Clockwork Orange 几年前试尝读过，读不下去，觉得太难了，好多字都看不懂。
租了电影来看，觉得电影的视觉艺术很棒，配乐也好。
今年年初把书又拿出来读了，终于读完了。才知道我不认识的字都是作者 Anthony Burgess 自己发明的，要根据语法和上下文来猜测。但因为很多是俄文的字根，我自然看得很困难。从网上找到一个“字典”，才看懂了。觉得作者真是天才。
然后又看了电影。Kubrick 当然是天才，视觉艺术的天才。
发现书和电影所要表达的东西非常不同。
故事大致是这样的（书和电影略有不同）。第一部：一个在生活在未来英国社会的青少年 Alex，有严重暴力倾向。他和朋友每天晚上出门，打砸抢奸，无恶不作。后来遭同伙出卖，在一次作案中被警察抓住，送进监狱。第二部：为了早日出狱，他要求接受 aversion therapy。几天之后，他“治愈”了，变得完全不能忍受任何暴力。第三部：出狱之后，他遭受同伙的报复，家人的抛弃，以前受害者的欺负，却因失去自卫能力，想自杀都不行。最后政府为了搞宣传，又把他治回原状。他又开始暴力的生活了。
可是，书比电影多出一章。这第21章使得两部作品的寓意有很大差异。
书的结尾是这样的：Alex 回到暴力的生活后，又过了一段时间，忽然感到暴力很无聊，意识到“that human energy is better expended on creation than destruction. Senseless violence is a prerogative of youth, which has much energy but little talent for the constructive.” 他就结束暴力生涯，结婚，生子，"and perhaps even create something... "做了一个正常的社会公民。
电影虽然是在英国拍的，Kubrick 却选择用了美国小说的版本，没有最后一章的内容。
我读书和看电影，最大的收获是读了作者 Burgess 写的前言，主要是关于最后一章的。据 Burgess 说，他的书在美国发表的时候，出版社让他把最后一章删掉：
My New York publisher believed that my 21st chapter was a sellout. It was veddy veddy British, don't you know. It was bland and it showed a Pelagian unwillingness to accept that a human being could be a model of unregenerable evil. The Americans, he said in effect, were tougher than British and could face up to reality. Soon they would be facing up to it in Vietnam. My book was Kennedyan and accepted the notion of moral progress. What was really wanted was a Nixonian book with no shred of optimism in it. Let us have evil prancing on the page and, up to the very last line, sneering in the face of all the inherited beliefs, Jewish, Christian, Muslim and Holy Roller, about people being able to make themselves better. Such a book would be sensational, and so it is. But I do not think it is a fair picture of a human life.
I do not think so because, by definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange--meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good, in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities....
印象最深的是作者的这段话：
The 21st chapter gives the novel the quality of genuine fiction, an art founded on the principle that human beings change. There is, in fact, not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral transformation, or an increase in wisdom, operating in your chief character or characters. Even trashy bestsellers show people changing. When a fictional work fails to show change, when it merely indicates that human characters is se, stony, unregenerable, then you are out of the field of the novel and into that of the fable or the allegory. The American or Kubrickian Orange is a fable; the British or world one is a novel.
最好笑的是，因为电影比书更出名，在作者把第21章加上后，很多读者／观众都来信询问。作者说，他的后半生大部分时间就是在 Xeroxing statements of intention and the frustration of intention，给读者回信，解释为什么书比电影多出一章来--while both Kubrick and my New York publisher coolly bask in the rewards of their misdemeanour. :)
Sunday, November 1, 2009
Wednesday, August 26, 2009
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Book: The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay
Quote:
In this world are very few things made from logic alone. It is illogical for a an to be too logical. Some things we must just let stand. The mystery is more important than any possible explanation. The searcher after truth must search with humanity. Ruthless logic is the sign of a limited mind. The truth can only add to the sum of what you know, while a harmless mystery left unexplored often adds to the meaning of life. When a truth is not so important, it is better left as a mystery. p.263
In this world are very few things made from logic alone. It is illogical for a an to be too logical. Some things we must just let stand. The mystery is more important than any possible explanation. The searcher after truth must search with humanity. Ruthless logic is the sign of a limited mind. The truth can only add to the sum of what you know, while a harmless mystery left unexplored often adds to the meaning of life. When a truth is not so important, it is better left as a mystery. p.263
Saturday, November 15, 2008
rate my life quiz, not bad
| This Is My Life, Rated | |
| Life: |  7.3 |
| Mind: |  8.3 |
| Body: |  8 |
| Spirit: |  6 |
| Friends/Family: |  5.1 |
| Love: | 7.3 |
| Finance: | 6 |
| Take the Rate My Life Quiz | |
We thought it might be interesting to let quiz-takers compare their scores to the averages we generate. So here are your scores compared to the average results from your age group and gender. This average is generated from 55,876 quiz scores.
