Friday, February 10, 2006
Whatever happened to Zoe?
Lately I've been negligent in posting my fatherly musings. These are still happening, but it's more difficult to write about those kind of things than it is things I'm more used to writing about. Also, this stuff is just the kind of stuff that's been on my mind lately in a writerly way. I'm devoted to my daughter Zoe, but I don't know if I want to share how this manifests itself in my daily life. I'll endeavor to think along these lines more in the future.
Three types of novels
I just found out that this summer I'm teaching literature again after about a five year hiatus, during which I've been teaching composition. I'm thrilled about the chance. Teaching composition is OK, but it's not my true passion in life. I suppose it was because of this that for about a year I used a textbook titled Literature For Composition in my classes, until the department decided to stop allowing the book as a textbook choice. Oh, bother.
The class I'm teaching is going to be an introduction to fiction class. The primary textbook will be a collection of short stories, but I also want to try to squeeze in a novel or two as well. This is difficult as it's only an eight week course.
In trying to decide which novels to choose, I've been torn between different types of novel. It seems to me there are three main types of novel.
1. The Classic. This is often what one thinks of as a classic, realist novel from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such authors as Defoe, Fielding, Austen, Scott, Dickens, James, Flaubert, Eliot, Tolstoy, Conrad, Chekhov, and Hemingway would be in this category. This is a good category to include because it gives students a good conception of what a "novel" in an academic context really means. These novels are not terribly interesting from a formal point of view, but they provide a solid basis in good, memorable characters. They are realistic novels.
2. The Lyric. Alongside the standard tradition of the realist novel as conventionally understood is a whole other type. Authors like Sterne, Shelley, Emily Bronte, Melville, Dostoevsky, Chopin, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner seem less interested in the standard novel. Instead, they try to initiate something else in their work. These novelists try to tap into the deep underlying passions of their characters. They tend to be more introspective, less interested in evoking a realistic picture of the known world.
3. The Experimental. Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is my paradigmatic idea of a lyrical novel. His later works Ulysses and especially Finnegans Wake, though, seem to go off in a different direction altogether. Most tweentieth century novelists are working either at the limits of realism or push beyond this limit to try to narrate the unnarratable. This experimentation often happens in the realm of language. Lyrical novelists are often the ones to go in an experimental direction because they are trying to capture a new conception of the world after the breakdown of the dominant paradigm of a European, white, male, middleclass worldview. Threads of experimentations go back to writers such as Sterne and Diderot, but this type of writing is most pronounced in modern masters such as Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Kafka, and Proust. It also surfaces in those known as "postmodern" novelists, such as Beckett, Garcia Marquez, Rushdie, and DeLillo.
This distinction is not a clear-cut one. The latter work by Henry James, for example, could be said to encompass all three categories. It's just a way of understanding three different tendencies in novels.
Ideally I'd like to include all three in my classes, but time restricts what one can include. This summer I think I'm going to use a classical realist novel, Austen's Pride and Prejudice, paired with the experimental Jacques the Fatalist and His Master by Diderot. In the past I've overlooked the classic realist novel as my own personal taste extends more to categories two and three, but I think I'm coming to realize this does my students a disfavor as they don't understand what it is the lyrical and experimental type novels are calling into question through their techniques. So this is why I think I'm going to include Austen this time. The last time I taught this class I used Wuthering Heights and DeLillo's White Noise.
Here's a list of novels that I could imagine using in a introduction to fiction type class under the different categories.
1. Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Emma
Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Flaubert, Madame Bovary
James, Portrait of a Lady
Conrad, Nostromo
2. Sterne, Sentimental Journey
Shelley, Frankenstein
Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Chopin, The Awakening
Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Lawrence, Women in Love
3. Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
DeLillo, White Noise
Rushdie, Midnight's Children
The class I'm teaching is going to be an introduction to fiction class. The primary textbook will be a collection of short stories, but I also want to try to squeeze in a novel or two as well. This is difficult as it's only an eight week course.
In trying to decide which novels to choose, I've been torn between different types of novel. It seems to me there are three main types of novel.
1. The Classic. This is often what one thinks of as a classic, realist novel from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Such authors as Defoe, Fielding, Austen, Scott, Dickens, James, Flaubert, Eliot, Tolstoy, Conrad, Chekhov, and Hemingway would be in this category. This is a good category to include because it gives students a good conception of what a "novel" in an academic context really means. These novels are not terribly interesting from a formal point of view, but they provide a solid basis in good, memorable characters. They are realistic novels.
