Comps Literary Works

The Waste Land (T.S. Eliot, 1922)

- Form: 5 sections—"The Burial of the Dead" (disillusionment and despair), "A Game of Chess," (alternating narrations, in which vignettes of several characters address those themes experientially), "The Fire Sermon" (philosophical meditation in relation to the imagery of death and views of self-denial in juxtaposition influenced by Augustine of Hippo and eastern religions), "Death by Water" (brief lyrical petition), "What the Thunder Said" (an image of judgment); text followed by several pages of notes, some of which clarify metaphors and the like, but some of which are more confusing than the poem itself; highbrow and lowbrow references throughout; stems from eliot's interest in dramatic monologue and modernist sudden shifts in narrator/image - one thing to note: land is described as not being fertile, and the one image we have of a fertile woman is lil, a woman who has born 6 children and chooses to get an abortion and is judged by her friend; clearly women must hold the potential for a return to fertility since they're the only ones who can be fertile but here you have this woman who has chosen to reject that; by picking lil as the central feature of this poem vs. tiresias (because she has the very clear power toward regeneration and rejects it) and ignoring eliot's note we can reject this assumption of male-dominated history/culture; lil is the marker of control in this narrative because she takes her life into her own hands, but eliot clearly displays disinterest in women's abilities to carve their own fates outside of traditional mother/wife role - most interesting thing: representation of madness --> neurotic behavior in game of chess (section 2), talking to herself, shown in instability of meter; so the poem's structural breakdown occurs in line with her breakdown, to get the point doubly across; goes hand in hand with fragmented jumping around to convey the fragmented and shattered nature of society after WWI (modernism); even more powerful b/c eliot himself was crazy?

Selected Poems of Langston Hughes (1958)

- Poem #1: Afro-American Fragments collection → the negro speaks of rivers (sense of identity, shared experience, kinship with africans and blacks across time/place); Negro ("I am a negro...I've been a worker...I've been a slave → trauma in lynching, slavery, kidnapping, sorrow experienced collectively echoed in a shared "I"); As I Grew Older (black represented literally throughout, as night, shadow, darkness); celebrating and demanding celebration of beauty in blackness --> when comparing to Baldwin, Hughes connects black identity across time and place, so African blacks tied to Harlem blacks - Poem #2: Lament over love collection → all told from women's PoVs, often capturing violence done by men and desire to escape love's pain; topic kind of limited to narratives about domesticity but section title maybe reflects that focus; section heightened by songlike/lyrical quality and frequent repetition of lines; numerous girls whose reputations are ruined by men (Ballad of the Girl Whose Name is Mud) and women who face actual violence; men as source of betrayal, disappointment, focusing on small sadnesses and frustrations situated in narrative of larger ones; closes with "Lament Over Love" where woman narrator concludes she hopes her child never loves and she prepares to kill herself; stylistically many of the poems are "blues," indicating appeal/relevance to average blue collar citizen (thinking in contrast to high-brown modernism or something similar; attainable); definitely songlike approach here, blending poetry and music - most interesting thing: home → "Kid in the Park" -- "Home's just around the corner there--but not really anywhere"; sense that the narrators in Hughes's poems don't have home; many landlords coming to request rent money w/ people threatening them and even in one case trying to fight them, so home isn't their own but instead facilitated/controlled by white-favoring government or business structure, and then struggle again with home in terms of US and its structure that fails to protect black citizens, that limits them from pursuing higher offices (we see in poem w/ kids' nursery rhymes where they say they can't be president) and then I, Too resisting that liminality and demanding a sense of place - another thing to note: a dream deferred → repetition of this phrase across poems and sense that it's set up against American Dream; published in 1950s when American Dream narrative is seen throughout other texts published around this time by white authors with white characters striving to obtain this perfect life, whereas we get narratives of black citizens struggling to get by, dealing with threats of eviction, prejudice, jim crow laws → american dream temporarily set aside and that should have some bearing on sense of american identity somehow not attainable either if the dreams can't be reached

Harmonium (Wallace Stevens, 1923)

- Specific Poem #1: The Plot Against the Giant (1917) → 3 girls plotting to undo giant (masculine power) w/ different approaches; the first "checks" him w/ nature in the form of fresh flowers, the second shames him w/ cloths w/ small colors, and the third undoes him, whispering in his ear with "heavenly labials in a world of gutturals"; to me this poem is about femininity's relationship to nature and the power of the natural at odds with seeming power in masculinity (size, strength, violence) -- also sexual implication in undoing him; written just before end of WWI, a big show of masculine strength, and it's almost like stevens is pushing for return to natural and understanding the power in what was overlooked during war; art over force/masculine destruction - Specific Poem #2: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird (first published in lit journal in 1917) → Stevens wrote, "This group of poems is not meant to be a collection of epigrams or of ideas, but of sensations"; circular poem where it starts in snow, goes to human society, ends in snow; focuses on small images/moments; influenced by haiku/Asian art; both longer poem and 13 short poems; poem marked by ambiguity/innuendo/lack of answers, sensation of many truths depending on how you look at something - One thing to say: Stevens represents a sort of interesting conundrum because he fulfilled american dream of success with wife, house, job, $$, but his poems suggest that he favors nature/natural world/return to that world and humanity's place within natural world - Most interesting thing: Throughout his poetic career, Stevens was concerned with the question of what to think about the world now that our old notions of religion no longer suffice; His solution might be summarized by the notion of a "Supreme Fiction" (a fictional idea that people could believe in/replace belief in God with)

Selected Poems of Gwendolyn Brooks (1963)

- Specific poem #1: "A Street in Bronzeville" -- humanizes chicago neighborhood; describes their suffering, their untold struggles in a way that makes them resilient, not victimized; in "the mother" the narrator seeks forgiveness from unborn child after abortion, that she had no choice and still loved; also communicates hidden sorrows unknown and unobserved; using domestic space to convey experiences and desire for expanded experiences - specific poem #2: the womanhood: collection of vignettes describing challenge of women having children but nothing to give them in a society that says they're automatically less-than, not as human, suffering poverty, etc. → seems to be spoken by God who suggests fighting back, carrying hate as armor and win and then you can have your beauty; "I love those little booths at Benvenuti's": unclear on relationship to "the womanhood" except making everyday observations of everyday things worthy of high art forms of modernist poetry; "Beverly Hills, Chicago" is so resonant for observation that whites look natural in spaces of wealth and get to live until they have white hair, "Nobody is furious. Nobody hates these people" → explicitly speaking on behalf of black Chicagoans the experience of being less than and wanting more; so incredibly relevant shows nothing has changed! - one thing to note: she moves from ballads to sonnets and plays with form to tell small triumphs, unheroic survival of otherwise unnoticed people; I think by playing with form she's telling stories of different people all united by shared experiences (so different forms united by same theme) to create blend of voices telling shared story - one more thing: Her body of work gave her, according to critic George E. Kent, "a unique position in American letters. Not only has she combined a strong commitment to racial identity and equality with a mastery of poetic techniques, but she has also managed to bridge the gap between the academic poets of her generation in the 1940s and the young Black militant writers of the 1960s." Her poems in A Street in Bronzeville and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Annie Allen (1949) were "devoted to small, carefully cerebrated, terse portraits of the Black urban poor," commented Richard K. Barksdale in Modern Black Poets: A Collection of Critical Essay

Carrie (Stephen King, 1974)

- main character: carrie; mama; sue; chris; billy; miss desjardin - king's first published novel; started as a short story; wrote it in response to a woman accusing him of only writing about macho men - one thing to say: the theme of religion works in interesting ways here, w/ carrie acting like a god, punishing with fire, though that could also be seen from a religious standpoint as "cleansing" -- even her ability to rain stones down is reminiscent of the plagues and god's punishment, only here again it's carrie in control - another thing to say: blood as symbol of death at odds with blood as tool for teenaged girl bullying (first in carrie's conviction she was going to die vs. plug it up shouts, then again with pigs' blood that triggers violence; then finally sue's period in closing immediately after carrie's death suggests cyclical nature of violence?); king acknowledged that it's a metaphor of women finding their power in their sexuality and using that power to destroy something rotten; sees weak men trying to control or resist that power; but i think you could make the opposite argument that it presents womanly power as something to be feared, something overflowing that given the doctors' suggestions in the novel, needs to be stopped - most interesting thing: equating people with animals (girls as swans, carrie as ox) --> in final scenes with sue and carrie, she describes carrie as animalistic, looking around "bovinely" and using "it" instead of her; suggests a dehumanized view of woman out of control, definitely at odds w/ contained, restrained idea of what femininity should be

In Cold Blood (Truman Capote, 1966)

- main characters: Clutter family; Dick Hickock; Perry Smith; Agent Dewey - one thing to say: question of truth: originally released as magazine articles w/ note at top about how it came from interviews, verbatim convos, etc.; Capote called it the nonfiction novel, which he defined as "a narrative form that employed all techniques of fictional art, but was nevertheless immaculately factual"; stories leading up to murder are set alongside one another (as if they're happening at the same time); characters in the book denied that scenes had taken place/insisted that their conversations had been altered for dramatic effect. The lead KBI agent in the last scene claimed it was a total fabrication. One writer even thought that Capote had refused to assist in the prisoners' defense, even though he became extremely close to them, because he thought that a hanging would be a better end to the story. - one more thing: perry starts writing to guy don he used to know, who tries to get him to express remorse for killing, but he doesn't feel anything and points to how soldiers get medals for killing/the townspeople want them killed (hypocrisy in his mind) - most interesting thing: the stylistic buildup --> we know what has happened, we know they get caught, we get the murder in the first portion of the text, and yet there is all of this buildup (both in writing and as a reader) to hear the confession directly from killers --> why?

Anthem (Ayn Rand, 1938)

- main characters: Equality 7-2521 (main character; renamed Prometheus); Liberty 5-3000 (The Golden One; Gaea) - most interesting thing: published first in the UK; only published as mass market paperback in US almost 25 years after she first wrote it; a lot of resistance from the USA for the first publishing; inspired by Russian communism; novel shows power of a text to completely incite revolution (prometheus's discovery of the word "I" from a book) so the publishing of this book itself also raises the question of how it could impact readers - one thing to note: novella is written to convey idea of egoism, of acting in your own best interest at odds with collectivism of society portrayed, but i'm left wondering what happens when you choose to love and how that works with egoism (at what point would you want/need to choose to put another person's desires and needs above your own? or let them go even if it hurt? etc.)

Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller, 1949)

- main characters: William (Willy) Loman (depressed salesman; Michael Scott-esque); Linda (Willy's passive wife); Biff (older son; a loser); Harold (Happy) Loman (younger son; womanizer; no shame); Charley (Willy's neighbor; successful); Bernard (Charley's son); Uncle Ben (Willy's brother; became a diamond tycoon; represents Willy's idea of the American Dream) - one thing to say: killing himself with the car demonstrates how he's abandoning the dream with the very object he associated w/ achieving that dream - most interesting thing: in a lot of texts, people collect objects (cars, houses, electronic cigarette holders, clothing) as proof of wealth/american dream; but here we see how the dream falls apart as these objects literally fall apart (loman struggle marked by repairs they can't afford for fridge, car, house, etc.); makes linda's "we're finally free" comment @ end after paying off mortgage more heartbreaking because now we know the cost of achieving the dream -

As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner, 1930)

- main characters: addie bundren; husband anse; cash; darl; jewel; dewey dell; vardamam - one thing to say: faulkner's work is the embodiment of modernist style and he uses it to his advantage to explore the differing understandings of what death and family mean from different perspectives; it also allows him to jump back and forth in time and even gives us addie's voice even after she's died (first-person PoV ripping apart notions of family by revealing her infidelity and hatred of pregnancy/mothering; in a way it expands her character's identity by rupturing the stereotype she otherwise occupied as wife and mother) - most interesting thing: how faulkner uses modernism stylistically to his advantage by making it all fall apart for darl (previously the most well-spoken member of the group) after he's gone to an asylum, where he loses his sense of self and none of it makes sense (it's like we're in his head for the nonsensical stream of consciousness); faulkner in an interview actually said darl was mad all along and that's WHY he spoke so poetically, which would reframe madness as source of beauty!!!

Kitchen Confidential (Anthony Bourdain, 2000)

- main characters: anthony, scott, bigfoot - one thing to say: structured like a five-course meal, with five chapters; relatively straightforward and heavily chronological but genre-bending as well, anecdote heavy, sort of an exposé but then he also almost treats it like an instruction manual at the same time (sharing the tools you need to have a successful kitchen, tips and tricks and lessons he'd learned, ex. Never be late); definitely a sense that he's writing to a very specific audience; switches to first person on chapter describing his current life - another thing: bookended with two more recent commentaries exposing his shock at the way the book has been received, how his life has changed → implication that there is a bigger audience than he expected, that book as object had a far reach; closing section implies that writing and publishing the book granted him a life that he used to judge but that he's now embraced (he acknowledges the hypocrisy but it still seems unfair that he gets to judge others and then adopt their lifestyles) - most interesting thing: using closing space to acknowledge unseen labor of PoC

The Testaments (Margaret Atwood, 2019)

- main characters: aunt lydia; agnes; daisy/jade/baby nicole; becka; aunt vidala; aunt elizabeth - one thing to say: embodimentttt: opening with lydia's statue and ending with becka's → women presented as bodies, series of parts, but we get lies in the first and truth/honor in the second; this approach treats women as bigger than themselves, which is important because of how women are reduced to one-dimensional identities/roles in gilead, yet with these statues, they're seen as bigger -- rather than smaller -- than themselves; body becomes message with handmaidens/others hanging on wall as threats/reminders of what could happen - in her afterward, Atwood identifies its relevance and explains she wanted to show how totalitarian governments collapse from within - most interesting thing: like THT, suggestion at end in afterward that content might be repurposed to suit scholarly aims and edited/altered/adjusted as a result, inescapable nature of women's voices/stories being repurposed to meet men's desires

Babbitt (Lewis Sinclair, 1922)

- main characters: babbitt; myra; paul; zilla - one thing to note: irony in babbitt being a real estate agent because his home as described as being a house, not a home, devoid of anything that would make it meaningful and family-filled but really he'd make the perfect real estate agent because he's selling that exact mindset in a community that thrives on it; it also allows him to thrive with his ironic sense of morality that is best exhibited as him hypocritically taking advantage of people in weird buyer scheme to make them overpay for bad property (sense of dog eat dog mentality but also if they can't play the game they're in the wrong place) - most interesting thing: zilla's the most interesting character in this story because she's figured out a way to get what she wants, namely by pushing paul to do what she knows he should do; he shoots her but she lives; zilla plays into classic role of wife figure serving husband but she maintains a sense of power by figuring out ways to push limits and manipulate even from her limited source of power

Beloved (Toni Morrison, 1987)

- main characters: beloved; seth; denver; paul D; baby suggs; stamp paid; schoolteacher; halle - one thing to say: why is pivotal moment of murder narrated by four white men instead of sethe? They look at situation of sethe killing one baby and try to kill another and think there's nothing to claim, just madness and mother who can't care for children even if they took her boys; schoolteacher experiences anger b/c he thinks she was abused too much by his nephews who took her milk; schoolteacher's nephew can't understand why sethe killed daughter, thinks it's because she was beat and thinks how he's been beaten too but would never do that; BUT sethe's perceived insanity from the white men's POV is what actually saves her/her children because they decide not to take her → so telling the story from their PoV at that moment kind of reveals how craziness can be salvation, like being driven down to your very core, abandoning all else, and the idea that them seeing her as uncontrollable was her only freedom even if it in turn she wasn't really free but had to face her actions; paul d and stamp paid joke about sethe's craziness at end after she tried to stab white man, like they see how her insanity has freed her from things - inspired by true story - most interesting thing: beloved tells her story twice; split mirrors Beloved's role as two different characters in the novel: baby/adolescent; maybe she gets two chances to "speak" because she's both of those characters in one body or double narration as a form of "rememory" (first we get primal memory then rememory of making sense, logical approach); jameson's understanding of schizophrenia in PM text: by making even something like language unstable, unable to be processed, contained in the present, we are experiencing destabilization of time, moving us out of sethe's fixation on past and denver's concern for future and into beloved's mindset

Native Son (Richard Wright, 1940)

- main characters: bigger thomas; bessie; mary; jan; mr. and mrs. dalton; britten (detective) - most interesting thing: race involved in doubling of mary and bessie -- his murder of mary is soft and unintentional, whereas that of bessie is deliberate, violent, and unapologetic (and comes after rape); treats black body as dispensable, undeserving of respect; bessie's body is then dragged into courtroom as proof of his second act (since mary's body can't be) but it's covered with a white sheet (black body used for white gain; person isn't as important as the body); while bigger reduces mary to matter, sawing off her head and burning her, she's brought to life in the courtroom whereas bessie/her body are just props for white prosecutor's aims; bessie's death isn't even shown in film version! she's doubly eliminated! - one thing to note: flight from police during blizzard is a metaphor for bigger's who life, fleeing from whiteness; when he sees jan in prison talking about how much he'd suffered because of blackness and how unfair it was to expect him to relate differently to them, bigger sees white individual for the first time; he also sees individual in white lawyer, max, which is fitting b/c max makes a case for bigger as both individual "test subject" and one of many blacks in chicago/usa abused by racist structures/housing systems - one more thing to note: mrs. dalton's literal blindness aligned with blindness of blizzard (whiteness as blinding) and blindness of whites to understand the damage they're doing to blacks; even bigger sees himself as blind at end, finally seeing white individual

Slaughterhouse Five (Kurt Vonnegut, 1969)

- main characters: billy pilgrim; valencia; yon yonson; roland weary; paul lazzaro; montana wildhack - one thing to say: ambiguity of truth exemplified in opening comment: "all this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyways, are pretty much true." - most interesting thing: PM was started to make sense of post-wwii life, so this is perfect example; flexibility to move through time key for PM text, and we see it here with BP but because it's rooted in Tralfadamor expression "and so it goes" to exemplify how time is always happening/already happened it makes me wonder if it's really serving its PM purpose to show that it's unstable/ incomprehensible --> the non-linear narrative is given an explanation that may seem crazy but at least adds legitimacy; by telling the beginning, middle, and end of the story right away, Vonnegut departs from the familiar literary signposts of cause and effect, suspense and climax. We do not see Billy as everyone else in his life sees him; rather, instead of seeing his life in a linear progression, we see the entirety of his life come together to define him. In other words, we can better understand and sympathize with Billy's dazed wandering through the totality of events that make up his existence. - one thing to say: chapter 1 situates vonnegut in the novel, further blending says it's short and jumbled b/c there's nothing intelligent to say about a massacre (war as perfect PM topic b/c it is incomprehensible itself); emphasized w/ "and so it goes" after each death (inevitability) -- by making this part of the book (vs. an intro/foreword) he inserts himself into the text; when captured by ETs, Billy is asked if he has any questions. He asks, "Why me?"—a question that his captors think very typical of earthlings to ask. They tell him that there is no why, since the moment simply is and since all of them are trapped in the moment, like bugs in amber. --> irony is that it isn't so crazy but roland weary does blame him for weary's death and sets off things in motion that eventually result in billy's death - one more thing to say: question of sight -- billy is an optometrist and can see into the past and future, but at the expense of being perceived as insane by others; w/ every seeming increase in knowledge comes less ability to function in real world

All the Pretty Horses (Cormac McCarthy, 1992)

- main characters: blevins; rawlins; john grady cole; alejandra - one thing to note: jarring transitions make it difficult to trace the passing of time; also considering how there is limited modern tech here and often times JG doesn't know the day/week/month it's like the novel is taking place over a month or over a year, we have no real idea; it's kind of powerful in relation to message that nature is timeless because he seems to be just sort of drifting along with it - most interesting thing: stylistic → no quotation marks and polysyndetic style with use of conjunctions, so sentences just kind of flow and there's no interruption from the plot or the descriptive narration of events/place with quotations; it's all kind of immersed in the story. Portrayal of land is extensive/detailed (idea that land stretches past our imagination, land will always be there after humans are gone) - one more thing to say: the name comes from a lullaby by the same name, telling babies not to cry to go to sleep and when they wake they'll have all the pretty horses (so could be read as teenage angst when they don't have everything they wanted)

Future Home of the Living God (Louise Erdrich, 2017)

- main characters: cedar (would have been "mary" on reservation); phil; Mother; Sweetie; Sera; Eddy; Little Mary; Tia; Orielee - one thing to say: writing to "you" of baby revealed later to be separated from her after birth; writing initially as way of coping, but "you" could also be understood to have journal act as artifact a la THT, where it's a record of a personal experience and the "you" is the reader to whom she calls out looking for hope, assistance, salvation; also naming (she struggles with what to call birth mom, roommate; never actually gives name to her son) - thing to say: it's interesting that in dystopia, vs. w/ THT, here both women and womanly figures drive both resistance and government (woman takes her from her house, Mother, women nurses, Sera, woman saint, etc.) - most interesting thing: in thinking through embodiment, idea that woman is reduced to reproductive capabilities, womb over everything → after tia gives birth to a stillborn, cedar realizes she could just stroll out of cave, no longer a threat; imprisonment in body mimicked with literal imprisonment of pregnant women; title is reference to a billboard near rez suggesting that's where second coming of jesus will happen, but it also comes to represent the bodies of women carrying children during the apocalypse, who are robbed of their own identity/become incubators for future saviors?; othering rooted in embodiment but in a temporary way (once they're no longer pregnant, it's over); cedar experiences pride/marveling at what her body has become while pregnant; she's no longer tying it to physical characteristics except the beauty in her maternal nature