Life:
You: 7.3
Average: 6.3
Mind:
You: 8.3
Average: 6.2
Body:
You: 8
Average: 6.4
Spirit:
You: 6
Average: 6.5
Friends/Family:
You: 5.1
Average: 5.2
Love:
You: 7.3
Average: 5.5
Finance:
You: 6
Average: 6.5
=======
not bad....
Thursday, November 6, 2008
Movie/Book: Into the Wild
5/24/08
昨晚看了电影 Into the Wild，才知道这个人，这家人的事。一边看，一边想，我们能从这个故事学到什么。这个孩子是不是教育失败？
首先，他完全没有按照父母的意愿生活，逃离家庭，不承认父母，心中没有一点对父母的感激。按草叶的准则，他是一个失败的人生。
可是，他独立自主，自力更生，虽身无分文，却过了两年快乐的流浪生活。用浮生和风子的准则，他快乐，喜欢自己选择的生活，是一个成功的人生。
他虽然没有给社会创造很多财富，却给遇到的人带来快乐。他给父母家人带来的是痛苦和悔恨，他的故事给我们外人带来思考和启发。从社会的角度来看，他的人生是有价值的。
最后，他不能按照他的意愿生存下去。他临死前意识到，happiness only real when shared，死之前想念家人，说明他自己选择的道路是不成功的，而且他也意识到了。那么，人生中短暂的快乐，不能决定人生的成功，可是，要多久的快乐才能算成功？十年二十年三十年？后半生？是不是在死的时候，才能对整个人生的成败下定论？再有，谁来下定论？作父母的，是要把子女培养成父母认为是成功的，还是子女自己认为是成功的，或是社会认为是成功的，才算成功？
这个问题越讨论越艰难。
另外，按七月所说，给孩子空间，如果孩子不需要父母，没有信号，父母就不要去打扰他，让孩子自然成长？可是，谁决定孩子需不需要父母？也许孩子的超级独立，是一种对父母需要的表现？电影中的男孩，如果父母能读到他给的信号，能创造一个交流的渠道，是否可以避免悲剧？
当然，电影 version中，最后这个男孩能得到大智慧，父母因为挫折而改变了自己的人生态度，在高一层次上，是否算是一种成功？不论道路多么艰辛曲折，在最后能够醒悟，能够与世界和解，能够认命，make peace with the world，一生也算可以算是完满的。
想到最后，还是觉得，人生道路有各种各样的，没有什么成功和失败，只有不同。每个人只能为了自己最终的内心安详而生活，只能为自己的幸福负责。自己喜欢怎么做，就怎么做吧。最终的心态是最重要的。子女的人生是他们的， 他们也要自己找到健康的心态。做父母的，给子女的影响最大，所以首先要调整好自己的心态，以身作则，能帮就多帮一些。心要大，要开。智慧是快乐成功的唯一要素。
我每次想问题，想到最后，得到的都是一样的结论。怎么回事？:)
11/6/08
昨天我看了这本书。我觉得书比电影好。电影只是讲 Chris McCandless 的 misadventure，但书里写了不少其他人对 Alaska wilderness 的向往和追求，尤其作者年轻时有过类似的 Alaska 冒险的经历，读起来觉得很真切。
我也有 Alaska 情结。在美国读大学的时候，同学跟我说，要想赚钱，就趁暑假去 Alaska 打鱼，男生打鱼，女生在 cannery 工作，一个夏天可以挣五六千块钱呢。因为夏天日子长，每天要工作 10-12 个小时，但剩下时间都是自由的。我就特别向往，向往那种别样的生活。可惜大学我只过了一个暑假，上了好多课，没机会去。研究生的时候，我约了女友一起开车去 Alaska 玩一个月。临走那天她才说不想去了。后来我就更向往了，特别想开车去逛 3 个月。我不想坐 cruise，也许要等孩子长大一些，才能圆了我的阿拉斯加梦，但肯定跟年轻时的那种去冒险的感觉又不一样了。
因为是真事，是报告文学，所以才更令人感慨，感慨生命在青春时的脆弱。
昨晚看了电影 Into the Wild，才知道这个人，这家人的事。一边看，一边想，我们能从这个故事学到什么。这个孩子是不是教育失败？
首先，他完全没有按照父母的意愿生活，逃离家庭，不承认父母，心中没有一点对父母的感激。按草叶的准则，他是一个失败的人生。
可是，他独立自主，自力更生，虽身无分文，却过了两年快乐的流浪生活。用浮生和风子的准则，他快乐，喜欢自己选择的生活，是一个成功的人生。
他虽然没有给社会创造很多财富，却给遇到的人带来快乐。他给父母家人带来的是痛苦和悔恨，他的故事给我们外人带来思考和启发。从社会的角度来看，他的人生是有价值的。