2. The Lyric. Alongside the standard tradition of the realist novel as conventionally understood is a whole other type. Authors like Sterne, Shelley, Emily Bronte, Melville, Dostoevsky, Chopin, Proust, Lawrence, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner seem less interested in the standard novel. Instead, they try to initiate something else in their work. These novelists try to tap into the deep underlying passions of their characters. They tend to be more introspective, less interested in evoking a realistic picture of the known world.
3. The Experimental. Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is my paradigmatic idea of a lyrical novel. His later works Ulysses and especially Finnegans Wake, though, seem to go off in a different direction altogether. Most tweentieth century novelists are working either at the limits of realism or push beyond this limit to try to narrate the unnarratable. This experimentation often happens in the realm of language. Lyrical novelists are often the ones to go in an experimental direction because they are trying to capture a new conception of the world after the breakdown of the dominant paradigm of a European, white, male, middleclass worldview. Threads of experimentations go back to writers such as Sterne and Diderot, but this type of writing is most pronounced in modern masters such as Joyce, Woolf, Faulkner, and Kafka, and Proust. It also surfaces in those known as "postmodern" novelists, such as Beckett, Garcia Marquez, Rushdie, and DeLillo.
This distinction is not a clear-cut one. The latter work by Henry James, for example, could be said to encompass all three categories. It's just a way of understanding three different tendencies in novels.
Ideally I'd like to include all three in my classes, but time restricts what one can include. This summer I think I'm going to use a classical realist novel, Austen's Pride and Prejudice, paired with the experimental Jacques the Fatalist and His Master by Diderot. In the past I've overlooked the classic realist novel as my own personal taste extends more to categories two and three, but I think I'm coming to realize this does my students a disfavor as they don't understand what it is the lyrical and experimental type novels are calling into question through their techniques. So this is why I think I'm going to include Austen this time. The last time I taught this class I used Wuthering Heights and DeLillo's White Noise.
Here's a list of novels that I could imagine using in a introduction to fiction type class under the different categories.
1. Austen, Pride and Prejudice; Emma
Eliot, The Mill on the Floss
Flaubert, Madame Bovary
James, Portrait of a Lady
Conrad, Nostromo
2. Sterne, Sentimental Journey
Shelley, Frankenstein
Bronte, Wuthering Heights
Chopin, The Awakening
Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Lawrence, Women in Love
3. Diderot, Jacques the Fatalist and His Master
DeLillo, White Noise
Rushdie, Midnight's Children
Sunday, February 05, 2006
Research and Writing Projects
These are three writing projects I envision as of this morning. (It always seems to be in flux and nothing ever gets done.)
1. An essay offering a comparative analysis of two Romantic poetics or "poetologies": Holderlin and Shelley. All these ideas are vague. But there's something about these two that seemed linked to me. For one, I like both poets. (And I don't like most poetry!) There's something about the two of them that seem very contemporary in a proto-deconstructive way. Shelley worked out his conception of poetry in A Defense of Poetry as well as other prose works and in the poems, too. Prometheus Unbound seems especially exemplary in this way. Holderlin has a number of fascinating, though nearly impossible to read fragmentary essays and letters collected by Thomas Pfau in a collection I enjoy looking at. Holderlin also works out his ideas of poetry in his mature odes. Critical accounts of the two poets seem important somehow, too. For Holderlin, there's appraisals from Heidegger, Adorno, and Benjamin. Trying to get the Heidegger and the Adorno ideas together is an interesting challenge. For Shelley, one of my favorite critical books is Jerold Hogle's Shelley's Process, not to mention various essays written by my dissertation advisor Forest Pyle. Derrida's "Living On: Borderlines" is a prennial favorite.
2. Some kind of "pure" theory book on four writers from the twentieth century, which are exemplary in their regard to come up with an unsystematic system of inquiry. A method that questions methodology on its way to resisting a Hegelian-inspired notion of Totality. The four writers are Wittgenstein, Adorno, Derrida, and Deleuze. I've been reading lots about these guys lately, and I wish I could find a way to bring them altogether, regardless of their complex individuality and irreducible differences from each other. Been enjoying a collection of essays,
Between Deleuze and Derrida, which does good work on the two, but get frustrated by how much of what they say seems to connect with the Benjamin/Adorno wing of continental philosophy, too, but not knowing how to put it all together.