The Color Purple (Alice Walker, 1986)

- main characters: celie; nettie; mr. ________; shug avery; harpo; sofia; squeaky - most interesting thing: creation/adornment in celie making pants → independence helping her earn money, but pants themselves represent her finding freedom from limitations of black femaleness as wife/mother, breaking out of that to become neither wife nor mother (since nettie kind of has that role with celie's children at the end, and she is in love with shug but letting her do her own thing); pants are about existing in a space between gender norms and creating something that is for others, the way she would with food/birth, but on her terms and for pleasure vs. practicality; when celie first experiences longing for shug, she thinks she has turned into a man → symbol at end in making pants and loving shug that she's found a space for herself to be both masculine and feminine; she says "Shug acts more manly than most men"; fitting she would give Shug first pair of pants - one thing to note: book faced pushback for portraying black men as violent and showing blacks as lacking family environments

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Ken Kesey, 1962)

- main characters: chief; nurse ratched; mcmurphy; billy bibbit; harding - one thing to say: women presented as either prostitutes or castrators (billy's mom controls his life; in chief's flashbacks we hear how his mom made his dad take her last name, made them "small" or just feel small; nurse ratched just makes everyone do what she wants; at the end, when ratched says mcm is getting an operation, he even jokes about castration) - most interesting thing: craziness presented as source of power -- first when mcm arrives to establish dominance and then at scene at gas station; also bromden's seemingly insane view of how they control patients is really just an exaggerated/literal version of the reality so who is the crazy one?

Passing (Nella Larsen, 1929)

- main characters: clare (passing); irene (occasionally passing); brian; jack - one thing to note: violence against women but also idea that body can be its own form of violence by exposing your true color through childbirth; we get reimagined feminism as women manipulate the system by presenting themselves as white but in the end, their color can reveal itself in pregnancy and because their role is supposed to be mother/wife, they're never free of that fear - one other thing to note: when irene is convinced clare is having an affair, she imagines telling jack, and she realizes one of two things will have to pay the price, either herself (by sucking it up and letting affair happen, her own heartbreak happen) or her race (by exposing truth of passing to the white racist and by outing her oldest friend); passing becomes a communal concern - most interesting thing: novella structured as a play in three parts (encounter, re-encounter, finale) corresponds with race as performance, the very act of passing is a performance

Dutchman (Amiri Bakara, 1964)

- main characters: clay, lula - one thing to say: allegory about white culture abusing black culture OR allegory about man's fall from grace (in which case it presents women as rational/cool/ violent, which would is definitely work against expected narrative; it also would suggest like adam, clay reveals he knows too much about inner workings of race dynamics and that's why he's killed) - most interesting thing: by setting this scene on a train we see clay's sense of placelessness, liminality, that is further conveyed in what lula claims is his blackness and attempt to be white (surrendering/abandoning his race's history to try to pretend to be a white man, dress and talk like a white man) -- lula mockingly telling him she wants to rub bellies is pushing him back toward blackness; when clay says he's adopted white man's style to keep from murdering whites but ends up getting murdered, could be read as bakara's commentary on pushing for black nationalism (that playing white simply won't do) foreshadowing his own abandoning of mixed race kids and adopting extremism

An American Tragedy (Theodore Dreiser, 1925)

- main characters: clyde griffiths; roberta (bert); sondra - most interesting thing: the amount of detail and dispassionate storytelling keep it going for the extensive length; also allows build-up of drama; stylistically by drawing out the moments when Clyde's life hangs in the balance, where he might be saved or fall into the fate that always existed, it gives the reader the sense of possibility of hope (maybe he won't actually kill roberta, maybe he won't actually be convicted and sentenced to death), which makes the moments when his fate does correspond with expectations that much sadder (naturalism but also clever storytelling/pacing) - one thing to note: based on a true story!; Dreiser took the majority of the story straight from the papers (religious family, going to work for wealthy uncle's factory, Bert, reading the letters in court, his use of initials, etc.); much of his work then came in spinning a more detailed tale out of the sensationalized details; in addition, stories from clive's life also overlapped w/ dreiser's own family dynamics and experiences; "His intent was not to retell a story but to recast Gillette's experience into an American tragedy" (Donald Pizer)

The Underground Railroad (Coleson Whitehead, 2016)

- main characters: cora/bessie; ridgeway; caesar; martin/ethel; john valentine; mabel - interesting: inclusion of runaway slave advertisements shown to be real at end of book → there's an overlap between truth and fiction, reality and magical realism, that makes it difficult to turn away without sense of guilt and responsibility - most interesting thing: impact of magical realist reimagining of underground railroad as something tangible -- also exposes the ability to crush the object (the railroad station) vs. the person (the "station master" or what have you) -- in thinking about black bodies, it's actually a really interesting way to see a sort of freedom from embodiment in the breaking of railroad chains because the way to break them isn't to destroy the bodies so much as the station itself (even though they did kill people) → so in a way it makes for a better story, it makes you think about the black bodies using the railroads they constructed as a source of freedom vs. forced labor, but it also emphasizes place (transience of railroad car at odds with permanence, until destroyed, of the station) over embodiment - one thing to say: cora trips ridgeway down stairs using chains; symbolically repurposes tool of her abuse to take him out - another thing to say: magical realism in reimagining underground railroad as literal railroad -- a way to juxtaposition the industrial development with the past of slavery, unwillingness to move forward without bodies to perform the labor, and a tool that slaves were forced to build reimagined as a source of freedom for them -- beautiful reimagining of source of anguish into something beautiful and even source of hope - another thing to say: control of black bodies, not just through slavery but later through other means such as syphilis research and eugenic efforts through forced sterilization; there's an interesting part midway through with two random characters, stevens and cob, who are grave diggers, and they talk about how selling black bodies to universities is easier because nobody comes looking for the bodies but they also make the claim that this is the only way for black bodies to be truly equal to whites in their value because to use black bodies for medical research means to finally acknowledge them as human ("In death the negro became a human being. Only then was he the white man's equal.")

Kindred (Octavia Butler, 1979)

- main characters: dana; kevin; rufus; tom wyelin; alice - one thing to note: we see black women overcome violence in two distinct ways --> alice kills herself after rufus says he sold their kids (he didn't), reclaiming her body when she thinks all is lost (beloved-esque) whereas dana kills rufus when he tries to rape her (alternative source of power) --> but dana's ability to escape is what gives her freedom to commit the violence, so alice's death is a reminder of the real option of escape for black women at the time - most interesting thing: science-fiction genre allows butler to situate contemporary readers in dana's situation and see the world through a relatable character's eyes (who already knows slavery has ended, thinks it's wrong, etc.); Butler was inspired to write this book b/c of sci-fi's lack of noteworthy female protagonists and limited portrayal of race and class; she called it "writing myself in"; she gives black women/history a place in sci-fi - thing to note: A black classmate involved in the Black Power Movement loudly criticized previous generations of African Americans for being subservient to whites. As Butler explained in later interviews, the young man's remarks were a catalyst that led her to respond with a story providing historical context for the subservience, showing that it could be understood as silent but courageous survival

Me Talk Pretty One Day (David Sedaris, 2000)

- main characters: david; hugh; amy; father; mother - one thing to say: speech is wrapped up with outsider status (lisp exposing homosexuality; trying to learn french but never really mastering it, etc.) - most interesting thing: he represents art as something others find transcendent but he just pokes holes into (ex. father loving music but none of them successfully performing; trying and failing to learn guitar; most successful artistry involves lots of drugs and father makes fun of it) -- where art is represented as uniting factor in other books, here it's shown to be an absurd attempt to insert meaning into the meaningless; the best example of this is the turd in the toilet, which could be reimagined as some artistic thing but instead he reveals that it has no meaning; it's just a funny story, and that's ok.

The Star-Side of Bird Hill (Naomi Jackson, 2015)

- main characters: dionne; phaedra; hyacinth; errol; avril - one thing to note: valuable look at embodiment thru dionne's fixation with what she wears/doing hair and makeup, the jeans she put on layaway for her birthday that she won't get to have back in brooklyn; by the end, her hair is falling out in clumps/she has tic of pulling pieces out, but there's the sense that she's more at peace with herself than when she was trying to hold it together; outward appearance is superficial attempt to control her life when everything around her is falling apart, so when she stops trying, it's because she's reached a sort of peace with everything around her; there's also this underlying narrative of adolescent girl growing into her body and having to navigate what that means -- she originally directs it outward, engaging in sex as a sort of rebellion, as if pleasure can be escape in her life, but by the end, she's stopped trying to repurpose her body in that way, and that's set against how errol has done exactly that with other girls' bodies, using them as almost separate from the person they're attached to - most interesting thing: chose to write about sisters because of "the ways that love and cruelty rub up against one another" and how they can be experiencing the same thing from similar vantage point and have completely different reactions to it - she also wanted to challenge idea of older woman being sexless, wise old lady figure

The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath, 1963)

- main characters: esther; buddy; doreen; joan - one thing to say: she killed herself a month after the bell jar was published; published under pseudonym in UK -- not published in US until 1971 (interesting b/c it kind of serves as a condemnation of US culture on multiple fronts) - most interesting thing: relationship between femininity and sex --> women expected to be wives/mothers but esther already resisting this by working and trying to write; sex for women presented as rooted in babymaking or keeping men happy (vs. men's freedom to have affairs b/c of sexual desire), and esther only receives praise from others when she's dating someone -- when esther does have sex, violence of bleeding corresponds w/ violence of condemnation

Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury, 1953)

- main characters: guy montag (firefighter); clarisse (little girl neighbor pushing him to question things); mildred (wife); faber - one thing to note: this was published in Playboy broken up across 3 issues; very attached to this story because he essentially grew up in a library; wrote 25,000 word version in 9 days and then added 25,000 words over another 9 days two years later - most interesting thing: technology replacing nature -- with the Electric-Eyed Snake machine and the Mechanical Hound -- but shown to be lacking, but it doesn't matter because people are so immersed in entertainment that they don't recognize what has been lost. Tech doesn't just replace nature but also communication between people, as engagements happen across screens instead; technology shown to be the enemy here - bradbury raises interesting ideas about censorship, obviously a big theme to the big. He notes in the Afterword that he objects strongly to letters he has received suggesting that he revise his treatment of female or black characters. He sees such interventions as essentially hostile and intolerant—as the first step on the road to book burning. Which in turn sounds like a privileged perspective if anything

