Instructor:Dr. Stephen doCarmo
Office: 276 Baker Center for the Arts
Office Hours: Mondays and Wednesdays, 12:00 - 2:00
Phone: 3336
E-Mail: snd3@lehigh.edu

Note that this syllabus is available on the web, in case you want to bookmark it on your own computer.  The address is in the upper right hand corner of this page.

Required Texts
Roth, Philip. Goodbye, Columbus.
Barth, John.  The End of the Road.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved.
DeLillo, Don. Libra.
Cisneros, Sandra.  The House on Mango Street.

Course Description
In this course we'll be reading, writing about, and discussing major books by five important contemporary American novelists, each of them working from different aesthetic, philosophical, and/or political agendas.  We'll start with Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus, which, despite its 1960 publication date, will demonstrate for us many characteristics of the existentialist-influenced realism of the 1950s.  John Barth's The End of the Road, despite its publication in 1958, will then illustrate the obsessions of postmodernist black humor writers of, chiefly, the 1960s.  Don DeLillo's Libra will show us a second type of postmodernist writing: "image fiction," as novelist and critic David Foster Wallace calls the stuff.  Finally, Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987) and Sandra Cisneros' The House on Mango Street (1989) will show us the ways that post-Civil Rights cultural-political movements involving issues of race and gender have found voices in contemporary literature.

Requirements
There are several.  Here they are:

1.First, you'll need to keep a reading journal, which will account for 30% of your final grade.  Each time you come to class on a day a reading assignment is due (and that's pretty much every day), you should bring along a typed journal entry on that reading.  Each entry should be between one and two double-spaced pages long and should address, above all else, this question: What one big idea is this author trying sell me on via the story s/he's telling, and where in the text is that idea coming across especially clearly?

That's actually two related questions, I guess -- and as you answer the second one, you should directly quote the text you're writing about.  Don't quote it too exorbitantly, so that you spend all your time copying our authors' words instead of developing your own ideas.  But at some point in each journal you should reproduce (and so put quote marks around) some sentence or passage in which you think the author's central idea is coming across particularly loudly.

Though they must be typed, I'll think of journal entries as relatively informal writings.  This doesn't mean they can be sloppy or insensible; it just means I won't flip out or penalize you if there are a few spelling or comma errors, or if your train of thought shifts a little more abruptly at times than would be permissible in a polished piece of writing.

I'll collect daily journal entries every day a reading assignment is due.  Once I've got it from you, I'll put some comments on it and give it a grade of between one and five, five being good (the equivalent of an "A") and one being lousy (basically an "F").  At the end of the semester I'll drop your lowest journal grade and average all the others.
 

2.Next, you'll need to write a (roughly) seven-page polished essay, which will be worth 40% of your final grade.  A few weeks into the semester, I'll give you some "prompt" questions to get you started, but you can devise a topic of your own if you like.  Just talk to me about what you want to do before you deviate from those questions of mine.

No matter what you wind up writing on, your essay should have a clear thesis, or central idea.  It should be well organized, and transitions between its ideas should be readily followable.  Your essay should have sufficient support for its claims, whether in the form of quotes from the texts it examines or first-person stories about things you've seen or experienced in your own life.  And it should be well proofread, with very few spelling, punctuation, or grammar errors.

Lastly, your essay should incorporate ideas from at least two professional literary critics.  Try to avoid book reviews, encyclopedia entries, Cliff's Notes -- all that sort of stuff.  Muhlenberg's online MLA bibliography (go to http://library.muhlenberg.edu/screens/remote.html and follow the "MLA" link) is the best place to look for good critical essays and books on the novelist(s) you want to write about.

Since you'll be using outside sources in your essay, you'll need a "works cited" page at the end of it.  I'll give you more information later about what format you should use for it.
 

3.Next, you'll have take-home midterm and final exams.  Each will be worth 10% of your final grade and will require you to compare and contrast the novels we've been reading and the aesthetic/philosophical "movements" to which they belong.  Count on doing three or four pages of reasonably polished writing for each test.
 

4. Lastly, the quality of your participation in class discussions will count for 10% of your final grade.  You don't have to be brilliant every time you open your mouth.  God knows I'm not.  But you should make your voice heard frequently.  I conceive this as a seminar-style course, not a lecture one; thus the success of our meetings will rely largely on your willingness to speak up and make your questions, comments, and insights heard.

