[The final
papers are coming in and the blue books have entered the building, so it must
be the end of another semester. This week I’ll recap some inspiring moments
from my
Fall 2018 semester, and I’d love to hear some of yours in comments!]
On three complex,
inspiring characters from my Major
American Authors of the 20th Century class.
1)
Carrie Meeber: I wrote about the contemporary
relatability of the title character of Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie (1900) in one
of my earliest posts, and almost exactly eight years later (!) have continued
to find that both she and the novel speak to 21st century students
and readers very fully and powerfully. But this time I was also struck by my
response to the novel’s ending, where Dreiser’s narrator criticizes Carrie for
her pursuit of wealth and fame and the solitude and unhappiness it seems to
have produced. Maybe, and certainly we all should think about what we most value,
individually and societally; but maybe Dreiser’s narrator is also a bit limited
in how he’s able to examine a young woman and her potential identities and
futures. This time around, anyway, I found Carrie’s present location and future
potential at the novel’s end to be, while unquestionably complex and not
without their sadder sides, much more inspiring than does Dreiser’s narrator.
2)
Albertine Johnson: I talked a bit about the first-person
narrator of the first story in Louise Erdrich’s short story cycle Love
Medicine (1984/1993) in this
post on that story and book, but to be honest have never focused too much
of my reading or teaching of the book on Albertine. After that story she
largely disappears from the novel, appearing in one other, very dark and
complex story toward the book’s end, “A
Bridge.” Part of the reason is that Albertine no longer lives on the Turtle
Mountain Chippewa reservation with her family, having moved away to attend
nursing school in a city (probably Fargo). This time around those details got
me thinking about the ways that Albertine parallels Erdrich
herself, including mixed-race parents (Albertine’s Dad is Swedish American
and Erdrich’s German American), that education away from the reservation
(Erdrich attended Dartmouth), and that complex insider-outsider relationship to
the Chippewa community as a result. Which might mean that Albertine is more
than just our first narrator—she is in some compelling ways our narrator and
writer throughout the book.
3)
Nath Lee: As I mentioned in my Preview
post for this class, my difficult decision to remove Oscar Wao from the syllabus freed up a spot for our FSU
Community Read book for the year, Celeste
Ng’s Everything I Never Told You (2014).
Ng’s book is a mystery/thriller, and I’m not going to reveal any of its
climactic revelations or scenes here. So I’ll just say that while those scenes
focus on Lydia Lee, the teenager whose death (no spoilers there) drives the
novel’s plot and its revelations alike, they also have a great deal to tell us
about her older brother, Nath. I suppose I’ll spoil enough to say that Nath
lives on beyond the novel’s ending, and thus represents questions of whether
and how the next generation of this family and American story will endure into
the future. Questions we should all be thinking a lot about these days, and
ones that Ng’s book, like so many great American novels, helps us examine.
Last recap
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Semester reflections you’d share?
No comments:
Post a Comment