Recommended Reading List

Congratulations! Now your job is to relax / idle / explore for the summer. Here are some books that I've thought were great over the last few years.

Aimee Bender's The Girl in the Flammable Skirt - A short story collection that I really can't recommend enough. Think "magical realism."

Anything by David Foster Wallace - You can find a number of his essays online here, Where I recommend beginning with "Shipping Out," about a cruise ship. In terms of fiction, why not start with Brief Interviews with Hideous Men or his first novel, The Broom of the System. Also check out Jhumpa Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies or Unaccustomed Earth. Junot Diaz: Drown, a collection of stories about (young) Dominican Americans in New York and New Jersey. Make Believe, by Joanna Scott; "The Secret Integration," a story in Thomas Pynchon's Slow Learner.

Just south of the US I recommend checking out the Mexican / Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño; maybe begin with his story collection Last Evenings on Earth before moving on to his Savage Detectives. From Brazil, I can't get enough of Clairce Lispector, particularly her Hour of the Star. Also, anything by the Argentines César Aira, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar. In Praise of the Stepmother, by Mario Vargas Llosa (Peru).

From India, check out Aravind Adiga's White Tiger and Arundati Roy's The God of Small Things. From Africa, The Book of Chameleons; Ngugi wa Thiong'o, The Devil on the Cross.

As for biographies, I just read one on Shakespeare, Will in the World, and one of the French "Symbolist" poet, Arthur Rimbaud, both of which are fantastic.

If you read one and like it, why not leave a comment below? Or recommend something that you like! Happy Reading!

Final Exams and Papers!

I just sent an email to all of you with the finalized rules and regulations for the final papers and exams; the final exam questions have also been included there. If for some reason you did not receive that email or cannot read it's formatting, please email me and I will resend it.

I have office hours tomorrow, Tuesday (6/22) in B507, from 1pm to 6pm; please stop by if you have any questions!

My summer reading recommendations will be posted here soon! Here's one of them, pasted to the side here: John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces. In my opinion the best satire written in the U.S. in the last 100 years... (though several others come close; I'll post those too!).

(PS.-The title comes from Jonathan Swift)

4pm Class Start on Tuesday, and Final Paper

First off, this Tuesday's class (6/15) will start at 4pm. The readings are Part IV of Gulliver's Travels.

If you would like to write a final paper instead of taking the take-home exam (both will be approx. 5 pages, double-spaced), by Monday (6/14) please email me:

• Two paragraphs describing what you want to write about
• A possible thesis statement
• Type out 3 key quotes for your argument

The goal of your paper is to do a close reading of several key passages where you make an argument about a particular author(s) take on a theme. To begin, I recommend investigating a question that puzzles you: how does the Fool act as a comment on King Lear? Why is the body so important in Gulliver's Travels? Is Thomas More really putting forth a viable economic system in Utopia?

And don't forget, you are welcome to compare any text / film we've read / seen, provided one of the things you're comparing is Lear, Gulliver's Travels, or Utopia.

More soon!

King Lear, Acts IV & V; Final Paper FAQ

For next time, please finish reading King Lear. At the end of class, we'll watch portions Akira Kurosawa's movie, Ran (乱), a rewriting of Lear set in feudal Japan.

A few words about the final. There will be two options: either a) you can do the take-home assignment, where you choose 3 out of 4 questions to write about, for a total of 4-5 pages; or b) you design a topic yourself and write a 4-5 page paper about it.

If you're interested in the second option, I recommend thinking about a question that strikes you as interesting, but which doesn't strike you as having an immediately recognizable answer. "What is the relationship between the Fool's irony and Edgar's nonsense?" might be such a question. Or, "What is the role of women in More's Utopia?" Or, "How are animals used in Lear and Gulliver's Travels?" Or even, "What are the differences between Shakespeare's King Lear and the Emperor in Kurosawa's Ran?"

Anything we have read or watched in the second half of the course is open for discussion, but at least one key work must be a written text.

Once you come up with an interesting question or two, attune your ears and eyes so that you begin looking and listening for spots where that question arises.

If you choose to write a paper, you'll need to send me a quick one-paragraph prospectus explaining what you want to write about, with three key quotations that you will analyze; that will be due in two weeks. In the meantime, please send me any questions you have, or drop by my office hours (T 2.20-3.20), or ask for a more convenient time to meet.

