The End of the World as We Know It

4-6 Pages.  Due December 2

1. Write a longer review of any of the books from the course, like the one that I posted on the blog.  If you choose to do this assignment, please do not review White Teeth again, and please choose a different work from the one that you wrote about in your first formal paper.

2. One might read David Foster Wallace’s essay, “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again,” as simply a piece about the peculiarities of the cruise ship experience.  But one might also claim that he is trying to describe a larger problem within contemporary American society and using the cruise ship as a metaphor.  What do you think that problem is?  How does Wallace’s comedic style of writing help him to communicate his preoccupations?

3. Zadie Smith’s White Teeth explores two competing impulses, both frequently celebrated within our public discourse: the urge to promote cultural diversity and expose people to a variety of different ethnic traditions and the urge to preserve one’s own inherited culture in the name of authenticity and thus to resist the influence of other traditions.  What does Zadie Smith have to say about these urges?  Does she advocate one or the other?  Does she critique either?  Does her book offer some recipe or model for surviving the challenges of a multicultural world?  If so, what is it?  Or does she avoid taking a strong position, and if so, why does she avoid doing so?

4. In The Gay Science the philosopher Nietzsche remarks:

This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence—even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!

Zadie Smith references this notion of “eternal recurrence” multiple times in White Teeth.  Does this strike you as an accurate description of the philosophical position that her novel is seeking to underscore?  Why or why not?

5. A central theme in Ian McEwan’s Atonement is time, and the various ways in which we experience it.  Time is one of those phenomena that is so constantly present to our minds, that we think we can grasp it rather easily.  But can we?  What new ways of understanding the passage of time does Atonement offer us?

6. As Robbie Turner is retreating to Dunkirk, he recalls the world before the war: “A dead civilization.  First his own life ruined, then everyone else’s” (204).  Is Atonement about the death of a civilization?  How so?  What exactly has been lost?  And how does Ian McEwan attempt to capture that loss?

7. In his poem, “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” W.H. Auden famously proclaimed: “For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives / In the valley of its making where executives / Would never want to tamper.”  If poetry makes nothing happen, then what can it do?  What does the poetry of Wislawa Szymborska do?  Is Auden’s statement applicable to her work?  How so?

8.  Mohsin Hamid asks us to imagine that the text of The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a monologue delivered by a Pakistani to an American in a café in Lahore.  What kind of relationship does the novel construct between the speaker and listener?  What sort of reaction is the narrator seeking to elicit, and how do his modes of address elicit this reaction?  How does this narrative framing device influence our responses to the text, as readers?  And what is the relationship between this device and the larger themes that Hamid is exploring?

9.  In an interview printed at the end of The Reluctant Fundamentalist, Mohsim Hamid remarks, “I feel I have written from a stance that is both critical of and loving toward America.  I hope that readers will feel my affection and see that my intent is not to gloss over the very real pain of September 11 but rather to reconnect parts of my world, and myself, that have grown increasingly divided.”  Is this what the Hamid’s novel accomplishes?  If so, how?  If not, why not?