The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger, 1945)

- main characters: holden caufield; phoebe; stradlater; mr. antolini; DJ; allie (younger brother died of leukemia); ackley (annoying neighbor) - one thing to note: published first in serial form in 1945-6 then as a full book in 1951 - one other thing to note: definitely a post-wwii novel exploring "phoniness" of american consumerism boom after the war and the trauma and the sense of disillusionment that people are pretending it didn't happen; fixation on youth and innocence (even getting rid of curse word at phoebe's school) an attempt to preserve innocence that was lost for him; also a post-wwii disconnect after experiencing sense of unity/patriotism during war - most interesting thing: stylistic approach hearing directly from him; by hearing from him in hospital, story is presented/filtered/mediated by holden, and the stylistic choice with ramblings and lists and digressions seems to be an attempt to justify the very style that made him fail english (seemingly random tangents) -- it's a story of seemingly random tangents; it's essentially just a larger version of phoebe's seemingly tangential notebook, which could mean that the reason he's so happy at the end with phoebe is because he's realized that he can preserve the very innocence he still sees in phoebe's life/thought processes by telling his story the way he wants/not letting go of that youthful approach

Americanah (Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, 2013)

- main characters: ifemelu; obinze; aunty uju; dike; kimberley; blaine - most interesting thing: Shan complains when describing her own book, saying most editors don't want a novel that focuses on race—the issue must somehow be made more "complex" or described so beautifully that the reader doesn't even notice it. With this Adichie comments on her own work, declaring that race and racism are big and complicated enough issues on their own, and they deserve a novel as sprawling and complex as Americanah; also like shan's commentary adichie doesn't want to hide commentary on race behind lyricism/metaphor - one thing to note: at first, obinze straightens hair/hides accent, but eventually she embraces nigerian identity in america, but she comes to realize she will always inhabit liminal identity; called "americanah" when she returns to nigeria --> hair used repeatedly as a symbol for changing identity and embracing background/culture; after relaxing it starts falling out so she cuts if off, feels like not a part of herself, then discovers website for people w/ natural hair and sense of community/her voice - adichie also demonstrates how in US race matters a great deal but people are afraid to talk about it (ex. at store where ifemelu's friend tries to describe salesperson, and kimberley saying how beautiful all of these black people are, calling them beautiful instead of black, white prof changing subject as students argue about bleeping out n-word in movie) - theme of money as source of power: in nigeria it gets you a job, authority, people fawning over you, but in US it only works if you have money and are white (as seen when carpet cleaner comes to house and recoils w/ ifemelu answering door until she says she's the help)

My Year of Meats (Ruth Ozeki, 1999)

- main characters: jane; akiko; john ueno; sloan - most interesting thing: from the author: the novel's primary theme, that we live in a world where culture is commerce and where global miscommunication is mediated by commercial television, grew from the very specific escapades of the narrator, Jane. The meat was metaphorical: women as cows; wives as chattel (a word related to cattle); and the body as meat, fleshy, sexual, the irreducible element of human identity. I was thinking of TV as a meat market, Jane as cultural pimp, pandering the physical image of American housewives to satisfy Japanese TV consumers → women represented as meat throughout this story, and akiko is "bred" like a cow, or at least john tries to do so; author also takes this to the extreme by using language to reflect women's status as meat (ex. stripper's "tenderloin") - one thing to say: role of names --> jane tries to name her kid by wandering through graveyards but thinks names are pointless; baby ends up being called "product of conception" at hospital after miscarriage; jane has last name "tagaki-little" because her mom was concerned that keeping her dad's last name would be a bad omen → mom believes "name is face to all the world"; she gives ad-ex Joichi the nickname "john" like "john wayne" as a joke but he's obsessed with it and keeps it, as if his new name can give him a new american identity

Their Eyes Were Watching God (Zora Neale Hurston, 1937)

- main characters: janie; teacake; pheoby; joe; mrs. thomas - one thing to say: biggest violence against women is shown to be keeping them from being fully human by silencing their voices; joe tried to force janie into one-dimensional caricature of wife; when she yells at him right before he dies, it's not about beating her up as much as the violence he inflicted by treating her the way he did (true?); janie finds her voice maybe not as loud as expected but in a sense by choosing to embrace her youthfulness, her freedom as a woman who doesn't want to settle down, was with younger teacake ALTHOUGH entire story is being told BY janie TO pheoby; it's like hurston is putting added weight onto the conversations between women, often depicted as of lesser importance than other speaking occasions; this is made even more evident by how hurston writes the whole story in the vernacular that is primarily phonetic (so Ah vs. I) → making these language patterns literary - another thing to say: nature at root of key moments in text for janie: nature as root of janie's sex as she connects it to orgasmic experience watching bee pollinate blossom and later with hurricane that dooms janie indirectly even as she doesn't die; nature responsible for teacake's insanity (like it triumphs over janie's plans w/ him after all) - most interesting thing: lack protest writers judged this book because it didn't really grapple at all with black/white relations and didn't fit within the protest tradition; wasn't a bitter book depicting harshness of life in the south for black people but rather a beautiful, celebratory piece; it was paid little attention in the following decade because it wasn't as powerful, demanding, loud as richard wright and other social realism books written by black men in protest tradition; women began discovering the book on their own around 2-3 decades later and connecting deeply with the personal style of the writing and the characters portrayed in the story; became an "underground phenomenon" in 1971 and alice walker started teaching the book and began a search to find hurston's unmarked grave to add a marker and wrote an essay about it in Ms. magazine and petition in MLA in 1975 got it back into print; at 1979 MLA conference, people argued about the book and alice walker proclaimed that janie's silence during court scene was useful and purposeful → moment indicated that the book was now a shared text, recognized as part of the discourse and respected

My Antonia (Willa Cather, 1918)

- main characters: jim/antonia - one thing to say: food is used as a tool to indicate status, foreignness (mushrooms--though not identified as such-- gifted to Jim's grandparents tossed away because they don't trust the food from the Shimerda family; Leo tells Jim "Americans don't know what kolaches are") - most interesting thing: novel plays with gender roles: written by a woman author who used to go by a man's name, told through a man's eyes, story is a memoir from man but really about a woman's life, and in the story, women often take strong roles; antonia helps lead the family after her dad kills himself and lena outright rejects idea of marriage and instead becomes a successful dressmaker in san francisco

The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck, 1939)

- main characters: joad family; tom joad; casy; rose of sharon - one thing to say: realist novel was intended to awaken sympathy and concern and it did the trick -- inspired eleanor roosevelt to congressional hearings on migrant worker camp conditions and labor laws were changed; stylistically the sympathy came, i think, in sympathetic/ intimate portrayal of family's struggle juxtaposed w/ commentary on struggles more broadly - most interesting thing: inverted gender dynamics (pa withdraws, ma steps up, pa threatens to hit her but it's an empty threat; by the end of the novel, previously powerless woman has taken control) alongside twisted version of expected women's dynamics (rose of sharon's baby represents promise of new beginning but then it dies but then she feeds a starving man --> suggests that fertility of mother earth?? can save them still; there's still hope) --> ending with woman in conventional mother role but recipient is shifted

The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion, 2005)

- main characters: joan; husband john; daughter quintana - one thing to note: powerful descriptions of grief but what really stands out to me is how she tries to find comfort in information, so looking to poems/novels/Freud's theory/Greek philosophy to make sense of her own progression from grief to mourning and how that's mimicked in her attempts to control situation with Quintana by doing research into terminology and things and demanding that doctors pay attention to the things she has noted (means of controlling the situation when the rest of her life is out of control) - won pulitzer prize - most interesting thing: the nature of the spectre of dead person -- grieving for them preserves their presence; also just thinking about the style of this storytelling where it's going over the events repeatedly trying to make sense, piece together things, but also relying on memory that is inherently faulty so it's all hopeless after all to some degree; she identifies herself as a sort of spectre, incorporeal and invisible - another thing: she repeatedly connects her personal accounts with grief with shared experiences/behaviors (shock, awareness) from other people who have gone through other forms of suffering - memory shown to be unreliable (at the same time that she repeatedly relives moments of trauma, she also contrasts EMT's notes of procedures with what she can't remember after they arrived - quintana died between her finishing the book and publishing it

Go Tell it on the Mountain (James Baldwin, 1953)

- main characters: john (bastard but doesn't know it; homosexual themes); Gabriel (john's dad; reverend; incredibly religious); elisha (preacher's son; john is into him?); Richard (Elizabeth's first love; John's dad; arrested for connection to black robbery -- mistaken because he was black; went to prison, got released, killed himself); royal (john's brother); aunt florence (knows secret) - one thing to note: rhythm and language of the story draw heavily on the language of the Bible, particularly of the King James Version. Many of the passages use the patterns of repetition identified by scholars such as Robert Alter and others as being characteristic of Biblical poetry → very distinct stylistic choice that grounds the novel in the story's plot about religion and aligns the story with biblical family stories/drama - most interesting thing: recurring theme of dust, trying to sweep it away but it's impossible to do so; idea of dust tied to sin/poverty and them going hand-in-hand - another thing: semi-autobiographical novel

Sing, Unburied, Sing (Jesmyn Ward, 2017)

- main characters: jojo; river/pop; leonie; given; michael; mam; michaela/kayla; richie - one thing to note: looking at consumption -- repeatedly theme here but it's not just about food/starvation (we see starvation for truth in Richie; consumption, literally, of drugs with Leonie/Michael; Leonie consumed by love of Michael to the point of ignoring her children; Pop using food to show love; Michael tries to do it but burns bacon so much JoJo can't even eat it/just like Leonie trying to treat Kayla but it doesn't work; Kayla barfing could read as literally throwing up negativity? - most interesting thing: ghosts who died in violence say "home, home" as they fly there, and there's question of what makes home in this novel --> pop provides home where leonie/michael fail as parents - another thing: kinship/heritage key in this, with representations of chosen family (richie + pop) as more meaningful/loving than blood family (leonnie + jojo)

Everything is Illuminated (Jonathan Safran Foer, 2002)