最后，他不能按照他的意愿生存下去。他临死前意识到，happiness only real when shared，死之前想念家人，说明他自己选择的道路是不成功的，而且他也意识到了。那么，人生中短暂的快乐，不能决定人生的成功，可是，要多久的快乐才能算成功？十年二十年三十年？后半生？是不是在死的时候，才能对整个人生的成败下定论？再有，谁来下定论？作父母的，是要把子女培养成父母认为是成功的，还是子女自己认为是成功的，或是社会认为是成功的，才算成功？
这个问题越讨论越艰难。
另外，按七月所说，给孩子空间，如果孩子不需要父母，没有信号，父母就不要去打扰他，让孩子自然成长？可是，谁决定孩子需不需要父母？也许孩子的超级独立，是一种对父母需要的表现？电影中的男孩，如果父母能读到他给的信号，能创造一个交流的渠道，是否可以避免悲剧？
当然，电影 version中，最后这个男孩能得到大智慧，父母因为挫折而改变了自己的人生态度，在高一层次上，是否算是一种成功？不论道路多么艰辛曲折，在最后能够醒悟，能够与世界和解，能够认命，make peace with the world，一生也算可以算是完满的。
想到最后，还是觉得，人生道路有各种各样的，没有什么成功和失败，只有不同。每个人只能为了自己最终的内心安详而生活，只能为自己的幸福负责。自己喜欢怎么做，就怎么做吧。最终的心态是最重要的。子女的人生是他们的， 他们也要自己找到健康的心态。做父母的，给子女的影响最大，所以首先要调整好自己的心态，以身作则，能帮就多帮一些。心要大，要开。智慧是快乐成功的唯一要素。
我每次想问题，想到最后，得到的都是一样的结论。怎么回事？:)
11/6/08
昨天我看了这本书。我觉得书比电影好。电影只是讲 Chris McCandless 的 misadventure，但书里写了不少其他人对 Alaska wilderness 的向往和追求，尤其作者年轻时有过类似的 Alaska 冒险的经历，读起来觉得很真切。
我也有 Alaska 情结。在美国读大学的时候，同学跟我说，要想赚钱，就趁暑假去 Alaska 打鱼，男生打鱼，女生在 cannery 工作，一个夏天可以挣五六千块钱呢。因为夏天日子长，每天要工作 10-12 个小时，但剩下时间都是自由的。我就特别向往，向往那种别样的生活。可惜大学我只过了一个暑假，上了好多课，没机会去。研究生的时候，我约了女友一起开车去 Alaska 玩一个月。临走那天她才说不想去了。后来我就更向往了，特别想开车去逛 3 个月。我不想坐 cruise，也许要等孩子长大一些，才能圆了我的阿拉斯加梦，但肯定跟年轻时的那种去冒险的感觉又不一样了。
因为是真事，是报告文学，所以才更令人感慨，感慨生命在青春时的脆弱。
Book: The Brethren by John Grisham
前两天刚读了 The Brethren by John Grisham，小说的一个重要的 subplot 是讲美国总统选举的。书里说，谁的钱多，谁就能赢。读后，我对大选的激情更加淡薄。归根结底还是钱的问题。
CIA director wants to increase military budget, so he picks an unknown Arizona congressman to be a presidential candidate after NH primary, promises to provide unlimited campaign funding. He "creates" terrorist crisis to scare the people, and soon everyone turns to the new candidate. The money comes from defense companies, including "private" companies that nobody knows. The money is used for advertisement, for buying off politicians (to pay off their campaign debts), and such. Throughout the book, the CIA director keeps saying that the one who has more campaign money always wins. The writer John Grisham has worked in a presidential campaign before, so I assume he knows some inside stories.
