Weeks 14–15: Colson Whitehead's "The Nickel Boys" (2019)

Our semester started nearly a hundred years ago with the Jazz Age lyricism of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and it ends with one of this year's most highly-anticipated releases, Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, which even made it on to President Obama's summer reading list. One major reason that so many readers are eager to get their hands on this latest book is that its predecessor, The Underground Railroad, won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize and the 2016 National Book Award (two of the nation's three major book prizes), as well as the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction, and made numerous year-end best lists. 

Like The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys serves as a reckoning with our nation's inhumane history towards African Americans. This time, the subject matter is a little closer to our present time, namely Florida's Dozier School for Boys, a reform school known to locals as Nickel Academy. Despite persistent rumors of mistreatment of residents by staff, the school remained open for more than a century, finally being closed by the state in 2011, after which 55 bodies were found buried on the grounds. While Whitehead first heard the story of the Dozier School in 2014, he was reluctant to begin work on another serious project. As he tells Vanity Fair, "I didn't want to do another heavy book. The Underground Railroad took a lot from me. I didn't want to deal with such depressing material again."  The 2016 election changed his mind, however. Faced with a sudden, alarming change in our nation's direction, Whitehead confessed that he "felt compelled to make sense of where we were as a country." Finally, while Whitehead has made use of science fiction and fantasy tropes in some of his previous books like The Underground Railroad and Zone One (a zombie apocalypse novel), he made the conscious choice to work in a more strict realist mode this time around.

Here's a breakdown of our final classes on The Nickel Boys:

• Tues. November 26: Prologue, Chapters 1–4
• Thurs. November 28: No Class — Thanksgiving
• Tues. December 3: Chapters 5–12
• Thurs. December 5: Chapters 13–16, Epilogue

And here are a few supplemental resources related to the novel:

• Frank Rich, "In ‘The Nickel Boys,’ Colson Whitehead Depicts a Real-Life House of Horrors" in The New York Times [link]
• Maureen Corrigan, "Rooted In History, 'The Nickel Boys' Is A Great American Novel" on NPR's Fresh Air: [link]
• Michael Schaub, "For The 'Nickel Boys,' Life Isn't Worth 5 Cents" on NPR [link]
• Tim Adams, "The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead – Brutal Justice" in The Guardian [link]
• Ron Charles, "In Colson Whitehead's 'The Nickel Boys,' an Idealistic Black Teen Learns a Harsh Reality" in The Washington Post [link]
• Constance Grady, "Colson Whitehead's Spare, Riveting, Horrifying Nickel Boys" in VOX [link]
• Art Edwards, "The Carrot and the Stick: On Colson Whitehead's 'The Nickel Boys'" in Los Angeles Review of Books [link]
• "Colson Whitehead Talks Hope, Despair, and Fighting the Power in 'The Nickel Boys'" in Vanity Fair [link]

Weeks 12 and 13: Valeria Luiselli's "Faces in the Crowd" (2012)

As I stated in my opening note, a true survey of "American Literature" would include (at the very least) work from Canada and Mexico if not the Americas as a whole. At the same our country's tastes have grown increasingly multicultural, both within and beyond our national borders. Zadie Smith, Marjane Satrapi, Sally Rooney, Roberto Bolaño, Elena Ferrante, and Karl Ove Knausgård are all fine examples of foreign books that captivated large American audiences, and the work that trailblazing international authors did in past generations has helped set the state for today's breakout voices, including Mexico's Valeria Luiselli.

Luiselli has taken the literary world by storm: in 2014 she received the National Book Foundation's "5 under 35" award, and still not having reached that age, she published four books in two different genres — the essay collections Sidewalks (2013) and Tell Me How It Ends: an Essay in 40 Questions (2017); and the novels The Story of My Teeth (2015) along with her debut, Faces in the Crowd (2012) — all of which have been well-received, with Teeth being a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. This year's Lost Children Archive — a narrative version of Luiselli's experience doing aid work for immigrants first explored in Tell Me How It Ends — is sure to be a favorite for all of the major literary awards. It's also 400 pages long, which is why we aren't reading it, but that doesn't mean that Faces in the Crowd isn't a fascinating book that offers startling insights into the immigrant's experience of America.