- main characters: jonathan safran foer; alex; grandfather; brod; safran; little igor; yankel; augustine; sofikowa - one thing to say: PM at its finest; playing with book as object (book of antecedents w/ "we are writing..." repeated hundreds of times); playing with text (pacing -- scene with herschel begging, no punctuation, words blend together, etc.) → puts readers in moment, experiencing anxiety; metafictional play where characters appear from past in play performed for a more recent generation (idea that truth and fiction are unclear, past becomes present becomes future, lines are blurred w/ time and truth); at one point, flow chart meant to communicate path of truths but clearly doesn't make sense, random words that require context/framing --> essentially playing with various aspects of book as thing/storytelling to show the chaos, nonsensical nature and lack of satisfying ending (of WWII trauma) - another thing to say: writing shown to be a process and collaborative, positioning writer as actively engaged, making decisions about hurting characters - most interesting thing: sex associated w/ masculinity throughout this work (safran was a playa, brod shamed for sexuality; women's sexuality was feared or taken advantage of) HOWEVER alex's character development seems to upset this understanding of it by positioning him to rethink obsession w/ getting laid - another thing: representation of love: safran finding it in orgasm with bomb; giant orgy lit up visible from space when safran has his first orgasm -- almost like suggestion that love illuminates, which would tie into JSF's quest to uncover meaning from life of someone he loved, safran saved in act of love, and alex's grandfather reaching illumination b/c he chooses to love alex in suicide note - another thing: JSF questions freedom to imagine with the holocaust, especially w/ family's personal connection → is it appropriate to imagine narratives for such a traumatic truth w/ so many stories experienced and so many stories/histories/lineages wiped out? -- JSF sees the book as merging how things were w/ how things could have been; expression of novel's power to rewrite history, reframe it in readers' minds (question of how to handle instances of tragedy in fiction)

Black Water (Joyce Carol Oates, 1992)

- main characters: kelly; the senator; buffy st. john; artie; lisa/laura gardener - one thing to note: fixation on being normal, not standing out (we see this with kelly's dad unwilling to look at her until her lazy eye is corrected surgically: sense that they want to conform to/perform at expectation of ideals in new england world); fits into oates's general style of portraying violence affecting average people and an ugly world where people suffer from things outside of their control - most interesting thing: stylistically notable → shift between political commentary, like kelly recalling paper against the death penalty, as well as generally situating it in politics, her work in politics, the senator's political history, her parents' dynamics as conservatives, alongside personal details of relationship; almost like groundhog day, repeating this story over and over and helping readers glean more - another thing: weird sharp interruption of ads, such as ad about adult acne, instructions on applying foundation, repetition of CAUTION instructions to avoid sun damage set at odds with AIDS → sense of insane paradox between the little details people like kelly would fixate on and the big problems of reality; stylistically she also adopts run-on sentences as we get closer and closer to the end, putting us in the moment in a sort of stream of consciousness as he kicks away from her to escape, she panics and waits for him to come back and eventually dies, he makes his way to a phone booth, etc. → chaos and trauma and confusion and crushing disappointment and death replicated in language - from oates: 'I wanted the story to be somewhat mythical, the almost archetypal experience of a young woman who trusts an older man and whose trust is violated.'"

Breakfast of Champions (Kurt Vonnegut, 1974)

- main characters: kilgore trout; dwayne hoover; francine; harry; bunny; wayne hoobler; eliot rosewater - one thing to say: free will taken up in this book and in slaughterhouse-five; here, vonnegut meets trout and says he's freeing him and leaves him feeling abandoned and confused (vs. fatalism dwayne experiences when thinking everyone is a machine); in this way, vonnegut is pushing readers to consider what happens when we use our brains to imagine, to free ourselves?? - most interesting thing: stylistically this book is pinnacle of PM --> fragmented storytelling, non-chronological, metatextual, presence of vonnegut in his own story, lack of meaning/sense, pictures, making familiar unfamiliar and vice versa (describing commonplace things as if teaching them to someone unfamiliar with them -- makes reader reconsider the weirdness/emptiness of things like race dynamics); also showing things like how "beaver" describes woman's vagina is PM tool to show how language is arbitrary - another thing: book takes up consumerism to show how it has destroyed core of things (ex. the name of the book; armistice day used to stand for something else now it's just a tool to sell things) --> suggests even the best things are stripped of meaning and repurposed to serve american capitalism; things often given names because people like the "sound" of them even if the name doesn't have anything to do with the item - another thing: representation of mental illness affecting almost all characters and vonnegut himself (bringing attention/exposure to something stigmatized)

Of Mice and Men (John Steinbeck, 1937)

- main characters: lennie; george; candy; curley; curley's wife - one thing to say: emptiness of dreams in 1930s, around start of WWII/coming out of depression; curley's wife dreamed of being a movie star, lennie and george dreamed of having their own farms; lots of dreams that were never really in reach from them b/c of who they were (naturalism text?); stylistically social realism demonstrates the harsh reality of life for migrants working on farms (dreams are all they had) --> set it at odds w/ american dream depictions elsewhere in history - most interesting thing: Structured in three acts of two chapters each, it is intended to be both a novella and a script for a play. It is only 30,000 words in length. Steinbeck wanted to write a novel that could be played from its lines, or a play that could be read like a novel; stage version was written by steinbeck and presented on broadway; in the play, curley's wife doesn't threaten to have crooks lynched and she talks about her dad trying to run away with her (softens character; offsets one-dimensional portrayal in book - less possible with physical presence in play)

Bento Box in the Heartland (Linda Furiya, 2006)

- main characters: linda; tracy; obachan (mom's stepmother); uncle george - most interesting thing: interesting effect to have dramatic, even traumatic stories told, giving food weight and emotional ties, and then to present recipes at the end of the chapter in completely objective voice → makes you wonder what happens if you eat the food; can you ever just enjoy it objectively now that you know the story that accompanies it?; given added meaning because of instances of going hungry/not having access to this food (her dad as Japanese POW in Russia, starving; her family in Illinois with limited access to Japanese ingredients); it's almost like an invitation to partake in her story!!! - most interesting thing: she regularly translates japanese words into english, reminder that she's straddling between two identities/cultures, playing the same role she once did for parents, helping white people navigate japanese culture; kind of ties into recipes: presents recipes in objective, neutral manner after tying them to emotional moments (what's recipe's purpose? To put people in those moments? To preserve her history the way her parents were doing by making the food in the first place?)

Them (Joyce Carol Oates, 1969)

- main characters: loretta; jules; maureen; howard; pat furlong; nadine - most interesting thing: how Oates writes the story, there's an interesting sense of dissociation from reality (opens with Loretta appreciating himself, then we see it with Jules admiring himself as others would see him walking down the street, then later again with Maureen when she looks in mirror and notes body attached to her name -- not processing it as herself) -- interesting because it could be tied to "craziness" in family -- this ties into her use of an author's note that suggests this is all true, based on story of former student (aka Maureen who writes letter to "miss oates") but that turns out to be a lie too; there's a weird play of dissociation from events she didn't directly experience but still trying to present the reality of them; truth and fiction get blurred here; naturalistic theme -- characters shaped by nature outside of their own control - one thing to note: PM playing around with notion of truth, promised in foreword and then exposed as a lie in afterward; raises question of how we receive fiction when labeled truth (aka like in cold blood)

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (Tennessee Williams, 1955)

- main characters: mae; maggie; brick; big daddy; big mama; gooper; skipper - one thing to say: 3rd act rewritten as joint act between williams and broadway director → he was fearful director would lose interest if he didn't re-examine the script according to director's suggestions; williams was concerned about making sure his play would be a success/reach larger audiences, so he adjusted pieces about having big daddy reappear, making maggie more sympathetic; he wanted the director to direct so he had to alter his art to suit director's desires, almost like sacrificing some of the text to achieve the final result (because theater is about the words but also the design, movements, directing) - most interesting thing: when it was made into a movie they had to cut out all mentions of gay (per new movie hays code); even mention of homosexuality was unacceptable

Eat the Document (Dana Spiotta, 2006)

- main characters: mary (also caroline/louise --> taking on new names); nash (actually bobby); henry; jason; miranda - one thing to note: homes as symbols allegecom's houses are epitome of this → designed by science to be an ecotopia, exactly what is needed to have productive, satisfied community, but they're just shells; mary sees the women's community homes as forced, the pretense as they are just as designed to communicate things, louise's house could have existed anywhere, it's like she's existing in a body that doesn't belong to her, and a shell of a home; miranda fixated on living in a home that isn't suburban, as if changing her "outside" will change who she is (lol no); struggles to reconcile josh's lovely suburban home w/ secret hacker identity; symbolism in mary not staying in commune where she'd have to build her own home, construct representation of herself, craft a space to call home; instead ends up in epitome of cookie cutter, empty, superficial home, just like identity as louise); it may seem like allegecom's community finally pushes capitalism into the home space, but the book gives examples of how that's already happened even in closed off communities → it's all forced, built on pretense - most interesting thing: how it explores selfhood (Mary/Caroline/Louise seems to be unable to ever find herself again after bombings; Miranda is her parallel, unable to find herself, hiding out in men -- nash and josh --, josh pretending to be alt-hacker then swept away by money/success, jason thinks he knows himself but his mom's secret life ruins it, but then again his only real identity is obsession with the beach boys); really most powerful moment is when Mary takes on Louise as identity; even miranda's interest in renaming things, everyday objects, as if that could change how we interact with and view the objects, is intriguing; bobby/nash also really into creating acronyms, playing with identity - another thing: doesn't just jump between people but also across time → transformative event repeatedly hinted at but isn't described until the last pages (where ideally we'd already view bobby/nash and mary/louise as sympathetic people); when mary takes louise's name, she sees it as a deep lie, thinking about the baby, the darkness of her identity

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou, 1966)

- main characters: maya, bailey (brother), momma (grandma); mother; big bailey (dad) uncle willie; grandmother baxter; mr. freeman - one thing to say: food is important motif --> vivid descriptions of eating; they saved up pickled food in storehouse to get through the year; Momma allowing people to trade in rations during Great Depression, to keep their dignity while Maya/Bailey ate powdered milk and eggs, embodies how food can be source of pride or shame (and shows her own sacrificial nature); Maya hates Reverend Thomas because whenever he visits he stays with them and eats best parts of chicken -- sense of laying claim to what he feels he is entitled to; picnics are overflowing with food -- community in food; in LA, eating chinese and italian: "Through food we learned that there were other people in the world" - most important thing: how maya grapples with embodiment through assault, rape, race, pregnancy, birth, possession --> begins w/ sense of not being at home in her body, ashamed of ugliness, and she goes through struggle to reconcile her race/sex/potential sexuality/rape, ownership over her body; ends w/ her having kid and learning how to care for son, sleeping through night w/ him in arm crook --> sense of finally feeling stable, like she has family of her own, and in the right place - one more thing: Angelou was challenged by James Baldwin, and editor, Robert Loomis, to write an autobiography that was also a piece of literature; often categorized as autobiographical fiction b/c Angelou uses thematic development and other techniques common to fiction, but the prevailing critical view characterizes it as an autobiography, a genre she attempts to critique, change, and expand - one more thing: liminality/placenessness (sense that she doesn't fit into south, CA, family isn't stable, bailey eventually moves out, etc. --> 'home' is a struggle for her to identify)

Ragtime (E.L. Doctorow, 1974)

