On two provocative questions raised in a course’s compelling conversations.
In the semester
preview post on my American Novel Since WWII course, I focused on questions
of likability, and on a couple narrator/protagonists (Sylvia Plath’s Esther
and Jeffrey
Eugenides’ Calliope) whom my prior section of the course hadn’t found
likeable. For whatever reason, this time around the class responded very well
to both of those novels, and were similarly willing and able to give an
entirely non-traditional and very challenging novel like Ishmael
Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo their time and
effort. Indeed, the whole semester with this great group was successful, and I
mostly just had to stay out of the way of their voices and conversations. And
no series of conversations were more communally engaged, nor more provocative,
than those focused on Bret
Easton Ellis’ American Psycho.
If you know either the novel or the relatively close film
adaptation, you know that one of the central questions about American Psycho is whether its
narrator/protagonist Patrick Bateman is actually carrying out his brutal serial
killings or simply imagining or hallucinating them. The question goes to literary
issues (such as narrator reliability), genre issues (whether the novel is
horror or social satire, for example), and social issues (including whether
Bateman represents an extreme or a norm within his 1980s yuppie culture), among
other ramifications. The students engaged with all those issues, using evidence
from the novel very effectively to support their perspectives, but they also
came to a very strong communal perspective on an even more complex and crucial
point: that the existence of the uncertainties and ambiguities is itself an
analytical point, a way to understand what Ellis is doing and how his novel
works.
Those issues are at least somewhat specific and unique to Ellis’ novel, but
in the course of our conversations about American
Psycho the students also raised another, broader and equally
provocative question about how we define the work. Compared to the three books
we had read before it (Plath’s, Reed’s, and Kurt
Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five),
Ellis’ novel was far more mainstream and popular, a massmarket bestseller by an
author with an established reputation for such hits. In fact, as I mentioned in
class, it is likely one of the few such truly bestselling, popular works I’ve
taught—even works like The Great Gatsby
that are very well-known today did not sell particularly well in their own era.
And that sense of popularity, rather than simply identifying Ellis’ novel as
something different from our other readings, provoked the students to a series
of strong and evolving discussions about topics like audience and expectations,
author’s purpose and intention, and the roles literature and art can play in
reflecting, contributing to, and challenging their societies. Just one more
layer to this course’s very compelling communal conversations.
Next recap tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on this
topic? How was your spring semester?
No comments:
Post a Comment