The End of the World as We Know It

Please take a few minutes to read a New York Times book review of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, by clicking the link.

We’ll be discussing it in class tomorrow.

Quick announcement: I’m postponing the response paper supposedly due on Tuesday.  It will be due on Thursday instead.  I’ll post a question early next week.

Grading Rubric for Formal Essays

F to D+: Limited effort, no clear argument, failure to offer any interpretation.

C: The essay offers some kind of interpretation of the text and demonstrates a reasonable grasp of grammatical rules; some ideas are clearly expressed.

C+: The essay contains a clear argument and a plausible interpretation of the text; some paragraphs have an identifiable focus; some ideas are clearly expressed, and a significant portion of the essay is grammatically correct.

B-: The essay contains a clear thesis and a convincing interpretation of the text; all of the paragraphs have a clear focus and most of them have topic sentences; most of the ideas are clearly expressed; some of the assertions are supported with evidence from the text; most of the sentences obey grammatical rules.

B: The essay contains a clear thesis and a convincing and interesting interpretation of the text; all of the paragraphs have a clear focus and most of them have topic sentences; most of the ideas are clearly expressed; the essay support many of its assertions with evidence from the text; almost all of the sentences follow grammatical rules; the style of the essay is smooth and easy to read.

B+: The essay contains a clear thesis and a convincing and interesting interpretation of the text; some of the arguments demonstrate serious thought; all of the paragraphs have a clear focus; almost all of the ideas in the essay are clearly expressed; the essay supports almost all of its assertions with evidence from the text; there are no significant grammatical mistakes; the style is smooth and engaging.

A-: The essay contains a clear and provocative thesis and a compelling and interesting interpretation of the text; many of the arguments demonstrate considerable thought; the essay reveals an ability to move beyond clichés and commonplace assumptions; the essay is well-organized; all of the ideas are clearly expressed; all of the assertions are supported with evidence from the text; the essay demonstrates an ability to interpret particular passages closely, with attention to the passages’ connotations and multiple meanings; there are no major grammatical mistakes; the style is smooth and involves a creative use of language.

A: The essay offers an original or surprising perspective on the text and demonstrates careful critical thought; the essay is well organized; all of the ideas are clearly expressed; all of the assertions are supported with evidence from the text; the essay demonstrates an ability to interpret particular passages closely, with attention to the passages’ connotations and multiple meanings; there are no major grammatical mistakes; the style is smooth, very engaging, and involves a creative use of language.

In Marie Howe’s aptly named collection of poetry “What the Living Do,” her poems are powerful because of their poignancy.  The collection ranges chronologically throughout her life with the first part containing the poems concerning her youth; they read with the distinct language of a person looking back that is specifically emphasized by the descriptive nature of the writing in these pieces. The middle part, probably the most somber of the three, chronicles her experiences with her older brother John, who suffers and eventually dies from AIDS. The final part opens seamlessly with a poem of the moment when she recognizes that her brother’s death has become a memory and not so palpable “as if time were a/room/I could gaze clear across—four years since I’d lifted his hand from/the sheets on his bed and it cooled in my hand.” (p. 63) The language of this final part carries the immediacy of someone writing (in verse) about her life as she lives it.

Although there are clear demarcations of her life into three periods, the work in its entirety doesn’t feel disjointed; it’s as if each poem were a piece of poignant paper-mache—no less diminished when considered individually—that staggers the soul when seen as a whole.

Personally, the two poems that resonated the most profoundly with me were “A Certain Light” and “Pain.” Losing a loved-one is never easy. But losing a loved-one through prolonged disease brings with it a unique perspective. There is an emotional anesthetizing that Howe captures perfectly in “A Certain Light” with the deliberate and continual use of pronouns for the subjects of her sentences. The “He, We and His” serve the purpose of distancing the reader, and likely Howe as well, from the painful experiences that have become commonplace. It is not till the end that names—identities—are  used:

“And Joe said, Look at you.                          And John said, How do I look?