- main characters: mother; father; mother's younger brother; the boy; Tateh; Evelyn Nesbit; Houdini; Coalhouse Walker Jr. - book considered "modernism for the masses" (mixed w/ realism) - one thing to note: commentary on wealth, what we do for it; how it moves things forward; how society is divided into the haves and have nots, but so many of the haves still aren't satisfied; Evelyn literally "performs" poverty a few hours each day, finding the tiny apartment charming in its squalor -- shows the ultimate privilege of beautiful rich white woman; violence embodied even in the constricting clothing women like Evelyn wear, as Emma Goldman tells her before taking her out of it - most interesting thing: named for musical style that was popular at turn of the century until 1920 stemming from african-american communities; "distinctly american form of music"; presents history as something created by those who remain unseen as much as by those who are visible/wealthy/famous -- ragtime was precursor to jazz, which was at the age of loss of innocence for america, so the idea of ragtime suggests a flirting with immorality in a lot of ways without committing to it

The Age of Innocence (Edith Wharton, 1920)

- main characters: newland archer; may welling; countess ellen olenska; mrs. manson mingott - one thing to say: Wharton criticized narrative experimentation of people like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf; at a time when people were experiencing with novels, she kept it classic and traditional in her style of writing; yet we see a bit of creativity shining in her approach to satire and how she keeps the big revelation (that may isn't such an innocent fool after all) subtle but packing a big punch - most interesting thing: author was interior designer/popularized it as woman's career (represented in detailed accounts of spaces; archer uses that to interpret things about people); we get lots of accounts of place but most interestingly are ellen's (bohemian house, rejecting the niceties of high culture as constraining and overlooking actual bohemian culture happening w/ artists/writers) and mrs. manson mingott's (gigantic home built on the edge of high society and low class, built when nobody else was building there; her house is as overflowing and big as she is and it communicates her lack of concern about the way things should be but also her wealth and how that affords her the ability to do what she wants);

The Great Gatsby (F. Scott Fitzgerald, 1925)

- main characters: nick; tom and daisy buchanan; jay gatsby; myrtle - one thing to say: gatsby represents the american dream (and its unattainable nature); if we read the novel as an elegy, then Barbara Will interprets the scene late in the novel when Nick Carraway, wandering past Gatsby's house, catches sight of-and then erases-an obscene word scrawled on Gatsby's steps. This scene then gives way to the last four paragraphs of the novel, which stage Gatsby's final redemption and apotheosis as an American icon. Through foregrounding Nick's act of erasure, Fitzgerald emphasizes the process through which the "whitewashing" of Gatsby's reputation must occur in order for Gatsby's story to become the story of America itself --> stylistically speaking because this is all framed by nick, we have the sense of a mediator who tries to position Gatsby in a better light, framing aristocracy as the real problem (daisy caused accident, daisy didn't accept responsibility) but really naturalism could suggest that gatsby was doomed all along - most interesting thing: like TAoI, representation of house; also tom's house is gigantic but old, sense of comfort and slow pace because he doesn't have to try, house is just set for him; vs. gatsby's gigantic, over the top house that's empty in 99% of the house 99% of the time, all for show, just like gatsby it's all a shell, but daisy is swayed by the shell of gatsby and of gatsby's house; then nick's house is small, offset, positioned to witness the drama but not like the rest of them, just like nick

The Crying of Lot 49 (Thomas Pynchon, 1966)

- main characters: oedipa maas; mucho; metzger; pierce inverarity; dr. hilarius; mike fallopian; john nefastis; genghis cohen - one thing to say: struggle with the idea of oedipa maas as central detective figure in this story; on the one hand it seems like pynchon is challenging norms by putting housewife in center of story but she also fulfills expected narratives of loveless marriage, sexual objectification by male characters, and then also questions her own sanity --> I find myself reading it as Pynchon satisfying expectations but then readers are positioned alongside oedipa so maybe we don't escape either (and are just like her?) - most interesting thing: characters get names that can't possibly apply to them (Oedipa for Oedipus Rex, Mike Fallopian even though he's a man) so this further destabilizes identity in a PM work that's all about how things aren't what they seem → names are like a big joke by Pynchon with suggestion that he wants you to study them closer (Pierce Inverarity → suggests lack of truthfulness but we never really get that answer because story ends before we can); some of his message seems to be that stuff is meaningless and we try to apply interpretations to things that are themselves meaningless (like symbols) so this could be pynchon's way of proving that

The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood, 1985)

- main characters: offred; luke; serena joy; commander; nick; moira; aunt lydia - one thing to note: based heavily on 1984 but she felt orwell didn't have dynamic women characters/didn't explore gender aspect; structurally matches it - most interesting thing: atwood demanding it be called "speculative fiction" b/c pulled from truths

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Junot Diaz, 2008)

- main characters: oscar; lola; trujillo; yunior; hypatia; belicia; abelard; ybon; la inca (beli's mother) - one thing to say: dreams -- oscar and lola both live in dream world (oscar as sort of famous hott womanizer; lola as future backup dancer for U2, beli as wanting to run away with the guy who took her v-card and marry him) --> dreams as escape from reality (same with science fiction) - another thing: family --> this story tracks family's narrative across time/place (from grandfather to mother to oscar/lola); idea that we're all forever tied to our kin, our family history; a reversal of time (told in present up to oscar's death, back to lola's story, then mother's then grandfather's) --> winding up present all the way back; individual identity is inescapably tied up w/ collective identity - another thing: shift between first-second-third person; when suddenly it's lola's POV, it's second-person, like she wants to put reader in her shoes, but unclear if yunior is telling this for her, or these are her thoughts; difficult to map dynamics between storytellers here (especially because as soon as they're done recounting experience finding lump on mom's breast, it's back to first-person describing lola's difficult relationship with her mom --> fragmented storytelling, jumping around in time, and magical realism (PM baby) - another thing: i think what's most significant is the HEAVY use of notes, where we get yunior's code switching and self-reflection (almost like he presumes audience is white/unfamiliar with DR dynamics/history); moving between academic prose to DR slang and back (hinting at his struggle to reconcile his identity as DR and academic writer); he also switches between Spanish and English without providing translation or context, putting reader in position of trying to make sense of things, reposition themselves, sort of flipping his usual role (as other) onto them - another thing: like ayiti in representing sugar cane as location of violence (in this case murder, in the other case, rape) --> symbolism in violence tied to long history of colonialism

The Bluest Eye (Toni Morrison, 1970)

- main characters: pecola; claudia; frieda; pauline; cholly; soapbox church; maureen - one thing to say: houses as representative of the people within them (breedlove house falling apart; claudia's house warm, inviting; geraldine's house perfectly organized but loveless -- punishing junior/pecola, sense that she's a superficially perfect but empty inside shell just like her house) → at this time they were still immersed in culture that kept blacks from owning property in certain areas, kept people segregated (we see this when they can't walk through park near white house where polly works) - most interesting thing: stylistic PM choices --> storytelling interspersed with dick and jane primer lines that slowly get disrupted into nonsensical (idea that children, even black children, from the beginning learn of a certain standard/ideal of happy family w/ cat, house, two parents smiling; but the black kids never even stand a chance to obtain that, so what does it mean for them?); jumping in time (no big climax, just a sense of fatalism) - another thing: sex treated as illicit, hidden, shameful; few instances of pleasurable sex → even enjoyable sex between polly/cholly replaced w/ his sort of rape of her sleeping body (fear of embodiment? or pleasure in your body? race dynamic?)

Angels in America (Tony Kushner; 1992/1994)

- main characters: prior; harper; joe; louis; belize; mr. lies; hannah; roy - one thing to say: actors all play multiple roles, many times switching genders; end result is a blend of genders, of AIDS-inflicted and healthy people; blending of identity so it's impossible to separate out distinct actors - most interesting thing: play's format plays with our understanding of reality → so much about the play is hallucinations, imaginary occurrences, but the play brings them into reality by placing them in front of the audience (i.e. seeing the characters on stage in the same way we would otherwise during "hallucination" or "dream"; seeing angel crash through bedroom, etc.); it upsets understanding of crazy because things that are crazy according to the characters and to logic are placed on stage alongside and mixed into scenes of reality - another thing: kushner faced a lot of pressure to write second part and have it live up to expectations; was commissioned to write play about AIDS and under supporter's guidance was presented in workshop production then premiere then broadway

Rabbit, Run (John Updike, 1960)

- main characters: rabbit; janice; ruth; nelson; tothero; eccles; mrs. smith - one thing to note: dislike updike's style in general but especially when we hear from janice and ruth, both of whom are fixated on men; from ruth's PoV we learn that she has sex because she's insecure in her body; from janice we see how rabbit's departure affects her and leads her to drink and kill her baby; the novel is so rabbit-centric that these seem like the most masculine versions of women's thoughts that I could ever even fathom - most interesting thing: food/eating/cooking offers revelations about people; janice doesn't make dinner/ only starts making pork when rabbit agrees to go get nelson, then he sneaks back in and the food has all congealed; tothero frames hunger as metaphorical and difficult to satisfy (rabbit is "hungry" for something unattainable); tothero asks rabbit if he's hungry and describes the "old man's hunger" as "you eat and eat and it's never the right food"; ruth says she always wanted to cook because she's good at it and she prepares some sort of hot dog meal that he acts like it's the greatest thing ever; after rebecca dies, he can't eat or drink so food can't be a comfort to him; when he leaves at the end, it's after he's agreed to go to drugstore to buy food for pregnant ruth (so food as means of escape); at one point updike even blatantly connects sex/love to meat: rabbit sees a woman in the hospital with janice and describes her "a good solid piece: haunchy."