3. An underground, alternative, "minor" history of the novel that deals with the understanding of temporality, a time out of joint, which questions the conventional understandings of these topics. Rather than Leavis's "great tradition" of Austen, James, Eliot, and Lawrence, my collection of books include Behn's Oroonoko, Diderot's Jacques le fataliste et son maitre, Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Melville's Pierre, Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, and DeLillo's Underworld. All of these novels seem to be rethinking the eventhood of the pure event. Narratives try to relate a series of events, but the radicality of the event itself resists this process of domestication. (I like the symmetry of English-French-English and American-French-American.) A theoretical introduction would fuse interesting perspectives on time as developed by Benjamin, Derrida, and Deleuze. This is basically a re-working and expansion of my dissertation.
Hmmm . . . How will all this work get done? Arrgghhh!
1. An essay offering a comparative analysis of two Romantic poetics or "poetologies": Holderlin and Shelley. All these ideas are vague. But there's something about these two that seemed linked to me. For one, I like both poets. (And I don't like most poetry!) There's something about the two of them that seem very contemporary in a proto-deconstructive way. Shelley worked out his conception of poetry in A Defense of Poetry as well as other prose works and in the poems, too. Prometheus Unbound seems especially exemplary in this way. Holderlin has a number of fascinating, though nearly impossible to read fragmentary essays and letters collected by Thomas Pfau in a collection I enjoy looking at. Holderlin also works out his ideas of poetry in his mature odes. Critical accounts of the two poets seem important somehow, too. For Holderlin, there's appraisals from Heidegger, Adorno, and Benjamin. Trying to get the Heidegger and the Adorno ideas together is an interesting challenge. For Shelley, one of my favorite critical books is Jerold Hogle's Shelley's Process, not to mention various essays written by my dissertation advisor Forest Pyle. Derrida's "Living On: Borderlines" is a prennial favorite.
2. Some kind of "pure" theory book on four writers from the twentieth century, which are exemplary in their regard to come up with an unsystematic system of inquiry. A method that questions methodology on its way to resisting a Hegelian-inspired notion of Totality. The four writers are Wittgenstein, Adorno, Derrida, and Deleuze. I've been reading lots about these guys lately, and I wish I could find a way to bring them altogether, regardless of their complex individuality and irreducible differences from each other. Been enjoying a collection of essays,
Between Deleuze and Derrida, which does good work on the two, but get frustrated by how much of what they say seems to connect with the Benjamin/Adorno wing of continental philosophy, too, but not knowing how to put it all together.
3. An underground, alternative, "minor" history of the novel that deals with the understanding of temporality, a time out of joint, which questions the conventional understandings of these topics. Rather than Leavis's "great tradition" of Austen, James, Eliot, and Lawrence, my collection of books include Behn's Oroonoko, Diderot's Jacques le fataliste et son maitre, Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Melville's Pierre, Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu, and DeLillo's Underworld. All of these novels seem to be rethinking the eventhood of the pure event. Narratives try to relate a series of events, but the radicality of the event itself resists this process of domestication. (I like the symmetry of English-French-English and American-French-American.) A theoretical introduction would fuse interesting perspectives on time as developed by Benjamin, Derrida, and Deleuze. This is basically a re-working and expansion of my dissertation.
Hmmm . . . How will all this work get done? Arrgghhh!
Review of Fledgling
Octavia Butler's latest novel Fledgling opens with the character we will come to know as Shori Matthews in utter darkness, incomprehensible pain, and amnesia. Through the course of the novel Shori recovers from her wounds and discovers herself to be a member of a vampire-like race known as the Ina.
The Ina drink the blood of "regular" humans for their sustenance, but rather than completely draining their victims or turning them into the undead, too, as conventional vampires do, they develop a harem-type arrangement with around eight symbionts. This is not a one-way benefit to the Ina because their saliva contains some kind of drug which not only gives an undescribable euphoria to those they bite but extends their lives to two hundred years or so--years of good health and good mental acumen. The Ina can use this power over their humans to make them do anything they wish. Also, it is a drug addiction from which it is impossible to recover. Once a human and Ina have been "joined" (being bitten on a regular basis for a few days), not having the drug for more than a week proves fatal to the human.