CIA director wants to increase military budget, so he picks an unknown Arizona congressman to be a presidential candidate after NH primary, promises to provide unlimited campaign funding. He "creates" terrorist crisis to scare the people, and soon everyone turns to the new candidate. The money comes from defense companies, including "private" companies that nobody knows. The money is used for advertisement, for buying off politicians (to pay off their campaign debts), and such. Throughout the book, the CIA director keeps saying that the one who has more campaign money always wins. The writer John Grisham has worked in a presidential campaign before, so I assume he knows some inside stories.
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
TTC: 20th Century American Fiction
20th-Century American Fiction
(32 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)
by Arnold Weinstein
Hemingway. Fitzgerald. Faulkner. No first names are needed.
These giants of literature are immediately recognizable to anyone who loves to read fiction and even to many who don’t.
Now, thanks to this course from Brown University’s Professor Arnold Weinstein, you can develop fresh insight into these and eight other great American authors of the 20th century. Professor Weinstein sheds light not only on the sheer magnificence of these writers’ literary achievements but explores their uniquely American character as well. Despite their remarkable variety, each represents an outlook and a body of work that could only have emerged in the United States.
Freedom and Speech
The aim of this course is to analyze and appreciate some of the major works of fiction produced in this country over the past century, using as a focal point the idea of "freedom of speech." The focus on freedom of speech is appropriate for many reasons, particularly:
These texts often invoke the fundamental political freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, and many of them take the liberty of articulating the painful ideological conflicts that have punctuated our modern history: war, racism, poverty, drugs, sexism, and the like.
"Freedom of speech" also spells out the key thesis to be presented in these readings: Language itself turns out to be not only "free" but a precious means of becoming free, of experiencing life beyond the constraints of the ordinary workaday world.
The overriding theme in American literature, as in American life, is that of freedom itself, whether expressed in a laissez-faire economy, in upward mobility, or simply in our belief that we can make ourselves and our lives into something beyond the origins and influences of our births, a theme sometimes called the American dream. No other society has ever professed such beliefs, and it is not surprising that our literature has much to tell us about the viability of these notions.
Our Ongoing War for Independence
Why would literature be a privileged record for this special American story about freedom? The answer: American fiction is something of a battleground in the "war of independence" that human beings—white or black or red or yellow, male or female—wage every day of their lives.
Our war consists of achieving a self, making or maintaining an identity, making our particular mark in the world we inhabit. This is a battle because the 20th century American scene is not particularly hospitable to self-making: great forces coerce our lives, forces that are at once economic, biological, political, racial, and ideological.
We are dogged by not only death and taxes but by the influence of family, of business, of society, of all those potent vectors that constitute the real map and landscape of our lives. This vexed and conflicted terrain does not resemble the smooth résumés that are our shorthand for what we have done, but it does correspond to our experiential awareness of what we go through, how we have changed from childhood to adulthood, what our work and friendships and marriages have been and what they have meant to us. Literature enables us to recover this territory—our territory. The texts presented in this course constitute an enlarged repertory of human resources, of the battle for freedom.
The Heroic Self in a Humbling Land
We begin by looking at the great texts and movements of the 19th century, especially our belief in heroic selfhood, and we begin to see and chart the kinds of forces that make up the moving stage we occupy.
Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio is among the most poignant descriptions of life at the beginning of the century, but the charm of this small-town narrative acquires a deeper hue when we see the amount of repression and inner violence that Anderson chronicles.
Hemingway’s In Our Time and Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night are both, in their own ways, about American loss of innocence; about how the Great War and the brutality of modern life permanently altered our belief systems. This theme is presented as physical trauma in Hemingway and as madness and decay in Fitzgerald.
Faulkner’s Light in August depicts the ravages of racism in the American South, but it seeks, magnificently, to pair its overt story of carnage and neurosis with another, more elusive fable of love, kinship, and redemption.
We turn to Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God for the first—and perhaps the best—account of growing up black and female in America, a story that is expressed in a kind of language and diction that moves breathlessly from the vernacular to the legendary.
Flannery O’Connor’s stories bring a different agenda to our course: the challenge of perceiving the contours of God, spirit, and grace in a seemingly materialist Southern landscape peopled with the lowest profile folks in American literature.
Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, once censored and then seen as merely a raunchy drug epic, will be studied as a dazzling and disturbing account of the body in culture, a body that is horribly open and defenseless against the takeovers that beset it.
War returns to our course in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, at once poignant and wacky, speaking to us of mass destruction and of extraterrestrials in the same voice, a voice that is hard to forget.
The course will close with a series of lectures on three of the most significant contemporary writers—writers whose works may not yet be familiar to you.