Attendance
Since we have so few class meetings, you really shouldn't miss any of them.  If you have to miss one...all right.  If you're going to have to miss two or more, though, talk to me about it so we can arrange ways to compensate for the class work you'll be missing.  Being absent for two or more meetings without making those sorts of arrangements with me will severely jeopardize your final grade for the course.

Late Work
The only thing that could become late, really, is your reading journal entries, and I'll accept them at a two-number-grade-per-class-period penalty.  That's to say that turning in on Wednesday a journal entry you should have turned in Monday will result in its getting a "3" instead of the "5" it may have gotten had it been on time.  Turning in a journal entry immediately after a class meeting will get you the same penalty.  Sorry if that seems mean, but the point of reading journals is to make sure you're primed for class discussions before you get there.  Anyone who writes one after the class meeting is over has the unfair advantage of writing with a headful of ideas drawn from the class discussion.  The penalty exists to compensate for that unfair advantage.

Special Accomodations
Such accomodations as extended time on exams will naturally be given to anyone with a documented learning problem.  If you have such needs, please talk to me about them soon.

Course Schedule
Wednesday, May 23: Introduction to the course.  In-class screening of Mike Nichols' film The Graduate (1967) and a preliminary discussion of existentialist-influenced realism.

Wednesday, May 30: Discussion of the entirety of Philip Roth's Goodbye, Columbus.  (Just read the novel, not the five short stories that follow it.)

Monday, June 4: Discussion of  Barth's The End of the Road, pages 255-375.  (The novel starts on 255!)
Wedensday, June 6: Discussion of the remainder of Barth's The End of the Road.  I'll also give you on this day the prompt for your take-home midterm.

Monday, June 11: Take-home Midterm due at the beginning of the class period.  Also, discussion of Morrison's Beloved, through page 85.
Wednesday, June 13: Discussion of Morrison's Beloved, through page 153.

Monday, June 18: Discussion of the remainder of Morrison's Beloved.
Wednesday, June 20: Discussion of DeLillo's Libra, through page 79.

Monday, June 25: Discussion of DeLillo's Libra, through page 354.
Wednesday, June 27: Discussion of the remainder of DeLillo's Libra.  I'll also give you on this day the prompts for your take-home final.

Monday, July 2: Discussion of the entirety of Cisneros' The House on Mango Street.

Your take-home final exam will be due in my mailbox in the English Department office by 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, July 3rd!

Your polished essay will be due in my mailbox by noon on Wednesday, July 5th!
 

Some Notes on EXISTENTIALIST-INFLUENCED REALISM

Realism first got big in American fiction in the second half of the 19th century; Mark Twain, many critics say, was its first great practitioner.  It
stayed big through the mid 1920s or so; then (though this is simplifying things a bit) the avante garde experimentalism of the modernists stole
the spotlight for a while; then realism got big again after WW II.

As a style of fiction, realism has a few big hallmarks: 1) it’s usually plot-driven (even if subtly); 2) it’s usually concerned with “ordinary” people and
the details of ordinary life; 3) it usually tries for “psychological depth” — that is, it spends a lot of time exploring the minds and thought processes
of its characters; and 4) it generally uses “transparent” language — the sort that doesn’t draw attention to itself but rather (if it's working right) just
lets the reader see right through it to the world it’s representing.

(Bear in mind it’s not called realism because it’s the most realistic way, necessarily, of representing the world in fiction: modernists were
convinced their plotless, fragmented, “stream of consciousness” fictions were the most accurate way to show reality, and many readers believed it.  Though Mark Twain’s stories might have seemed particularly “realistic” when they were first written, and so were given that label, “realism” for us at this point is basically just a conventional label given to fiction with the qualities I’ve listed above.)

SO…a lot of fiction of the late ‘40s and ‘50s is not only realistic but “existentialist.”  Existentialism is a European philosophy advanced most
famously by Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, and it was at its height in Europe in the 1930s and ‘40s.  It has a few big, central beliefs: 1) that
the absurdity and inhumanity of the Godless modern world must be combated by brave, non-conformist individuals; 2) that “existence precedes
essence” (that is, you’re born with no God-given soul or human “essence,” so it’s your job to create it for yourself as you go through life); and 3)
though alienation from society may be painful, the brave, non-conformist individual who is the existentialist hero will preserve his or her alienation as an emblem of his or her independence.