And Joe said, Handsome.” (p. 45)

This is the experience representing (to use the cliché) the light that is brightest in the darkest of night. And yet, the emotional numbness while being understandably horrible is at the same time a merciful blessing which can be seen in “Pain”:

“And he did take the morphine, and he died the next week.”(p. 52)

We see a return to the use of pronouns that allows for a distancing from the pain so that it can be absorbed at a rate that only the sufferer can know to be acceptable.

In What the Living Do, Marie Howe reveals the scars from her life and the struggles in her attempt to understand her painful memories. And through her painful memories, there is a continuing theme of sexual trauma and confusion she goes through in her childhood.

Her father molested Howe as a child continuously. The man that she should have trusted strips her childhood away. Her mother never stopped her father. She knew what had been happening as she stood by the attic stairs and heard her crying. But she never said anything. Howe recalls a moment when she was in her room one night. Her brother was in the room beside hers imagining and designing new homes. And her father, who was a drunk and an abuser, crept into her room. Her brother fails to hear the ongoing event until their father leaves and Howe slams the door behind him. Her brother provides her with a comfort “and when he draws his skinny arm around my shaking shoulders, I don’t know if he knows he’s building a world where I can one day love a man…”(29). Through her battered trust and childhood, Howe’s brother is a glimmer a light for her.

Rape appears to be constant in Howe’s mind as a child. She was pushed into the world of sex before she grew up. And when she watches movies, Howe is numbed by all the rapes from soldiers. She notices the way how soldiers rapes women during a victory celebration and how there are always more than one. There is always one soldier that rapes while others hold the woman down and a husband watches from a distant unable to help his wife. The scenarios of what she sees in the movies may parallel all that Howe goes through herself. Her father turns into the soldier that rapes her. Her mother is the soldier holding Howe down because of her reluctance to help her crying daughter. And her brother, who cannot protect her, becomes the husband that must watch her sufferings from afar.

(A link to an article that may just help with the understanding of this possibly convoluted blog entry–I barely know what I wrote: http://www.nytimes.com/1996/06/23/books/bread-lines.html?ref=bookreviews)

Oddly enough—ironically enough—it seems as though it was the concept and practice of ‘freedom,’ not the manufacture of thousands upon thousands of nukes and atom bombs that threatened, on a daily bass, our international existence, that finally shocked post-Soviet Russia into a post-apocalyptic era, a notion explored in Eleanor Randolph’s Waking the Tempests: Ordinary Life in the New Russia.  Apparently, it was like watching what would have happened if Y2K had hit once the millennium ball dropped.  Russian citizens, their realities, were transformed into something like a bad sci-fi novel where everyone is forced to fend for themselves in the seediest and most sordid of ways just to get by, just to escape the poverty, the sense of abandon, to escape the ideological destruction that had been undeniably wrought upon a land that knew nothing but ideologies, strict ones, classical, romantic, vast and grand and epic, real and harsh, all of which—most importantly—were definable.  Russians are all about definitions, all about meaning, all about details and exhausting explanations and exposition, everything—as Soviet ideals have ingrained—must be a choice between black and white, evil and good, right and wrong, one way or the other, Communism or death (or some other and lesser, but still great form of punishment).  Words, thoughts, opinions were said as if cut in stone, with a literal standing.  What was said was said and forever held accountable.

