Prompt 4: The Society of Kids

In Ch. 11, Pop Culture Professor Murray makes the following statement:

I’m sorry you didn’t bring the kids.  I want to get to know small kids.  I tell my students they’re already too old to figure importantly in the making of society.  Minute by minute, they’re beginning to diverge from each other.  “Even as we sit here,” I tell them, “you are spinning out from the core, becoming less recognizable as a group, less targetable by advertisers and mass-producers of culture.  Kids are a true universal.  But you’re well beyond that, already beginning to drift, to feel estranged from the products you consume.  Who are they designed for?  What is your place in the marketing scheme?  Once you’re out of school, it is only a matter of time before you experience the vast loneliness and dissatisfaction of consumers who have lost their group identity.”  Then I tap my pencil on the table to indicate time passing ominously.  (49-50)

Straight Man and the Contemporary Campus Novel

Answer one of the following two prompts on Straight Man.

200-400 words.  Due: Tuesday March 13th by 11:59pm.

In Robert F. Scott’s “It’s a Small World After All: Assessing the Contemporary Campus Novel” (MMLA Vol. 37, no. 1, Spring 2004), the following assessment of the subgenre of “Campus Novel” is made:

In terms of their prevailing formal qualities and stylistic tendencies, campus novels are essentially comedies of manners. And, because these works tend to dwell upon the frustrations that accompany academic existence, they often call attention to the antagonistic relationships that exist between mind and flesh, private and public needs, and duty and desire. As a result, despite their comic tone, most campus novels simmer with barely concealed feelings of anger and even despair as protagonists frequently find themselves caught between administrative indifference on one side and student hostility on the other. Thus, even when campus novels are lightly satirical in tone, they nonetheless exhibit a seemingly irresistible tendency to trivialize academic life and to depict academia as a world that is both highly ritualized and deeply fragmented. (83)

Further:

At the heart of most campus novels stands the much-maligned figure of the college professor. Indeed, although there are notable (though few) exceptions, the professorial protagonists in recent campus novels are more often than not depicted as buffoons or intellectual charlatans. Among the well-established stereotypes, for example, are the absent-minded instructor, the wise simpleton, the lucky bumbler, the old goat, and the fuddy-duddy. Far removed from the inspiring figures of the kindly Mr. Chips or the dedicated seeker of knowledge, fictional academics—males in particular—are more likely to emerge as burnt out lechers with a penchant for preying on their students or their colleagues’ spouses. In his analysis of the images of higher education in academic novels of the 1980s, John Hedeman convincingly contrasts the generally positive images of professors prevalent in academic novels of the 1960s, those figures “who wanted to make a difference in the world beyond their cloistered campus,” with the protagonists in the 1980s who “have given up caring even about their own disciplines.” Maintaining that “[s]elf-doubt, self-absorption, and self-hate” characterize most recent fictional depictions of professors, Hedeman soberingly describes these protagonists as “average men and women with average abilities who live empty, unhappy lives” (152). (qtd. in Scott 83)

Do you agree with this assessment? Why the shift from the “positive” depictions of professors of the 60s to the more contemporary campus novels? Are these depictions realistic fiction, satiric send-ups, or is there something else at work here? Further, what of the depictions of students in campus novels (no winners there...)?

The “Picaresque” character of William Henry Devereaux, Jr.

Due Tuesday March 13th by 11:59pm

200-400 words.

In Jamie McCulloch’s “Creating the Rogue Hero: Literary Devices in the Picaresque Novels of Martin Amis, Richard Russo, Michael Chabon, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Steve Tesich” (International Fiction Review, Vol. 34, No. 1, 2007), McCulloch writes:

It's not just because picaresque heroes are more fun than other characters that I love them. It's not just the dissolute behavior that I find so appealing. And it's not just the dubious company they keep or the adventures they embark upon that I find so satisfying. All of these things make for a pretty good story. But what makes them really worthwhile is the romantic sense of sadness and futility that haunts them all—their honest recognition of their own shortcomings that gives them emotional weight and makes them resonate. Disappointingly, like young Hal in Henry IV, Part I, who eventually deserts Falstaff, all rogue heroes must grow up and assume a certain amount of responsibility. Often they settle down, give up their aimless wandering, and find a home. Unfortunately, settling down can mean letting go of "the impossible dream." We wish their peregrinations would never end, and so by nature the picaresque novel, whose trappings are ribald excess, is also fraught with a deep sense of loss and sorrow. We must not forget, however, that what makes the picaresque so much fun are the comic possibilities of an errant hero in pursuit of something impossible. He is at once noble and pathetic, a delight to spend time with and to laugh at, and heroic in his blindness to the humbling reality that confronts him wherever he goes.