Because it's the new millennium, books and authors make trailers now, and in the film above, Luiselli offers her own introduction to Faces in the Crowd, telling us that the novel "is told in four different times and by two different narrators." She continues: 

The first narrator is a woman, probably in her early forties, with two children in a house in Mexico City and a husband, whom she's slowly drifting away from. And the other narrator is a Mexican poet, who in fact existed and lived in New York in the 1920s, his name was Gilberto Owen. He narrates, almost from his deathbed in the 1950s, and he tells the story of his youth in New York, as does the woman narrator, the first narrator, tells the story of her youth in New York when she was working in a publishing house and trying to find the new Bolaño, and she comes across Gilberto Owen's poetry. He recorded the minute details of his everyday life in Harlem, which was a neighborhood that I had arrived to, and it was a neighborhood that sorta didn't have any depth for me — I had just arrived, I was a newcomer to it — and his letters became a sort of mirror for my own experience of the beighborhood and gave that neighborhood a depth it didn't have.  

I started writing a novel from the viewpoint of Gilberto Owen, sorta trying to record and imagine that area in the 1920s. At some point, I got married, I became pregnant, I planted a tree, and the rest of the chicles attached to growing up. When I finally went through the phase of pregnancy, which was a for me a very traumatizing phase because I didn't write, I didn't read, I didn't even watch movies, I just slept, basically. When I finally got through that I started writing again and I took out this material from the archives I had but it didn't seem as alive as it had once seemed. It sorta seemed absurd to carry on writing as nothing had happened so I had to find a viewpoint and a different tone to somehow go back into that material and I started intervening in it.

From there she goes on to discuss the essential multicultural nature of Harlem, which was only starting to develop — alongside the Harlem Renaissance — as Owen found himself in New York. Nevertheless, he found himself caught in-between cultural circles, and this spirit is a big part of what Luiselli tried to cultivate in her novel.

Here's our schedule for Faces in the Crowd:

• Thurs. November 14: pgs 1–53 
• Tues. November 19: pgs 54–105
• Thurs. November 21: pgs 106–146

And here are a few additional readings that might be interesting:

• Mina Holland reviews the novel for The Guardian: [link]
• Hector Tobar reviews the book for The Los Angeles Times: [link]
• Stephen Piccarella reviews the book for Electric Lit: [link]
• "Smashing Snow Globes: A Writer On Essays, Novels And Translation" on NPR's "All Things Considered": [link]
• Luiselli on translating the stories of detailed immigrant children in Rolling Stone: [link]

Week 12: Don DeLillo's "Pafko at the Wall" (1992)

We'll continue after the X-Men with another one-day reading before we move on to Valeria Luiselli and the 21st century: Don DeLillo's Pafko at the Wall. Subtitled "The Shot Heard Round the World," DeLillo's novella is concerned with just that: Bobby Thompson's game-winning home run against the Brooklyn Dodgers that won the 1951 NL Pennant for the New York Giants, which is widely considered to be one of the game's defining moments.

Pafko was first published in a folio edition in Harper's in October 1992 and would later appear under the title "The Triumph of Death" as a prologue to DeLillo's epic novel Underworld (1997), before appearing on its own as a single-printing hardcover (shown at the left) in 2001. This last version will be what we read, whether you buy the book itself or rely on the PDF linked below.

You'll notice that unlike so much of the prose we've read so far, DeLillo's characters exist in our own real world rather than a fictional one, and this is a popular postmodern literary technique called "historiographic metafiction" (impress your friends with that one) — he'd also use this to great effect in novels including Mao II and Falling Man — and this, along with our foreknowledge of the game's outcome, create a fascinating literary tension for us as readers.

Like the previous book, we'll spend just one day with DeLillo:

• Tues. November 12: Pafko at the Wall [PDF]

If you'd like a little more info on the game itself, check out the videos below.

[ footnote: 11/12 ] 

As I was finishing DeLillo tonight, I had the sinking suspicion that something was missing. Then I remembered that, up until this semester, I had taught from a printout of the original Harper's version of the novella from 1992, and this time I was reading the special hardcover edition published in 2001 to mark the 50th anniversary of "The Shot Heard Round the World." What I've linked above is a PDF version of the official e-book published by Scribners.