So…knowing what there is to know about Russians and their words and phrases that anchor, their former government that was hell bent on creating the culture, the ideologies, and the very opinions that ran through its citizens’ heads, what do you think their thoughts of ‘freedom’ were?  Most certainly not the same as an American’s, which for the most part, if you look at our liberal democracy’s definition simply means: do whatever you will as long as no one around you is cheated, swindled, pained, killed, or emotionally and psychologically bruised in direct reaction to your practice of ‘freedom.’  In other words, don’t go marching down the street brandishing a burning crucifix while robed and costumed in white hoods and sacks, screaming prejudiced words of hate in the middle of a New York street, claiming that all your doing is practicing that damned ‘freedom of speech’ of yours, knowing full well that people’s fear’s elevated by the mere sight of you.  You see, Americans are realistic about the limitations of freedom, Russians on the other hand, are not.  They have lived and been burdened, for almost a full century, with an ideological extreme—the opposite of freedom, and not the American kind mind you.  They are attracted and their mouth waters for the unbridled Merriam-Webster definition, the literal definition, of the word: “the absence of necessity, coercion, or constraint in choice or action.”  And once the Soviet empire fell, came crashing down like the tower built to God, what chanced to stumble through the smoke and rubble?  Pure and unadulterated freedom.  Which, of course, in my opinion, goes hand-in-hand with the vague and general, the undefined.

As you can see in the New York Times review of Waking the Tempests, boundaries seemed to have vanished and allowed Russia’s counter-economy (a sort of gray—a mixture of black and white—market that existed during the Soviet-era for the sake of foreign good consumption) to come out and play unfettered.  Even sexual liberation, which was only hitting Russian then in the ‘90s as opposed to the time it waved through every other important nation three decades prior, was considered “as [Ms. Randolph] rightly reports, less a liberating experience than a mixture of exploitative commercialism and degradation. Incidents of sexual violence and discrimination against women have soared, according to the Government’s own inadequate statistics.”*

* (Quick Side Note—since blogs don’t allow for foot notes—the article then goes onto mention how these statistics “would be familiar to us,” as in the US.  I would like to quickly debunk that and say that, sure, we do of course deal with the same issues as the ones described in Ms. Randolph’s book, but it’s all relative.  I truly doubt that current-day America, or even ‘90s America, has ever had to face the specific, abject-level of poverty and grime faced post-Soviet Russia in the early ‘90s.  That is very slipshod reviewing on Katrina vanden Heuvel’s part.  End Quick Side Note.)

The country’s post-Soviet sense of freedom is one of post-apocayptic free-for-all that allows entrance for anyone and everything, it even allows the nation to become a virtual playground for every and all religious groups and categories and sects and denominations and et cetera and et cetera, as is explored in the following paragraph: “Although the elderly have borne the brunt of the economic turmoil, political and psychological changes have led Russians of all ages to new religions and faith healers. In sometimes darkly funny prose, Ms. Randolph describes the arrival of the Hare Krishnas on Moscow’s streets. The Mormons, the evangelicals and the Bahais soon followed. Psychics fill stadiums with followers and broadcast weekly programs to millions of believers. When Ms. Randolph left Moscow in 1993, America’s Christian right groups were beginning to find Russian converts.”  What this suggests to me, this sprint and dash for spiritual explanation and meaning and interpretation, is that Russians really do hunger for that world of former definability, that this expanse, this half-continent’s sense of ‘freedom,’ is too open-ended and without comfort.  I mean, no one’s truly comfortable without walls and boundaries to protect them from the capricious, right?  We’re just more sure of ourselves, of our identities, when we can see clear, defineable lines cutting us out of the rest of this world’s indefinite jumble.

Hence—*

* (And this is where I get incredibly lazy with my blog as it pertains to Homo Zapiens.  End Even Quicker Side Note.)

—Homo Zapiens’s protagonist’s proclivity for the ad-game, and redefining how Russians examine and perceive their new surroundings, how they take what already exists in America’s consumer, capitalistic culture and rework it to fit their own—metaphorically-speaking—cratered and blown-out landscape, their fallen set of ideologies.  And maybe, just maybe, in the process of all this reshaping, this game of craft the new synonym!, the Russians will find a new, more appropriate word for ‘freedom’ that will help them in their transition from ending to beginning.

-Mikhail Karadimov

English 3950: Suggested Paper Topics

Due October 5. 4-6 pages, double spaced.

Feel free to respond any part or parts of the question that you find interesting.  Or invent your own topic.