Gilead (Marilynne Robinson, 2004)

- main characters: reverend john ames; lila; his son; jack boughton; mr. boughton; della; edward (his uncle) - one thing to note: book became important for calvinism as a sort of representation for how it was misinterpreted and wrongly framed by many; ames is a good figurehead for calvinism because he demonstrates that the answer of salvation isn't clear but there is peace in trying to live in love - another thing: role of names to connect people, creating kinship between jack and john even though he seemingly hates him - most interesting thing: stylistically speaking, the novel reads like someone's diary; we are in ames's head as he writes the story and blends past/present/future; the story is at once a meditation, a sermon, a collection of pieces of advice, a series of diary entries, and a letter; also really interesting to read this sort of domestic look at life from man's eyes

For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway, 1940)

- main characters: robert jordan; pilar; maria; pablo; karkov - one thing to note: the idea of bridge blow up is introduced on page 1, but it takes 445 pages for the thing to actually happen -- the rest is just them waiting for it, so there's a representation here of war not as this sort of glorious, heroic, quick paced thing that it's often portrayed as, but instead this slow, anxiety-ridden waiting period with the final gory moments of actual combat that pretty much kill everyone - most interesting thing: maria seems at first glance a submissive and one-dimensional character designed to represent passive femininity romanticized for robert jordan BUT you could also see her as reclaiming her identity, starting with reclaiming sexuality by CHOOSING to have sex with jordan; described at one point as wearing trousers when going to fight (reclaiming HER version of femininity); maria also carries blade and is prepared to kill or be killed using it if fighting gets that close --> while pilar looks like the strongest we also get another image of strong female character who repurposes femininity and reclaims identity and sexuality

Absalom, Absalom! (William Faulkner, 1935)

- main characters: rosa codfield; quentin; ellen; charles bon; milly; wash - one thing to say: Quentin feels more engaged with past than present (unaffected by weather, not freezing, but shakes at memory of the fire at end and can feel presence of people who have already died); given that the story winds its way through and plays with chronology, it seems believable that part of quentin would be in past; when Quentin is in the home, he is "blocked" by ghosts of imagined details Miss Rosa has shared with him - (martin kreiswirth) → A, A! is part of Yoknapatawpha fictional world, engaging in intertextual connection across other books; dialogue and bodily interactions of conversational pairs engaged in transmission of narrative materials is central to the story and, per kreiswirth, play a role in formation of yoknapatawpha → narrative as transmission, interaction between multiple people (shreve and quentin) standing in for fictional sutpens, and vice versa; description at one point where quentin stops talking because "he had no listener; he had no talker either; because now neither one of them was there; they were both in carolina...both of them were henry sutpen and both of them were bon, compounded each of both yet either neither" → author not sharing what happened but rather narrator showing through projections resulting from transferential exchange - one more thing to say: truth is never clear here, in part because of jumping around in time and PoV, in part b/c so much comes from stream of consciousness --> Faulkner uses M stylistic fluidity to the extreme to align with PM idea that truth is relative/ambiguous/impossible to know

Bel Canto (Ann Patchett, 2001)

- main characters: roxane; mr. hosowaka; gen; carmen; simon; messner; ruben; cesar - one thing to say: time key in story (sense that time is suspended); story told in series of non-chronological tellings; jumps into action from get-go and then jumps between people's PoVs, histories, etc. → works alongside theme of time being paused in this house, like they're all fixated on the present stretched out ahead of them, so we see past/future to show how present has transformed them; uses 3rd person omniscient narrator moving across people/times - most interesting thing: the way language can be used as a tool, bridging people together (through the person of Gen), but how sometimes language isn't even necessary when they find other ways to communicate (through art, especially); art as transformative; helps make sense of the ending: both roxane and gen used communication (translation/opera) to form relationships with others, form communities more broadly, so they end up functioning as sort of mirror images - one more thing: based on an actual hostage crisis in Peru; was published before sept. 11 so grapples w/ terrorism in a very different way (in this story, we become sympathetic to the terrorists; they're humanized, even the generals)

Brown Girl, Brownstones (Paule Marshall, 1959)

- main characters: selina; silla; deighton; ina; suggie; mrs. thompson; clive - one thing to say: representation of motherhood is interesting in line with sexuality and immigration; the figure of Silla doesn't get to act as a "mother" in the sense of being loving because she's too busy caring for her children in a literal sense, working for them, cooking for them, and striving for a tangible symbol of motherly love (literally the "home" she wants to buy); in contrast you have miss thompson, who is a grandmotherly sort of figure, pushing selina to consider other perspectives, and suggie, who encourages selina to embrace her sexuality and her body in a meaningful way, and both of them serve as the contrasts and almost like completions to silla's limited role - most interesting thing: motif of war: in selina's body (as both war between cultures and war of entering/fearing entering adulthood represented in menstruation); between parents (really between cultures: fast-paced get-ahead american in silla and slow, languorous deighton who wants to return to barbados, wearing rose-colored glasses about it all that ends on the same day WWII ends, when deighton drowns); clive's experience with literal war (as destructive to body and spirit, source of depression/angst)

Sophie's Choice (William Styron, 1979)

- main characters: sophie; nathan; stingo; hoss; dr. blackstock; larry; leslie lapidus - one thing to note: concept of truth as it relates to decisions we regret (sophie lies to stingo and slowly repeatedly reveals slips of truth as the story progresses) - another thing to note: distancing/contextualizing tragedy; this is supposed to be stingo retelling story and he can't help but situate the WWII aspects of the story in academic framework - most interesting thing: having to sacrifice a bit of yourself/your truth in an attempt to save yourself/those you love (sophie pretending she hates jews/her sister was raped by a jew to get hoss to free her/her son, like dana having to get alice to sleep with rufus because she needed rape to happen) - one more thing: nathan's repeated insistence that sophie did something to keep herself from dying suggests a sort of diminishing of her story in a way that aligns with what adrienne rich condemns (silencing in denial of truth) - stylistic movement in critical moments: sophie retelling almost suicide in non-chronological moments, jumping between key moments, "Footsteps thumped down the ancient carpeted staircase, timbers squealed like a hurt animal. Talktalktalktalk", talking about taking the pills, suddenly back on road, he's driving recklessly, they get out of car and he beats her; told all in present tense in moments they're having sex in woods and he beats her; multi-page paragraph recounting this scene in present tense goes hand in hand with stingo's sense of language as a process (he's writing first blurbs for books struggling with each individual word, then a narrative in his novel, then we have sophie struggling to learn english, to communicate her story → language isn't something done but something you have to actively work at) - reception was met with lots of criticism because of portrayal of non-jewish holocaust survivor, but some saw it as a way to shift holocaust into wider sense of human evil that affected us all

Sula (Toni Morrison, 1973)

- main characters: sula, nel; shadrack; jude; hannah (sula); plum; eva; the deweys; tar baby; chicken little; helene (nel); ajax - note: morrison began with introduction to gradually situate (white) readers in the story, specifically the Bottom as a place, rather than Shadrack's proclamations about Suicide Day -- "had I begun with Shadrack, I would have ignored the gentle welcome...and put the reader into immediate confrontation with his founded mind. It would have called greater attention to the traumatic displacement this most wasteful capitalistic war had on black people...and desperately creative strategies of survival" -- regret in her choice to structure the book that way - one thing to say: after sula sleeps with jude and he leaves nel, rumors go around that sula slept with white men -- treated as "nothing filthier" imaginable, flipping assumption that black is dirty here (sense of community, camaraderie in blackness, above all) - most interesting thing: Body as text, per Rosemarie Garland Thomson: Eva Pearce -- amputates leg to free herself from poverty; her "disability augments her power and dignity, inspiring awe and becoming a mark of superiority" (also shows her ownership over her body, deciding to do it harm/sacrifice it); Morrison presents her as other-worldy, a goddess creator; "Her enduring body is both her identity and her ultimate resource"; reads her act of naming as means of defining (Garland-Thomson); Sula's birthmark a text to be interpreted, read, by others (what is it? A rose? A snake?) -- just as Sethe's scar in Beloved is seen as a tree, a maze → so in a way this actually complicates women's bodies, because they use them to serve their ends rather than those of people in control, and because they can't easily be "read" by others

American Pastoral (Philip Roth, 1997)

- main characters: the swede; nathan zuckerberg; dawn; merry; jerry; rita cohen - one thing to note: powerful demonstration of how representations of america shown to be empty; miss new jersey dissatisfied with life, simultaneously hates and fixates on her own beauty, which everyone assumes the only purpose is for her to try and be miss america; the swede's life shown to be on par with nathan zuckerman's, dying from the same disease zuckerman had; swede wanted house to live in and girl who would fit image of what should belong in that house → image over meat, over any real substance; dawn's face lift is what transformed her into a happy person again (literally changing outside to impact inside) - one more thing to say: house --> swede obsessed w/ getting perfect house; dawn reveals she always hated the house, and the swede interprets that as her hating him (house as representation of him? Or more likely, his values not aligning with her own → the emptiness of his idea of perfection); book shows america as something less than ideal and makes swede's love of his country look asinine; nostalgia of country interwoven with anger; American Pastoral is all about worship, from formal religions to greed, wealth, power, and the struggle for freedom - most interesting thing: Milton is perhaps best known for his epic Paradise Lost, one of the few Pastoral epics ever written → story is organized in three sections, paradise remembered, the fall, paradise lost → why? religion shown to be empty; PM used as tool to show ludicrous nature of merry's religion → she doesn't bathe to avoid "hurting" water; is going to starve to death to achieve her idea of perfection (shown as alternative to quest for perfection that's deemed "american"); religion shown as transactional when the swede's jewish father negotiates holidays, baptisms, in imagined conversation w/ dawn (shown to be part of american life, capitalism vs. sacred/marked as something "special") → religion shown to be empty in a way/america's worship of beauty/perfection replacing religion - swede was based on a real person also called the swede (who went to the same school, etc.)

The Day of the Locust (Nathanael West, 1939)

- main characters: tod hackett; homer simpson; faye greener; abe kusich; harry; earle - one thing to say: novel shows essentially no good characters, nobody getting ahead, nobody achieving satisfaction or even peace. Clearly representing decay of American dream in CA. West saw the American dream as having been betrayed, both spiritually and materially, and in his writing he presented "a sweeping rejection of political causes, religious faith, artistic redemption and romantic love". This idea of the corrupt American dream endured long after his death, in the form of the term "West's disease", coined by the poet W. H. Auden to refer to poverty that exists in both a spiritual and economic sense. - most interesting thing: Nathanael West was born Nathan Weinstein in New York City, the first child of Ashkenazi Jewish parents. He dropped out of high school and only gained admission into Tufts College by forging his high school transcript. After being expelled from Tufts, West got into Brown University by appropriating the transcript of a fellow Tufts student, his cousin, Nathan Weinstein. --> name change to reimagine identity; novel concerned with acting/treating life as a performance and West's life story indicates his morals were in question and he was trying to Gatsby-esque his way into a new life

Invisible Man (Ralph Ellison, 1947)

- main characters: unnamed narrator; mr. norton; mr. blesdoe; ras the exhorter; tod clifton - one thing to say: the narrator enters the world of the Liberty Paints plant, which achieves financial success by subverting blackness in the service of a brighter white. There, the narrator finds himself involved in a process in which white depends heavily on black—both in terms of the mixing of the paint tones and in terms of the racial makeup of the workforce. Yet the factory denies this dependence in the final presentation of its product, and the narrator, as a black man, ends up stifled - most interesting thing: style of writing ellison describes as being like jazz -- art forms merging, meant to be metaphor vs. easily processed narrative; By turns sad, playful, shy, loud, fast-paced, drawing on different styles and traditions of writing, weaving constant refrains throughout the book, and creating a whole new aesthetic. The novel doesn't just have a style; it has styles --> this in turn captures spirit of harlem to some degree and demonstrates how literature can function as another art form, all part of this movement to embrace black creative spirit/abilities