So I dug up that old PDF, and as I thought, there was one relatively important part of Bill's post-game pursuit of Cotter that DeLillo opted to cut out of the final published version, which you can see to the right. I've left a little of their exchange before the cut (which falls in the middle of pg. 83) so you can orient yourself.

I'll be curious to hear your thoughts on that edit; whether it makes the story stronger or weaker, and why you think DeLillo might've chosen to cut it.

Your Final Essays (Due 12/12)

We've already gone over the basics of this assignment a number of times, so there shouldn't be anything too surprising here. The main goal here is twofold: 1) for you to find a topic that allows you to work closely with a subject that you find interesting and rewarding, and 2) for you to explore that topic over the breadth of a number of the texts we've read this semester, making an effective argument for its varied manifestations over time. For you to be able to do that you're going to need to choose a topic capacious enough to accommodate a complex analysis, and one which will appear across enough of our books to provide sufficient evidence.

There's no exact formula of how many books you need to bring into the discussion, but I'd think that three might be a good minimum. The more important thing is that you explore your topic with appropriate depth and then muster whatever evidence is necessary to make your most effective case. Thinking in terms of the classic five-paragraph essay you should aim to have at least three facets to your argument, and then each of those should be addressed as completely as possible. Use the evidence that works best where it works best: you don't need to use the same books to address every sub-point, and it's totally fine if you use a book for one point and then don't use it again. While it should be clear from what I've just said, let me be explicit: pretty much the only successful way to organize this essay is thematically, not chronologically or moving book by book through the readings.

As for the specific topic you choose — and I hope you're not just thinking about this now — one of the following general themes might suit you well:

• Race
• Gender
• Class / Money
• Violence (including War)
• Faith
• Justice / Injustice
• Age / Coming of Age
• Mortality

Or something a little more specific and weird might be more appealing:

• Food
• Alcohol (and/or Drugs)
• Motherhood
• the Kitchen
• Gossip
• the Media (print, television, radio, movies, etc.)
• Sexuality
• Mental Illness
• Work
• Fidelity / Infidelity
• Rural vs. Urban Life
• Accidents

That's twenty potential topics, but I'm open to any others that you can come up with. That said, I strongly recommend that you e-mail me with your proposed topic and a general blueprint of how you might handle it, so I can vet it and/or make suggestions before you get too far into the writing process.

Technical Details

Here are a few important guidelines for your final essays — fail to meet these requirements and, well, you'll fail(!):

• Length: 6–8 double-spaced pages minimum — that's full pages, and not counting your works cited list, so to be safe, make sure your piece goes on to page 7. Another reasonable minimum would be 2000 words. If the spirit moves you and you find yourself writing a longer piece, please don't feel constrained by the 8 page limit (that's just a general ballpark length to aim for). On the other hand, if you hand in a paper that's less than 6 full pages, you'll automatically receive an F (so don't do that).

• Formatting — particularly since you're sending your file to me electronically, it would not be wise to play around with margins, get cutesy with font sizes, etc. 12 point Times New Roman is lovely and easy on the eyes, to boot. Barring that, Cambria or a similar serif typeface (serifs, don't ya know, are those little decorative doohickeys at the ends of the letter) will be fine. I'm partial to the restrained elegance of Goudy Old Style (but that's just me).

• MLA citations and works cited list — you'll find links to MLA resources here. Don't forget that you need to cite paraphrases and summaries of source texts in addition to direct quotations.

• No block quotes — there is, perhaps, no greater comfort to the unprepared last-minute writer than the block quote — just cram it all in there, making no attempt to trim the text (or disguise the fact that you're cutting and pasting from Wikipedia). In formal essays of lengths longer than what you're being asked to deliver here, I might allow students to use one block quote in their essay, but there's no reason whatsoever for block quotes in a final project like this. Trim quotes to their essentials and/or interweave them throughout your sentences.

• Due date — Thursday, December 12th at 6:00PM. Please send your final to me at my gmail address (which is my last name [dot] my full first name at gmail.com) as an attachment. When I get your paper, I'll download it to make sure that it opens without issue and then write you a little note confirming that I've received it. Don't forget that late assignments will be docked accordingly. The absolute latest I can accept a paper is Monday, December 16th.