Happy Weekending!

King Lear, Acts II and III

Like I said in class, please read Acts II and III to your section next week. Also, bring along three questions to turn in to me:

• One textual question: it could be something that puzzles you, intrigues you, or just sounds interesting / beautiful / strange to you.
  
• One historical question.
• And one thematic question; remember, look for things that repeat... it could deal with a character and their motivations, irony, or one of the themes we've been discussing.

Oh, and that "In Search of Shakespeare" documentary I mentioned is just a quick google search away. You might add in "1of4". Also readily available online, I'm sure: Shakespeare in Love. If you haven't seen it, it's pretty good, and borrows a lot from Shakespeare's actual work.

King Lear, Act I

Hey class, here's the questions for this week! As I'm sure you've gathered from the sonnets, Shakespeare loves disguising ideas / metaphors / feelings in his language. As you read, I recommend picking out words and ideas that seem to recur. I give four examples below--nature, animals, authority, nothing--but there are far more; keep an eye out for others!

Q1 (Carol C.): The word "nature" seems to come up again and again in Act I; Lear mentions it several times, and Edmund, Gloucester's illegitimate son, seems obsessed with it. Note the spots where the term or idea comes up, and talk about what's behind it's ubiquity. (Hint: Different characters might be interested in it for different reasons).

Q2 (Sam): What do you make of this character, the Fool? What seems to be his function in the play? Does he remind you of anyone in anything else you've read / seen?

Q3 (Alice): Do you notice any similarities, either in language or in theme, between this first act of King Lear and the sonnets?

Q4 (Mia): Look carefully at the setting and stage directions of the various scenes. How important are they? How do they affect how we should interpret what happens in the dialog?

Q5 (Jenny): Animals are just everywhere in this first act, typically as metaphors or analogies. Why? Find some spots that strike you as interesting.

Q6 (Isabella): Summarize the responses of Lear's three daughters to his request that they declare how much they love him. Who seems the most sincere?

Q7 (Ashley): In Act I, Scene 4, Kent (in disguise) tells Lear that he has the look of "Authority"; does he, really? How would you describe the King's authority over the course of this first act of the play?

Q8 (Anne): This word "nothing," like nature, seems to come up again and again and again. Why? Pick out some spots where you think something interesting might be going on.

Utopia / Dystopia: Study Questions

Check the post below for the homework (from More's Utopia and Woody Allen's Sleeper, 90min, available on YouTube). Now on to the questions!

Q1 (Demi): In Raphael's description, King Utopus said that he "suspected that God perhaps likes diverse and manifold forms of worship and therefore deliberately inspired different people with different views" (Utopia, 580). What are some of the beliefs of the Utopians? How does King Utopus's statement jive with the depiction of More in A Man for All Seasons that we watched in class this week?

Q2 (Annie): At the end of Utopia, the character of "More" says this: "when Raphael had finished his story, I was left thinking that not a few customs and laws he had described as existing among the Utopians were quite absurd. Their methods of waging war, their religious practices, and their social customs were some of these, but my chief objection was to the basis of their whole system, that is, their communal living and their money economy" (588). Why does he say this? How closely should we take the character of "More" to resemble the actual views of More, the author?

Q3 (Jason): What is the Utopians' take on the relationship between pleasure and an ethical life? And how does it compare with the ways in which pleasure is depicted in Sleeper?

Q4 (Jill): More inarguably designed his island of Utopia in response to social / political / moral problems he saw in early 16th-century England. Based on what you saw in A Man for All Seasons, what are the principle problems he tries to address in Utopia?

Q5 (Kate): Golden chamberpots?! In Utopia? Why?!

Q6 (Rachel): Why is slavery so essential in Utopia?

Q7 (Tina): What exactly is More's argument about the fictionality of Utopia in his final letter to Peter Giles, pp. 589-90?

Q8 (Vicky): If More's Utopia was designed in response to the problems and preoccupations More saw in early 16th-century England, then we can fairly safely say that Woody Allen's Dys-topia in Sleeper was written in response to certain 1973 American problems and preoccupations. Based on what you've seen in that movie, what were Americans worried about and obsessed with at that time?