In his sprawling and audacious Public Burning, Robert Coover uses that most popular American code, entertainment, to present a manic account of the Rosenberg execution and the antics of one Richard Nixon.
Toni Morrison’s fascinating Sula is an experimental novel in which Morrison fashions a group of characters whose lives and values make rubble out of the conventions of humanistic culture, whether black or white.
Finally, Don DeLillo’s appealing, absurdist comedy of modern life, White Noise, depicts our encounter with the technological madhouse in which we live but which we have not quite gotten around to seeing.
Lifelines
These American fictions, seen together, tell a composite story about coping, about fashioning both a story and a life. The range of experiences and subcultures to be found here will dwarf the experience of any single reader, and that is how it should be. Much is dark in these stories, but the honesty and integrity of these writers adds pith and richness to our own lives and makes us realize that reading is as much a lifeline as it is entertainment or education.
Course Lecture Titles
1. American Fiction and the Individualist Creed
2. The American Self—Ghost in Disguise
3. What Produces "Nobody"?
4. Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio—Writing as the Talking Cure
5. Winesburg—A New American Prose-Poetry
6. Hemingway—Journalist, Writer, Legend
7. Hemingway as Trauma Artist
8. Hemingway's Cunning Art
9. F. Scott Fitzgerald—Tender Is the Night—Fitzgerald's Second Act
10. Fitzgerald's Psychiatric Tale
11. Dick's Dying Fall—An American Story
12. Light in August—Midpoint of the Faulkner Career
13. Light in August—Determinism vs. Freedom
14. Light in August—Novel as Poem, or, Beyond Holocaust
15. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God—Canon Explosion
16. Their Eyes Were Watching God—From Romance to Myth
17. Flannery O'Connor—Realist of Distances
18. O'Connor—Taking the Measure of the Region
19. Williams Burroughs—Bad Boy of American Literature
20. Naked Lunch—The Body in Culture
21. Naked Lunch—Power and Exchange in the Viral World
22. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five—Apocalypse Now
23. Vonnegut's World—Tralfamadore or Trauma?
24. Robert Coover—Postmodern Fabulator
25. The Public Burning—Execution at Times Square
26. Robert Coover—Fiction as Fission
27. Toni Morrison's Sula—From Trauma to Freedom
28. Sula—New Black Woman
29. Don DeLillo—Decoder of American Frequencies
30. White Noise—Representing the Environment
31. DeLillo and American Dread
32. Conclusion—Nobody's Home
(32 lectures, 30 minutes/lecture)
by Arnold Weinstein
Hemingway. Fitzgerald. Faulkner. No first names are needed.
These giants of literature are immediately recognizable to anyone who loves to read fiction and even to many who don’t.
Now, thanks to this course from Brown University’s Professor Arnold Weinstein, you can develop fresh insight into these and eight other great American authors of the 20th century. Professor Weinstein sheds light not only on the sheer magnificence of these writers’ literary achievements but explores their uniquely American character as well. Despite their remarkable variety, each represents an outlook and a body of work that could only have emerged in the United States.
Freedom and Speech
The aim of this course is to analyze and appreciate some of the major works of fiction produced in this country over the past century, using as a focal point the idea of "freedom of speech." The focus on freedom of speech is appropriate for many reasons, particularly:
These texts often invoke the fundamental political freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, and many of them take the liberty of articulating the painful ideological conflicts that have punctuated our modern history: war, racism, poverty, drugs, sexism, and the like.
"Freedom of speech" also spells out the key thesis to be presented in these readings: Language itself turns out to be not only "free" but a precious means of becoming free, of experiencing life beyond the constraints of the ordinary workaday world.
The overriding theme in American literature, as in American life, is that of freedom itself, whether expressed in a laissez-faire economy, in upward mobility, or simply in our belief that we can make ourselves and our lives into something beyond the origins and influences of our births, a theme sometimes called the American dream. No other society has ever professed such beliefs, and it is not surprising that our literature has much to tell us about the viability of these notions.
Our Ongoing War for Independence
Why would literature be a privileged record for this special American story about freedom? The answer: American fiction is something of a battleground in the "war of independence" that human beings—white or black or red or yellow, male or female—wage every day of their lives.
Our war consists of achieving a self, making or maintaining an identity, making our particular mark in the world we inhabit. This is a battle because the 20th century American scene is not particularly hospitable to self-making: great forces coerce our lives, forces that are at once economic, biological, political, racial, and ideological.
