academics who play around with him risk being played around with themselves.”

-David Galef

“Here is but a small sample of the main body of intellectual treasure that I leave for posterity, or until the cleaning woman comes.”

-Woody Allen

According to 18^th century poet and essayist James Beattie, “Laughter arises from the view of two or more inconsistent, unsuitable, or incongruous parts or circumstances, considered as united in one complex object or assemblage” (qtd. in Oring 2).  Elliott Oring, in his 1992 work, Jokes and Their Relations, furthers this claim: “The perception of humor depends on the perception of an appropriate incongruity—that is, the perception of an appropriate interrelationship of elements from domains that are generally regarded as incongruous” (2).  This view, often attributed to Sigmund Freud (there is a slight difference, though, as Freud claimed this to be a “forced” juxtaposition) has appeared to reach a critical consensus in one form or other amongst humor theorists.  I shall not disagree with this thesis.  However, when it comes to the forced juxtaposition employed by Woody Allen, the depths of his particular brand of humor need to be plumbed rigorously, as he’s often working on multiple levels. 

In his comic essay, “Remembering Needleman,” from the 1981 collection Side Effects, Allen employs the conflation of seriousness and silliness/absurdity to deal with the darkest of subject matter—death.  From the outset, Allen forces disparate concepts into one cohesive thought par excellence, while presenting his comic essay as a mock eulogy of sorts.  Allen opens with the yoking together of the morbid and the juvenile: “It has been four weeks and it is still hard for me to believe Sandor Needleman is dead.  I was present at the cremation and at his son’s request, brought the marshmallows, but few of us could think of anything but our pain” (Side Effects 3).  Unless read by a completely humorless individual, this line results in an outburst of laughter.  What is the cause of this?  Once again, Freud argues in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious that all humor is based on the forced conflation of disparate ideas.  What’s at work here is not just the forced conflation of disparate ideas, but a third element—an element of humor that hints that the structure of the joke is as important as the conflation of disparate ideas.  In effect, Freud (and Beattie) hints at the main driving force behind the line by line witticisms evident in Allen, but neglects the structure.  As Elliott Oring reminds us, “To neglect […] structural elements in conceptualizing the messages of humorous expression is to risk reading into them messages that may not be there, thus increasing rather than reducing levels of ambiguity” (15).  I shall heed this warning, and further, claim that the particular structure that makes Allen’s jokes both wildly hilarious, and perhaps the main element in why we may consider Allen’s jokes as literary, is the comic non sequitur.

            Maurice Charney, in his 1995 article, “Woody Allen’s Non Sequiturs” identifies this particular logical fallacy as the basis upon which Allen constructs his witticisms.  Charney defines the non sequitur as joke thusly:

            In the study of humor, a non sequitur usually refers to a kind of joke in which the punch   line seems to have nothing to do with the narrative content of the joke proper.  In other           words, a non sequitur joke seems like a shaggy dog story.  I use ‘seems’ advisedly    because the hearer always makes some effort to connect the premises and the conclusion,     although there is usually an unbridgeable gap between the two. (339)

Analyze the structure of Allen’s humor in “The Kugelmass Episode.”  What’s at work here?  What role do comic non sequiturs play in this metafictional referential comedy?  What else is at work?

Candide Option 1

**Assignment note** Pick one of the following three options to respond to.  I'd like a relatively even split, but I won't force it this time.  As always, make sure your name's evident, 200-400 words, due by 10pm Monday, January 31st.

I was going to simply quote William F. Bottiglia, but I like the summary of Bottiglia's contention made by Roy S. Wolper (both awesome names, by the way) in a 1969 article, "Candide, Gull in the Garden?" in Eighteenth Century Studies.

P. 265:

"Too much of the recent criticism of Candide has a magisterial certainty about it.  William F. Bottiglia, whose long analysis is now considered 'fundamental and convincing,' believes that Voltaire 'ends by affirming that social productivity of any kind at any level constitutes the good life, that there are limits within which man must be satisfied to lead the good life, but that within these he has a very real chance of achieving both private contentment and public progress.'  Bottiglia insists there is 'something wrong' with those whose conclusions differ from his own."

What say you?  Agree, or is there "something wrong" with you?  (Note: That's a joke... I really don't want a bunch of responses that simply say, "Bottiglia's right!" or accuse those of differing opinion to have some mental shortcoming.  Disagree away... but convincingly!)

Candide Option 2: Electric Boogaloo

In Chapter 17, Candide travels to Eldorado, a Utopian place literally overflowing with gemstones.  However, Candide voluntarily leaves "this earthly paradise" not long after arriving.

Analyze the role of utopia (and/or dystopia) in Candide and analyze the work with respect to other utopian novels, such as Sir Thomas More's Utopia.

No more guidance is necessary here.