The Road (Cormac McCarthy, 2006)

- main characters: unnamed; only old name supposedly named ely is identified - one thing to say: style described by James Wood as "dirty realism," american minimalism heightened with short declarative sentences; basic, domestic activities honored in deeply specific sentences; the existence of a moral structure—the will to do good—is the soaring discovery hidden in McCarthy's scourged planet. He evokes Hemingway's literary vision in order to invert it, first by eliminating the promise that nature can provide a refuge from human destruction (an appropriate revision in our era of nuclear rogues and global warming) and finally by giving us redemption in the form of the love between a parent and a child—their desire to be good although it serves no purpose. McCarthy is overt in his suggestion that this vision is holy. As the dying man is cared for by his son, he describes the boy as being surrounded by light. Watching him, the man seems to address some higher power directly with his mind: "Look around you, he said. There is no prophet in the earth's long chronicle who's not honored here today. Whatever form you spoke of you were right." - another thing: the lack of quotation marks to indicate when they're talking moves you into the story so even their conversation is part of the plot, not separate from it → almost like it doesn't really place us in their heads in the same way that we would if we got a clear sense that they were thinking, talking; the blending makes it so we see everything through the man's eyes but we don't get clear division between that viewpoint and the conversation, which is why the natural shift after the man dies is so smooth (story naturally continues from boy's PoV) - another thing: w/ only the corpse of a natural world to grapple w/, father and son exist in a realm rarely seen in the masculine literary tradition: the domestic. From this unlikely vantage McCarthy makes a big, shockingly successful grab at universality - most interesting thing: question of what makes someone human, how to maintain humanity in a world that has abandoned it (by choice or necessity, it's unclear) -- people eating people seems unnatural, and it's the boy insisting they must not eat other humans, despite that he never lived in the world pre-apocalypse, that makes this clarification of humanity even more interesting; boy and man agree repeatedly that they're "carrying the fire" and it's never clear what the fire is but given the choices they've made, it seems like the fire might be morality, a clear sense of when you're crossing the line, helping when you can, etc.; a few moments when it shifts to "I" and those seem to be when the man pauses to look back on everything and thinking that there are no real men (in terms of what defined humanity) - willingness to kill his son as violence as act of love, like beloved, leaves me wondering why we call some instances madness and others kindness → couldn't sethe's fear of slavery be equated to hopelessness, violence, lack of humanity in the road?

Catch-22 (Joseph Heller, 1953)

- main characters: yossarian; major major major; major _________ de coverley; milo; doc daneeka; col. cathcart; orr - one thing to say: dehumanization of soldiers/ exchangeability of men/facelessness of war embodied by soldier in white (nameless/faceless/unclear if dead or alive/replaced by another soldier later on and nobody can tell if it's the same guy/if someone is even in there) - main thing worth noting: language is shown to no longer have power because often what is said is a total lie or intended to be interpreted as the exact opposite of itself; or alternatively, language has an excessive amount of power because it can make absurd things true (ex. the doctor not really being dead but making it so)

Notes of a Native Son (James Baldwin, 1955)

- most important thing: identity and relationship to country vs. skin color; when he goes to france, he's treated first as an american (more in common with americans than african blacks); and dynamics with skin color are different -- not a source of camaraderie but distinction of cultures, even sense of jealousy toward african blacks for history that he doesn't have - one thing to note: baldwin shifts between using "his" and "we" and "I" -- at first he talks about "we" to communicate white actions as if he is also white (looking from whites' PoV), then "I" w/ autobiographical account, then back to "we" for jail situation; instability of identity but also instability of connection (sometimes with whites b/c nationality, sometimes w/ blacks b/c skin color); also by using "we" he can lure whites into false sense of comfort and position them to grapple w/ reality of race dynamics w/o getting defensive

Ayiti (Roxane Gay, 2011)

- most interesting thing: characters exist in the liminal spaces between Haiti and USA -- there's clearly an inescapable connection, whether because of family still there, family who refuses to leave or family they want to bring over, but also the way haiti is still captured in aspects of their lives, whether through accents, specific foods, etc.; also interesting because the collection is called ayiti but so much of the stories are looking at haiti from the USA, having escaped, trying to figure out relationship with home country/family's home country, your place btw 2 spaces | shifting between first- and third-person POV; difficult to separate gay's experiences from fiction and the idea that she's communicating shared truths would indicate that there is a piece of herself in a lot of these stories // liminal space is also huge here where lesbian woman are "women who don't exist" in haiti, who have to pretend they aren't gay/latch onto something american, that they can't ever act upon; similar to idea that there's this big ocean separating haitians from americans that they try to cross, or that separates families, etc.; and their stories are similarly shared in this liminal space - one thing to say: one story dehumanizes american tourists as the "they" for whom "we" perform and act out being haitan/foreign, letting them exist in the fantasy of haiti and blatantly ignore its truth lurking at the edges, so we can take their money and let them remain in ignorance (shift from conventional othering of PoC/immigrants to make american readers examine themselves more closely)

Her Body and Other Parties (Carmen Maria Machado, 2017)

- most powerful story: Eight Bites (woman undergoes surgical procedure to lose weight, following her sisters, and after she has the sense that a presence is watching her; finally recognizes it as a piece of her discarded flesh, and it haunts her until she's old and about to die and apologizes one last time; the ways in which we harm our bodies to satisfy the world? And realization at the end of her life?) - one thing to say: "The Green Ribbon" shows how the horror stories we grew up with (woman needs liver to cook, takes her own; man with hook at lovers' lane) all overlap and interweave into commentaries on women's bodies, centered on story of green ribbon girl (horror story from youth) → stage directions suggest there's an audience listening much like these stories used to be told; they go from reasonable to absurd (cut your finger to understand the pain); sense that she invites you to be a participant in these stories, to make them real in a way; narrators are never named so there's the suggestion that you might be like one of them, you might identify with them

How to Cook a Wolf (M.F.K. Fisher, 1942)

- one thing to say: cookbook genre here expanded as a sort of communal experience all across the world of food shortage and its impact on daily life and consumption; much more hands-on and creative and less wrapped around her own narrative; recipes at times clearly can't be included with the expectation of eating (ex. Talking about how americans would never eat a calf's head then including calf's head recipe) but rather as examples or illustrations of the point she's making; also includes recipes for things like toothpaste and soup → thinking through the needs of the whole body and mind (community, sustenance, sense of dignity and humanity that you can find in both eating and in keeping clean even in chaos) - most important thing: her work functions as ever-evolving, as evidenced by the presence of her own notes and updates; she makes jokes, makes fun of herself ("Cooked rice from a can? Was I dreaming? Should I ask my grocer? Where have I been? Mea culpa"), says what did and didn't work, and makes updates → sense of her work as evolving with the times, so its relevance extends out of wartime shortages and into more modern point; her point is that common sense and thoughtfulness when cooking shouldn't be limited to wartime and there's a way to cook on a spectrum so it doesn't feel as miserable/you can be creative in adapting cooking; as she notes in her introduction to the revised edition, people never really move on and can't ever fully go back to frivolous eating of the 1920s but thinking and thanksgiving, particularly when eating/cooking, is what separates us from "beasts"

Pisan Cantos (Ezra Pound, 1948)

- one thing to say: insanity's relationship to this poem -- pound literally had a mental breakdown in a metal cage in Italy that is attributed to pushing him to write this sixth book of his cantos; he was moved to medical tent and given confucius book, translation book, bible, and that's where he started writing this book; he had limited access to library, outside world, and you can see how he turns inward, concerned with memory and pound's own memories of life in other cities; also his typewriter, lack of access to get edits, etc. meant that publishers didn't necessarily correct/incorrectly corrected various parts of cantos - most important thing: experimental nature -- blend of chinese characters, musical scores; pound saw himself creating lyrical work; cared more about that than about any sort of order or rhyme scheme or having any consistency (which makes sense -- other forms of art don't often have total structure)

On Secrets, Lies, and Silence (Adrienne Rich, 1979)

- one thing to say: pushes us to consider woman-centered university, racism of the academy/its curriculum; women who succeed tend to distance themselves from other women/women's issues to avoid being accused of being less scholarly; woman-centered would mean breaking down departments/discipline (shift from fragmentation of knowledge); pushes toward blurring lines between university and community (obviously resonates w/ me) - most interesting thing: Motherhood: The Contemporary Emergency and the Quantum Leap (1978): power of speaking of women with other women, "hearing and saying of women has been able to break many a silence and a taboo"; motherhood as crux of self-determination of bodies, as historical sense of women's purpose, contained often to private sphere; root of sexism and gender stereotypes are gynephobia (male contempt/loathing for women's bodies and supposes an eternal/universal guilt that most women internalize); gynephobia + tech = dangerous combo (forced sterilization, bcps in 3rd world countries that aren't safe, low-income and WOC given c-sections/not treated equally during labor); motherhood contained to private/personal sphere is dangerous because it we approach it as individuals then we can't tackle institution of motherhood (law, tech, religion) - one more thing to say: politicizing womanhood (motherhood as politically structured, contained, utilized by patriarchy) - also: Rich brings in her own work, her own narrative; to me, that shows the power of storytelling and personal experience as a way of identifying shared experience and commonalities - also: push for accessing the female past so our actions are not dismissed as exceptional but rather rooted in a long history that has been silenced in a patriarchal violence that overlooks or dismisses women's full experiences; doing so positions women within a community

The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book (Alice B. Toklas, 1954)

- one thing to say: stylistically moves between narrative and recipe and back without any punctuation (literally moves from story to recipe without pause in the sentence, as if the instructions are just a natural part of the story, not a separate category or genre, meant to be "digested" by the reader no differently than the rest of the book - most interesting thing: at first glance, recipes seem neutral and objective but we still get glimpses of Toklas's personality poking through; seen again when Toklas gathers recipes from friends --> some are written as conversation, others include only objective and distanced instructions, and others inject all sorts of personality into them → that section pushes us to reimagine cookbook as communicative

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow is Enuf (Ntozake Shange, 1975)

- series of choreopoems telling stories of seven women (woman in red, blue, etc.); embodied storytelling - one thing to say: question of form --> what is lost/ gained when seeing it performed vs. reading it (long stylistic distinctions in writing but losing power of action and hearing things read aloud, etc.) - another thing to say: very audre lorde-esque in idea of reclamation of identity, strength coming in sisterhood - most interesting thing: describing sexual assault and how rape is much harder to recognize/punish when it's committed by a friend -- ahead of its time and the metoo movement; women all share experiences being raped by friends even though they were always told to watch out for strangers; one girl gets an abortion without anyone with her because she can't handle others being around her