[…]

A more scholarly approach to balancing the serious and the humorous in the picaresque is to mock the early romances just as Cervantes set out to do. The romance tradition is ripe for parody as are those who pursue "the impossible dream." In Russo's Straight Man, Hank has a not-so-subtle Cervantes-esque dream: "In my dream I am the star of the donkey basketball game. I have never been more light and graceful, never less encumbered by gravity or age. My shots, every one of them, leave my fingertips with perfect backspin and arc toward the hoop with a precision that is pure poetry, its refrain the sweet ripping of twine. And remember: I'm doing all this on a donkey" (364). Metaphorically shooting from his ass, Devereaux is weightless, ageless. The image is steeped in the mock heroic, an English professor as warrior is comic enough in itself—a man like the man of La Mancha riding a donkey while competing in a sports event is wonderfully absurd. At the same time, the dream is sadly romantic in the same sense that Don Quixote is a sadly romantic man—a man who sees the world as he chooses, not as it is.

Analyze Hank as a Picaresque (lovable rogue) character. Does Russo present Hank as a man in quest, a man whose quest is stalled, or is something else at work here? Could the mid-life crisis Hank and many of his colleagues are undergoing be a postmodern quest in and of itself? Is Hank Quixotic, and if so, what are the windmills he’s chasing? If there’s no quest, is it Picaresque (side note: I really did not intend for that to sound like a Johnny Cochrane courtroom rhyme, but here we are…)? Have I asked too many questions? Why are you still reading? Out of a morbid curiosity to see how this prompt ends? Something else?

First Impression/Setting the Tone

Answer one of the following four prompts on I am Not Sidney Poitier.

Due Feb. 26^th by 11:59pm.  200-400 words.

The novel begins with the following:

“I am the ill-starred fruit of a hysterical pregnancy, and surprisingly, odd though I might be, I am not hysterical myself.  I’m rather calm, in fact; some might say waveless.  I am tall and dark and look for the world like Mr. Sidney Poitier, something my poor disturbed and now deceased mother could not have known when I was born, when she named me Not Sidney Poitier.  I was born after two years of hysterical generation, and who knows what happens in a mind when expectant, anticipative for so long.  Two years.  At least this was the story told to me” (3).

Having read the first few chapters of the novel, what role does this opener serve to situate/anchor the book, or does its unmooring qualities remove the possibility of any such anchoring?  What genre/type of story does such an opening promise?  Where else in media (books, tv, film, etc) have you seen such a move?  Is this indicative of the possibility for magical realism or just the ramblings of an unreliable narrator?  Discuss.

The Role of Mentors

Due Feb. 26^th by 11:59pm.  200-400 words.

Not Sidney has a series of would-be-mentors in Betty (the raving socialist addicted to fast food), Ted Turner, Raymond (karate instructor), Percival Everett (college professor who teaches a course in nothing/meaninglessness), the ghost of his mother, and perhaps even the teachings of Mesmer.  How does the mentor/mentee relationship work in this novel, and what might Everett be saying about such relationships?

Ted’s “Jingles”

Due Feb. 26^th by 11:59pm.  200-400 words.

On pages 11-13, Ted discusses his plan to air the same “old crappy shows […] again and again until they sit in people’s heads like jingles” (12).  He then goes on to make a pretty profound statement about the political impact of television (of course he ends it with nonsense, but there is profundity in the middle).  What is Ted trying to do to the political power dynamic of network television, and what would rendering this media into nothing more than jingles do to the brains of those that consumed them?  In other words, what is Everett saying about television in the postmodern age?

Not Sidney’s Imprisonment in a Rural Georgia Work Gang/Thanksgiving With his Girlfriend’s Family

Due Feb. 26^th by 11:59pm.  200-400 words.

Everett’s never been one to shy away from issues of race in America.  About 20 years ago, Everett was supposed to speak at the South Carolina state house, but refused due to the presence of the Confederate Flag.  He’s also written satirical books such as “A History of the African American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond” and “Erasure” which lampoons what he terms “ghetto pop fiction” such as Push by Sapphire.  In this novel, as well, issues of race are at the front and center, especially in Chapters 2 and 4 (where he’s imprisoned and forced to work in a labor camp for “driving while black,” has a 19^th century slave narrative dream toward the end of ch. 2, and then experiences the more subtle racism of his girlfriend’s parents—who find his skin too dark, but change their reaction when they find out he’s rich).  Analyze these scenes and what Everett might be saying about race in America through them.