The Ina live in collective, communal arrangements with their own family members (divided by gender) as well as all of their collective symbionts. While the Ina do have incredibly long life spans, in the five hundred year range, they are not immortal as conventional vampires are. Also, they do have reflections, aren't harmed by crucifixes or garlic, and can't transform into wolves or bats. What they do have in common with vampires besides the blood sucking thing, is an almost superhuman strength, speed, and capacity to recover from wounds. Also, they will get a serious sunburn from sunlight and are entirely nocturnal, basically falling unconscious with the sunrise.
Shori is different from other Ina in this regard, though, as she is the result of genetic experimentation. Some of her genes are grafted from a black woman. Hence her appearance differs from other Ina. They tend to be melanin deficient. (They are described almost as albinos.) Also, although she prefers the nocturnal life, Shori can force herself to stay awake during the day and is OK as long as she keeps her skin covered.
It is as a result of her genetic difference that her injuries at the beginning of the book are derived. She and her mother's and sisters' group have been attacked, their buildings burned, and entirely killed by a group of Ina who view Shori as an abomination because of her genetic relationship to humans. Some Ina see humans as vastly inferior (sort of like domestic pets). Although completely burned and given severe head injuries, Shori somehow survives and recuperates. (One wonders why her human attackers sent by their Ina bosses didn't just sever her spinal cord at the base of the skull?) Eventually Shori develops her first Ina-human relationship with a guy who just happens to be driving down the road she is walking on, away from the devestation of her family's compound. She hooks up with her father and brothers, but they, too, are destroyed. Shori manages to save her own first symbiont and two others from her father's group. They make their way from Seattle to another Ina household in northern California, who become their allies. Most of the latter half of the novel is a trial-like affair with the Ina responsible for Shori's family being tried and punished by the larger Ina community.
Shori is eventually vindicated, but not without sever costs. During the trial one of her favorite symbionts, an older librarian from Seattle she first met when she was just trying to figure out who she was named Theodora Harkin (anyone read Mina Harkin in Bram Stoker's Dracula?), is murdered. Also, her entire past of fifty odd years and her family have been taken from her by the brutal attacks. She will need to figure out where she stands in the world and what it means to be Ina (or at least mostly Ina of a Ina-human genetic combination).
Because of this feeling of imcompletion at the conclusion of the novel, I'm hoping for at least a sequal if not a longer series of books about Shori. At the end of the novel Shori is still sexually immature. Although she is in her fifties, because she is still a youngster by Ina standards, she appears as a pre-teen black girl. So in subseqent novels I would like to see Shori having children. (At the end of the novel she is already engaged to the sons of the Ina family in northern California.) I would like to see how Ina children are weaned and first take symbionts of their own. Do they breastfeed? Also, I hope that Theodora Harkin has a granddaughter that Shori can hook up with later, as I really liked her character especially. The antoginistic Ina family has been broken up and adopted by others, but because they're still alive, will they come back to give Shori more trouble? This Ina family is not entirely a rogue group, and there are many others who are prejudiced against her as well as many others that are fascinated by her ability to stay awake during the day. Also, this novel was told from Shori's perspective. Wouldn't it make for an interesting novel if the novel were told from the humans' point-of-view? Break the narrative up into eight parts, with each human telling their own tale?
One of the memorable qualities of the book is its sensuality. Although Ina drink blood and eat raw meat exclusively, their humans still need to eat. So their meals are described in loving detail. We can almost smell and taste some of these get-togethers. Ina and humans can and do have sex with each other (heightening the effects of the Ina saliva drug), but Ina can only reproduce by their own kind. In fact, one of the disturbing aspects of the novel is picturing Shori engaged in various carnal relations with her symbionts, given that she appears as a preteen black girl. (She does think like an adult, though.) I appreciate the rich bisexual sexuality of then novel.
Anyways, I loved this book, and I can't wait to see what Ms. Butler has in store next. (I also very much liked her two previous books to this one, The Parable of the Talents and The Parable of the Sower--maybe reviews of those will be undertaken in future posts?)
The Ina drink the blood of "regular" humans for their sustenance, but rather than completely draining their victims or turning them into the undead, too, as conventional vampires do, they develop a harem-type arrangement with around eight symbionts. This is not a one-way benefit to the Ina because their saliva contains some kind of drug which not only gives an undescribable euphoria to those they bite but extends their lives to two hundred years or so--years of good health and good mental acumen. The Ina can use this power over their humans to make them do anything they wish. Also, it is a drug addiction from which it is impossible to recover. Once a human and Ina have been "joined" (being bitten on a regular basis for a few days), not having the drug for more than a week proves fatal to the human.
