The End of the World as We Know It

As I said in class, for your post you can bring up a passage or a scene from the text and talk about why you found it interesting, provocative, or moving.  You can also offer a review of the work we’ve been reading; you can try to assess its merits and its weaknesses.  You can bring up an image or a film clip related to the text and discuss it.  Or you can offer a link to an article or essay that is relevant to the themes we’ve been reading and discuss that.  Some good sources are:

Home

http://www.lrb.co.uk/

http://www.slate.com/

http://www.salon.com/

http://nplusonemag.com/

http://www.aldaily.com/

I should note that the political bent of most of these sites is liberal/left–in part because that is the political perspective of the majority of critics, authors, and intellectuals who currently contribute to contemporary literary culture.  If you are interested in a conservative perspective, you might consult:

http://www.nationalreview.com/

http://www.weeklystandard.com/

To give you an example of the kind of thing you might want to talk about,  I just read a review Jonathan Franzen’s new massive novel, Freedom, at slate.com:

http://www.slate.com/id/2265316/

Though I have not yet read the novel, it struck me that Franzen is addressing themes similar to the ones we see in Kushner.  His book, apparently, is about the danger of freedom as an ideal, one that is, of course, central to our conception of America.  If we become too passionately attached to individual freedom, and thereby reject responsibility, then we run the risk of causing enormous harm.   Franzen focuses on the urge to reject the values of our parents, to imagine ourselves as blank slates capable of shaping our own identities as we choose.  Apparently this urge almost always backfires, at least in his novel.  And this seems reminiscent of the the utopian urge in Angels of America to construct a new society out of nothing, in accordance with a theory or an idea, as the Communists did in the Soviet Union, or as Harper does in her hallucinated Antarctica.  This too seems always to backfire.  In trying to shape the future, both authors might argue, we cannot ignore the given reality; we have to work with what is in front of us,  and what is behind us.    One significant difference between Kushner and Franzen is the emphasis the latter places on relationships between parents and children.  Oddly Kushner, though he is very aware of our incapacity to escape the past, does not choose to focus on parent-children relationships very much.  We encounter Hannah and Joe, but they barely even talk during the play.  Instead he devotes much more attention to the role Roy plays as Joe’s surrogate father.  Why he does that strikes me as an important question.