Week 11: Chris Claremont and Brent Ericson's "X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills" (1982)

We're taking a bit of a left-turn with our next book, but an interesting one and one that will complement our other readings quite nicely. Reading a graphic novel in a literature survey isn't exactly groundbreaking, but it's typically a "prestige" book like Art Spiegelman's Maus or Alison Bechdel's Fun Home, not an actual comic book with superheroes in spandex running around zapping one another. Nonetheless, X-Men: God Loves, Man Kills, the fourth in Marvel Comics' graphic novel series intended to be both: eschewing monthly comics' newsprint for a larger format printed on heavyweight glossy paper. Brent Anderson's art is far more realistic than the typical cartoon style, seemingly painted rather than drawn, and Chris Claremont's story surpasses his already-high standards, offering up a legitimate statement about right and wrong, politics and morality.

There's a lot of backstory here, but you don't really need to know any of it and that's part of the beauty of this self-contained, non-canon story. The X-Men — young people who've opted to use their superpowers, granted via genetic mutation, to help defend a human race that fears and hates them — are led by the powerful telepath Charles Xavier. Their chief protagonist, and co-star here is Magneto, a Holocaust-survivor with the power to control magnetic forces. The team made their debut in 1963 and went on hiatus in 1970, reprinting older tales, but in 1975 Claremont resurrected the title, introduced a new, multicultural cast of characters, and made it one of the world's most popular comics titles. His 1975–1991 run as writer and chief-architect of the series (collaborating with artists Dave Cockrum, John Byrne, John Romita, Jr., Mark Silvestri, and Jim Lee, among others) is widely held as the gold standard for both the X-Men themselves and superhero comics in general. Part of why that work is so highly-esteemed is Claremont's use of the comic medium as a vehicle for social commentary, with the mutants' outsider status serving as a symbol for racism, homophobia, xenophobia, fears during the early AIDS crisis, etc. Claremont explains the core philosophical differences between his chief protagonist and antagonist in a 2000 New York Magazine profile: 

Magneto wants to protect mutants by any means necessary — usually by taking over the world — while Professor X believes humans and mutants can learn to live together. "To use Martin Luther King's idea," says Claremont, "judge them by the content of their character, not the color of their skin." He pauses. "Or the number of arms they have."

This ideological divide is at the heart of God Loves, Man Kills, in which a popular televangelist leads a crusade — both publicly and privately — against mutant-kind. Sadly, it's a message that's every bit as timely now as it was thirty-seven years ago.

We'll spend just one day with the graphic novel, which you can find here: [PDF]

• Thurs. November 7: God Loves, Man Kills

And here is a little optional reading that might help frame the book:

• Alex Abad-Santos talks to the book's creators about its significance in 2017 for Vox: [link]
• Den of Geek revisits the graphic novel in 2008: [link]

Extra Credit Mini-Project

Do well on this assignment and you'll be as happy as this pencil (unless it's actually terrified and running away).

I'd like to extend to everyone an opportunity for a little extra credit before the semester's up. The project is brief, but should offer you a chance to share something useful with your peers and me as well. 

You might recall that we'll read a total of ten texts this semester and below I'll list another twenty or so books that might've made it onto the reading list. Your mission: to select another book (a novel, collection of short stories, volume of poems, play, book of literary nonfiction, graphic novel etc.) that you think would be a good candidate for a survey of American lit course. Aside from demonstrable quality it should meet the following criteria:

1. It should be written by an American author (authors with joint citizenship and/or a long residency in the US without citizenship are acceptable as well).
2. It should have been published after 1900.
3. It should be a discrete volume (i.e. not a collected works, selected works, etc.).
4. It shouldn't duplicate the selections on my list or any of your peers' reserved choices.

Choices can be reserved (first come-first served) by commenting on this thread. If there are any issues with your pick, I'll let you know. You'll write up a short (250–300 word minimum) rationale for your pick and post it as a comment on this thread. Start your entry by listing the book as follows — Author, Title (year of publication) — then skip two lines and paste in your write-up. Of course, you'll want to make sure you

The deadline for this assignment is noon on Tuesday, November 26th, and we'll take a little time out of class that day to discuss everyone's selections. If you have any other questions, let me know.