The Ina live in collective, communal arrangements with their own family members (divided by gender) as well as all of their collective symbionts. While the Ina do have incredibly long life spans, in the five hundred year range, they are not immortal as conventional vampires are. Also, they do have reflections, aren't harmed by crucifixes or garlic, and can't transform into wolves or bats. What they do have in common with vampires besides the blood sucking thing, is an almost superhuman strength, speed, and capacity to recover from wounds. Also, they will get a serious sunburn from sunlight and are entirely nocturnal, basically falling unconscious with the sunrise.
Shori is different from other Ina in this regard, though, as she is the result of genetic experimentation. Some of her genes are grafted from a black woman. Hence her appearance differs from other Ina. They tend to be melanin deficient. (They are described almost as albinos.) Also, although she prefers the nocturnal life, Shori can force herself to stay awake during the day and is OK as long as she keeps her skin covered.
It is as a result of her genetic difference that her injuries at the beginning of the book are derived. She and her mother's and sisters' group have been attacked, their buildings burned, and entirely killed by a group of Ina who view Shori as an abomination because of her genetic relationship to humans. Some Ina see humans as vastly inferior (sort of like domestic pets). Although completely burned and given severe head injuries, Shori somehow survives and recuperates. (One wonders why her human attackers sent by their Ina bosses didn't just sever her spinal cord at the base of the skull?) Eventually Shori develops her first Ina-human relationship with a guy who just happens to be driving down the road she is walking on, away from the devestation of her family's compound. She hooks up with her father and brothers, but they, too, are destroyed. Shori manages to save her own first symbiont and two others from her father's group. They make their way from Seattle to another Ina household in northern California, who become their allies. Most of the latter half of the novel is a trial-like affair with the Ina responsible for Shori's family being tried and punished by the larger Ina community.
Shori is eventually vindicated, but not without sever costs. During the trial one of her favorite symbionts, an older librarian from Seattle she first met when she was just trying to figure out who she was named Theodora Harkin (anyone read Mina Harkin in Bram Stoker's Dracula?), is murdered. Also, her entire past of fifty odd years and her family have been taken from her by the brutal attacks. She will need to figure out where she stands in the world and what it means to be Ina (or at least mostly Ina of a Ina-human genetic combination).
Because of this feeling of imcompletion at the conclusion of the novel, I'm hoping for at least a sequal if not a longer series of books about Shori. At the end of the novel Shori is still sexually immature. Although she is in her fifties, because she is still a youngster by Ina standards, she appears as a pre-teen black girl. So in subseqent novels I would like to see Shori having children. (At the end of the novel she is already engaged to the sons of the Ina family in northern California.) I would like to see how Ina children are weaned and first take symbionts of their own. Do they breastfeed? Also, I hope that Theodora Harkin has a granddaughter that Shori can hook up with later, as I really liked her character especially. The antoginistic Ina family has been broken up and adopted by others, but because they're still alive, will they come back to give Shori more trouble? This Ina family is not entirely a rogue group, and there are many others who are prejudiced against her as well as many others that are fascinated by her ability to stay awake during the day. Also, this novel was told from Shori's perspective. Wouldn't it make for an interesting novel if the novel were told from the humans' point-of-view? Break the narrative up into eight parts, with each human telling their own tale?
One of the memorable qualities of the book is its sensuality. Although Ina drink blood and eat raw meat exclusively, their humans still need to eat. So their meals are described in loving detail. We can almost smell and taste some of these get-togethers. Ina and humans can and do have sex with each other (heightening the effects of the Ina saliva drug), but Ina can only reproduce by their own kind. In fact, one of the disturbing aspects of the novel is picturing Shori engaged in various carnal relations with her symbionts, given that she appears as a preteen black girl. (She does think like an adult, though.) I appreciate the rich bisexual sexuality of then novel.
Anyways, I loved this book, and I can't wait to see what Ms. Butler has in store next. (I also very much liked her two previous books to this one, The Parable of the Talents and The Parable of the Sower--maybe reviews of those will be undertaken in future posts?)