1. Consider the experimental staging techniques that Tony Kushner deploys in Angels in America: the parallels scenes juxtaposed, the impossible occurrences, the appearance of angels, whose wires are exposed.  All of these, he would call “the magic of theater.”  What purposes do these strategies serve?  What do reaction might they provoke?  What do they allow Kushner to communicate?

2. Articulate Kushner’s political philosophy.  The Soviet Aleksii Antedilluvianovich Prelapsarinov declares at the beginning of Angels in America, Part II: Perestroika, “show me the Theory, and I will be at the barricades, show me the book of the next Beautiful Theory, and I promise you these blind eyes will see again, just to read it, to devour that text.  Show me the words that will reorder the world, or else keep silent.”  Does Kushner have a beautiful Theory to offer?  If so, what is it?  If not, why not?

3. The mode of art that epitomizes the postmodern age, according to the critic Fredric Jameson is “pastiche.”  “Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language.  But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and of any conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists.  Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyeballs.”  Is this a good description of Pelevin’s technique in Homo Zapiens?  Does he use “blank parody”?  How?  And for what purpose?

4. What is Pelevin trying to reveal about post-Communist Russia in his novel Homo Zapiens?  Are his insights only about Russia or are they about the experience of capitalism everywhere?  And what particular stylistic or narrative strategies does he use to capture that experience?

5. According to the great American poet Robert Frost, a successful poem ends in “a clarification of life—not necessarily a great clarification, such as sects and cults are founded on, but in a momentary stay against confusion.”  Does it make sense to read Marie Howe’s poems as “momentary stay[s] against confusion”?  What clarity does she offer?  If reality, in her depiction of it, is confusing, painful, and terrifying, what forms of solace, what means of coping, does she suggest?  If her poems are about unbearable traumas—sexual abuse, AIDS, death—then what relationship do her poems imagine between such traumas and everyday life?

What, in your view, is Tatarsky’s attitude toward the culture of post-Soviet Russia?  What is the narrator’s?  Are they enthusiastic, critical, or both?  In answering this question, I would recommend that you focus on a particular passage in the text and try to identify and describe the narrator’s tone.  Practically any scene in the novel would be suitable, but the advertisements that Tatarsky invents seem especially worthy of analysis.

One page, double-spaced. Due September 16th.

(I have decided not to post a second question.  In answering this question, you may choose to focus on any passage from pgs. 1-178.)

The problem with prophecy is that it leaves out the critical element of chance, of the unknown, eliminating the possibility of a future that one can dictate. Eloquently described to us by the Rabbi Isidor Chemelwitz in Act Five, Scene 6, this is the element that drives us forward, leaving us in a state of perpetual “painful progress,” as Harper put it in her final monologue at the end of the play. That pain is the adverse effect of being in a state akin to limbo, “Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.” [Harper, Act Five, Scene 10]

(Limbo: all the more fitting with the religious references being thrown around every which way, in my opinion. I’m surprised that limbo wasn’t a word really used more often, but then again, this play really deals with themes more human than anything otherwise. I get that recurring feeling of  limbo throughout the majority of this play, and although the characters themselves evolve and change, the circumstances don’t; the recognition of those circumstances, on the other hand, do.)

No matter what pain, no matter what hurt, life is still made to be lived. Prior recognizes this and, as a prophet, rejects the notion of anything but. Kushner neatly tucks that message into Prior’s rejection, and sets forth eventual conclusion of the play.

“If I can find hope anywhere, that’s it, that’s the best I can do. It’s so much not enough, so inadequate but…Bless me anyway. I want more life.” -Prior Walter, speaking to the Angels [Act Five, Scene Five]

Even if it’s a selfish act, it also doubles as an incredibly brave one, the same way Louis made the decision to walk out on Prior. The right to the life you’ve lived, the life you’re going to live, and the urge to keep living that life is key to the play despite the madness that may swirl violently around it’s characters, the whirlwind filled with labels, categories, and traps of every kind. Within that tornado, they all exist and will continue to, and that alone is enough to warrant more life.

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.