Candide Option 3: Tokyo Drift

From Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism, p.102:

"The Menippean satire deals less with people as such than with mental attitudes.  Pedants, bigots, cranks, parvenus, virtuosi, enthusiasts, rapacious and incompetent professional men of all kinds, are handled in terms of their occupational approach to life as distinct from their social behavior.  The Menippean satire thus resembles the confession in its ability to handle abstract ideas and theories, and differs from the novel in its characterization, which is stylized rather than naturalistic, and presents people as mouthpieces of the ideas they represent."
[...]
"A constant theme in the tradition is the ridicule of philosophus gloriosus."
[...]
"[It] relies on the free play of intellectual fancy and the kind of humorous observation that produces caricature."
[...]
"At its most concentrated, Menippean satire presents us with a vision of the world in terms of a single intellectual pattern."

Flannery O'Connor: "Good Country People"

In a 1968 article in The Sewanee Review, Ruth Vande Kieft stated, "This small but brilliant body of fiction constitutes for many readers a kind of serious and profound moral tease.  They have felt a kind of unwilling fascination, an uneasy blend of attraction to and revulsion from her fiction, which springs from uncertainty about the moral and religious vision concealed in these strangely grotesque and violent flowerings of her imagination."

Many O'Connor critics focus on her Catholocism and the "grace" her fiction evokes.  Others find this problematic.  For your blog post, keep these sentiments (and Vande Kieft's insight) in mind with respect to O'Connor's "Good Country People."

This post is only for people who enrolled late in the course and have yet to write a blog post (though this does not preclude the rest of you from reading their insights).  As always, 200-400 words (and strive to impress us with your intellect).

Due Monday by midnight.

The Role of Tragedy in Kafka

Blog Post #2

Group 2 (Jahnke-White)

Due 1/19 by 10pm.

Most of you should be familiar with the old comedic adage that comedy equals tragedy plus time.  Though this applies largely to satirical barbs borne out of tragic events or semi-autobiographical comic treatments of personal events that certainly weren’t funny at the time (and thus, not these stories, per se), the relationship between comedy and tragedy is so strong that they could be described as two sides of the same coin.  As group one focused on the complex role comedy plays in Kafka, I’d like group two to center their posts on the tragic, traumatic, and elegiac elements in the two stories, and how Kafka treats and presents such elements.

For literary critics such as Cathy Caruth, literature negotiates "the complex relation between knowing and not knowing."  Perhaps it is this knowing/not knowing dichotomy which is compressed so eerily in Kafka, producing the profound uncanny effect seen in his short fiction.  Combine this with the elegiac yearning for the past evident in both the Penal Colony’s Lieutenant and the protagonist in “A Hunger Artist,” and both are decidedly tragic tales, though perhaps not in the traditional sense. 

Examine the role of tragedy and/or elegy within the two Kafka short stories assigned.  Feel free to analyze Caruth’s insight in your posts, as well (note I’m not expecting you to know anything she’s said beyond the simple phrase quoted in the paragraph above).

The Role of Humor in Kafka

Blog Post #1

Group 1 (Arnold-Hudson)

Due 1/19 by 10pm.

Prompt:

In David Foster Wallace’s 1999 essay “Some Remarks on Kafka’s Funniness From Which Probably Not Enough Has Been Removed,” Wallace asserts:

[…]great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common.  Both depend on what communications theorists sometimes call exformation, which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.  This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve.  It’s not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as “a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.”  Nor is it an accident that the technical achievement of great short stories is often called compression—for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader.  What Kafka seems able to do better than just about anyone else is orchestrate the pressure’s increase in such a way that it becomes intolerable at the precise instant it is released (61).

With this in mind, analyze the role humor plays in “In the Penal Colony” and “The Hunger Artist.”  Granted, this is a difficult task I’ve set in front of you, but it should be rewarding.  As Wallace reminds us further, the difficulty of understanding comedy and Kafka might just be that:

[…] the particular kind of funniness Kafka deploys is deeply alien to students whose neural resonances are American.  The fact is that Kafka’s humor has almost none of the particular forms and codes of contemporary US amusement.  There’s no recursive wordplay or verbal stunt-pilotry, little in the way of wisecracks or mordant lampoon.  There is no body-function humor in Kafka, nor sexual entendre, nor stylized attempts to rebel by offending convention […] There are none of the ba-bing-ba-bang reversals of modern sitcoms; nor are there precocious children or profane grandparents or cynically insurgent coworkers.  Perhaps most alien of all, Kafka’s authority figures are never just hollow buffoons to be ridiculed, but are always absurd and scary and sad all at once (62-3).

By the end of this course, you’ll be able to comment quite intelligently on the relation between jokes and short stories on a larger scale, but let’s keep these posts to Kafka.  Oh, and for those of you thinking, “These stories were funny?!” humor is but one aspect of Kafka’s writing, and one that doesn’t get enough attention if you ask me.  We’ll discuss many other aspects of these stories in class.