[Next week, a
new semester begins; so this week, I’ll preview five classes and other aspects
of that semester, this time through the lens of teaching and working in the age
of Trump. Leading up to a special weekend post on book talks and plans!]
On three contemporary
topics that six classic American novels help us analyze.
1)
Immigration and Empathy: For the first time in
my many sections of this course, I’m stretching the definition of “novel” a bit
to include Sui
Sin Far’s short story cycle Mrs.
Spring Fragrance (1912). Besides being a wonderful book, Mrs. Spring Fragrance also offers our
most in-depth literary responses to the Chinese Exclusion Act, giving extended
voice to the effects of exclusionary attitudes and policies. But in its own
way, Willa Cather’s lyrical proto-Modernist frontier novel My
Ántonia (1918) offers just as intimate a depiction of immigrant
identities and communities, as narrator Jim Burden shares his outsider but
ever-more emphathetic perspective on the title character and her immigrant
American family, peers, and world. Taken together, these two books can help us
engage with one of the American communities most likely to be affected by Trump’s
policies and administration.
2)
Community and Identity: Our second and third
novels, Mark
Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885) and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899), are linked by
more than just shared Southern settings (Twain’s novel along the Mississippi
River, and Chopin’s at the river’s Louisiana endpoints). Both also focus,
through the perspectives of their protagonists (Twain through Huck’s
first-person narration and Chopin through a limited omniscient narrative focus
on Edna Pontellier), on how those individual characters are influenced by and
respond to broader social and cultural forces in their respective communities. They
do so in relationship to different central themes (race and prejudice in Twain,
gender and sex in Chopin), and their protagonists come
to famously different concluding
moments. But nonetheless, both characters struggle with questions facing
all Americans in 2017: whether and how to resist and challenge the dominant
forces in our society, and whether its possible to create individual and
communal identities outside of those powerful trends.
3)
Perspectives and the Past: Our first and last
novels, Nathaniel
Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables
(1851) and William
Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury
(1929), are as different from each other as their respective historical and
cultural moments. But one clear distinction, between their forms of narration, actually
helps both novels portray a shared theme: how our perspectives shape our sense
of the past. The storytelling narrator of Hawthorne’s
historical romance moves between official histories, “fireside legends,”
and the perspectives of different characters and generations, all to engage
with how a historical event like the Salem Witch Trials echoes into subsequent
moments and communities. The stream
of consciousness sections that comprise most of Faulkner’s Modernist
masterpiece help him create one of literature’s most intimate portrayals of
individual perspectives, and those perspectives consistently focus on the continued
presence and influence of the personal, familial, and regional pasts. As I’ve argued
already in this space, no lens is more important to understanding 2017
America than whether and how to remember our collective histories, and in their
hugely distinct ways both of these classic novels offer valuable visions of
those questions.
Next preview
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Spring plans you’d highlight or share?
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