---

Alternate Possibilities for Authors on the Reading List

• Toni Morrison, Sula, Beloved, or Song of Solomon
• Carson McCullers, Reflections in a Golden Eye
• Jack Kerouac, On the Road
• Colson Whitehead, The Underground Railroad
• Chris Claremont (and John Byrne), The Dark Phoenix Saga
• Don DeLillo, White Noise
• Valeria Luiselli, Lost Children Archive

Too Canonical / Safe / You Probably Already Read in High School

• Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises or A Farewell to Arms
• Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
• Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club

We Don't Need Another White Male Postmodernist (Though We Still Love Them)

• Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
• Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
• Donald Barthelme, Snow White
• William S. Burroughs, Naked Lunch
• Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America

These Women Are Too Damn Weird / Experimental for General Audiences

• Renata Adler, Speedboat
• Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee
• Kathy Acker, Blood and Guts in High School
• Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons or Three Lives

#MeToo

• Junot Diaz
• Sherman Alexie
• David Foster Wallace

Iconic, Yet Very Long

• Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
• Richard Fariña, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me
• Ken Kesey, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
• Louise Erdrich, Love Medicine
• Richard Wright, Native Son

Weeks 9–11: Maxine Hong Kingston, "The Woman Warrior" (1976)

Much like The Bluest Eye, our next book, The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts by Maxine Hong Kingston is emblematic of a very positive growing cultural pluralism in US literary circles during the 1970s (in the aftermath of the civil rights movements of the 1960s). In the more than forty years since its publication, it's become both an iconic, foundational text in Asian American literature, while also courting controversy.

Reviewing the book for The New York Times in 1976, John Leonard hailed The Woman Warrior as "one of the best [books] I've read in years" and described it as "fierce intelligence, all sinew, prowling among the emotions." Playing off of the book's subtitle, he notes that "there are two sets of ghosts. One set is Chinese legends, traditions, folklore, and always the unwanted girl‐child. The other set is Western, American, barbarian, the machine‐myths of the Occident. Somewhere in between, like the poet Ts'ai Yen, she is a hostage. And it isn't clear whether there is a place for her to return to, with her songs 'from the savage lands.'" He continues, "The Warrior Woman trafficks back and forth between sets of ghosts, re‐imagining the past with such dark beauty, such precision and anger and sadness, that you feel you have saddled the Tao dragon and see all through the fiery eye of God. Then, suddenly, you are dumped into the mundane, into scenes so carefully observed, so balanced on a knife‐edge of hope and humiliation, that you don't know whether to laugh or cry." That's fine praise from a trusted cultural institution, but not all readers have always been as pleased with Kingston.

Specifically, from within the field of Asian American literary studies, there have been critiques of the book in regards to its representation of ethnic identity, with some accusing Kingston of playing to stereotypes and fictionalizing both Chinese culture and folklore. We've already discussed the burden placed upon minority authors to serve as examples to mainstream audiences and that will influence our approach to this book as well. Another related accusation that's dogged the book since its publication is the question of its genre and inherent truth. As Jenessa Job observes, "the book itself is labeled 'Fiction/Literature' on the back cover, while the front cover proclaims the novel's acquisition of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction." Particularly in light of the controversy surrounding the liberties taken by memoirists like James Frey and JT LeRoy in the last decade, The Woman Warrior is seen in a somewhat different light, less an autobiographical document and more a series of fictions that draws upon real-life facts but distorts them. I offer all this up not to ruin your experience of the book, but simply to put it in context.

Here's our schedule for our time with Kingston:

• Thurs. October 24: "No Name Woman" and "White Tigers"
• Tues. October 29: "Shaman"
• Thurs. October 31: "At the Western Palace"
• Tues. November 5: "Song for a Barbarian Reed Pipe"

Here are some supplemental readings:

• "In Defiance of Two Worlds," John Leonard's New York Times review of the book [link]
• D.J. Enright reviews the book for The London Review of Books [link]
• Jess Row writes about "The Woman Warrior at Thirty" for Slate [link]
• Kirkus' starred review of the book [link]