We are dogged by not only death and taxes but by the influence of family, of business, of society, of all those potent vectors that constitute the real map and landscape of our lives. This vexed and conflicted terrain does not resemble the smooth résumés that are our shorthand for what we have done, but it does correspond to our experiential awareness of what we go through, how we have changed from childhood to adulthood, what our work and friendships and marriages have been and what they have meant to us. Literature enables us to recover this territory—our territory. The texts presented in this course constitute an enlarged repertory of human resources, of the battle for freedom.
The Heroic Self in a Humbling Land
We begin by looking at the great texts and movements of the 19th century, especially our belief in heroic selfhood, and we begin to see and chart the kinds of forces that make up the moving stage we occupy.
Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio is among the most poignant descriptions of life at the beginning of the century, but the charm of this small-town narrative acquires a deeper hue when we see the amount of repression and inner violence that Anderson chronicles.
Hemingway’s In Our Time and Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night are both, in their own ways, about American loss of innocence; about how the Great War and the brutality of modern life permanently altered our belief systems. This theme is presented as physical trauma in Hemingway and as madness and decay in Fitzgerald.
Faulkner’s Light in August depicts the ravages of racism in the American South, but it seeks, magnificently, to pair its overt story of carnage and neurosis with another, more elusive fable of love, kinship, and redemption.
We turn to Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God for the first—and perhaps the best—account of growing up black and female in America, a story that is expressed in a kind of language and diction that moves breathlessly from the vernacular to the legendary.
Flannery O’Connor’s stories bring a different agenda to our course: the challenge of perceiving the contours of God, spirit, and grace in a seemingly materialist Southern landscape peopled with the lowest profile folks in American literature.
Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, once censored and then seen as merely a raunchy drug epic, will be studied as a dazzling and disturbing account of the body in culture, a body that is horribly open and defenseless against the takeovers that beset it.
War returns to our course in Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five, at once poignant and wacky, speaking to us of mass destruction and of extraterrestrials in the same voice, a voice that is hard to forget.
The course will close with a series of lectures on three of the most significant contemporary writers—writers whose works may not yet be familiar to you.
In his sprawling and audacious Public Burning, Robert Coover uses that most popular American code, entertainment, to present a manic account of the Rosenberg execution and the antics of one Richard Nixon.
Toni Morrison’s fascinating Sula is an experimental novel in which Morrison fashions a group of characters whose lives and values make rubble out of the conventions of humanistic culture, whether black or white.
Finally, Don DeLillo’s appealing, absurdist comedy of modern life, White Noise, depicts our encounter with the technological madhouse in which we live but which we have not quite gotten around to seeing.
Lifelines
These American fictions, seen together, tell a composite story about coping, about fashioning both a story and a life. The range of experiences and subcultures to be found here will dwarf the experience of any single reader, and that is how it should be. Much is dark in these stories, but the honesty and integrity of these writers adds pith and richness to our own lives and makes us realize that reading is as much a lifeline as it is entertainment or education.
Course Lecture Titles
1. American Fiction and the Individualist Creed
2. The American Self—Ghost in Disguise
3. What Produces "Nobody"?
4. Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio—Writing as the Talking Cure
5. Winesburg—A New American Prose-Poetry
6. Hemingway—Journalist, Writer, Legend
7. Hemingway as Trauma Artist
8. Hemingway's Cunning Art
9. F. Scott Fitzgerald—Tender Is the Night—Fitzgerald's Second Act
10. Fitzgerald's Psychiatric Tale
11. Dick's Dying Fall—An American Story
12. Light in August—Midpoint of the Faulkner Career
13. Light in August—Determinism vs. Freedom
14. Light in August—Novel as Poem, or, Beyond Holocaust
15. Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God—Canon Explosion
16. Their Eyes Were Watching God—From Romance to Myth
17. Flannery O'Connor—Realist of Distances
18. O'Connor—Taking the Measure of the Region
19. Williams Burroughs—Bad Boy of American Literature
20. Naked Lunch—The Body in Culture
21. Naked Lunch—Power and Exchange in the Viral World
22. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five—Apocalypse Now
23. Vonnegut's World—Tralfamadore or Trauma?
24. Robert Coover—Postmodern Fabulator
25. The Public Burning—Execution at Times Square
26. Robert Coover—Fiction as Fission
27. Toni Morrison's Sula—From Trauma to Freedom
28. Sula—New Black Woman
29. Don DeLillo—Decoder of American Frequencies
30. White Noise—Representing the Environment
31. DeLillo and American Dread
32. Conclusion—Nobody's Home
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