Despite the fact that existentialists are almost by definition atheists (it’s your job to forge an “essence” for yourself, they’d say, precisely because no almighty power is going to hand one over to you), their writings often take on an almost religious tone or sensibility.  Why?  Because
existentialism is basically a secular religion, if that’s not too completely oxymoronic.  They may say you have to create your own essence, but
existentialists still believe in essences; thus the heroic characters in their books who conduct searches for Meaning, Insight, and Transcendence
(or who go looking for their own essences, basically) are on a mission no less religious for being human-centered rather than God-centered.

Existentialism got big with American writers after WW II for a couple key reasons.  The first is that fiction writers, like a lot of American
intellectuals, had had it with big, state-level politics.  Before WW II, many intellectuals were “lefties” who’d placed great faith in communism and
socialism as potential saviors of humanity.  During WW II, though, it became clear that plenty was rotten in Russia, the place many intellectuals
had looked to as a shining example of communism in practice.  Stalin, Russia’s leader, had not only made dirty deals with Hitler to keep him out
of Russia, but he was also, out of his own paranoia, imprisoning and murdering officials in his own government at an alarming rate.  His clear
new status as a dictator made lots of American intellectuals lose faith in any type of national-level governmental politics and made them look to
individuals as agents of change instead.

Another reason American writers take to existentialism after WW II: the “monoculture” is gaining ground in the States.  Everyone’s living in the same type of houses, watching the same TV shows, driving the same cars, working the same types of bureaucratic jobs.   Some bold existentialist individuality is clearly in order.

Lastly, a 1950s upper-middle class fascination with psychoanalysis probably helps feed the culture's obsession with existentialism.  Many folks who can afford it during the '50s enter therapy and have themselves "analyzed" just because it's the hip thing to do.  Like existentialism, psychoanalysis is all about exploring the self, making the trip inward, and is shot through with the idea that one must know one's self intimately in order to control one's life and destiny.

One other thing worth noting: much of the most famous existentialist realism of the ‘50s comes from Jewish-American writers (Philip Roth, Saul
Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Bernard Malamud) whose novels feature a character type literary critics have come to call the schlemiehl (“fool” in
Yiddish).  He (occasionally she) is a character unafraid to express emotion, be introspective, and be “different” from the regimented masses.
This character, according to a critic named Ruth Wisse, “declares his humanity by loving and suffering in defiance of the forces of
depersonalization and the ethic of enlightened stoicism.”   In other words, s/he’s all about being self-expressive in a world that demands that you
shut up and join.
 

Some Notes on POSTMODERNIST BLACK HUMOR

Before we get to the “black humor” part, let me tell you about the “postmodernist” part.

Postmodernism is a diverse, complex movement in philosophy and the arts involving everything from literature and film to architecture, painting, and music, and it starts becoming discernible around 1960, give or take a few years.  Like I said, it’s complicated, and it means different things to different thinkers in different fields, but for our purposes at this moment, I want to define postmodernism the same way a French philosopher named Jean Francois Lyotard does: as an “incredulity toward metanarratives.”

A “metanarrative,” for Lyotard, is any theory that might explain (or try to explain) just about anything that happens in the world.  And if you’re
“incredulous” toward metanarratives, as postmodernists are, it means you’re doubtful of them – that you disbelieve them.

There have been a few important metanarratives in modern times.  One is Marxism, which tries to explain absolutely everything in terms of
economics and class struggle.  Another is psychoanalysis, the type of thinking Freud initiated, which says human nature and (hence) all human
affairs are understandable in terms of people’s internal psychological conflicts.  A third metanarrative might be that of rational science in
general, which believes all phenomena can be classified and objectively understood through close empirical study.

All metanarratives, you might be able to see by now, are eminently rational: they believe everything that happens can be explained rationally,
according to the dictums of some theory.   Postmodernists, then, being “incredulous” toward metanarratives, are essentially anti-rational.  Why?
Because for (many) postmodernist artists and philosophers, rationality, logic, and scientism are bad things, despite the faith most modern
people have placed in them.  They’re bad because such systems’ belief that everything in the world can be mastered, understood, defined,
categorized, and explained are inevitably too reductive, and can even potentially get people hurt.  For a postmodernist, all rationality carries
within it the germ of fascism; that is, it can become a way to control people.

There are, then, a few traditional "western" beliefs, born from various metanarratives, that postmodernists want us to be done with: 1) the belief
in a coherent, stable subject, or “self,” along with all the systems of thinking (like psychoanalysis) that have claimed to understand what makes a
“self” tick; 2) the belief in teleological history – that is, any perspective (like Marxism) claiming that history is moving in some pre-ordained
direction, or that all events can be understood as part of some causal chain of events; and 3) the belief that science – any type of science – can
be an instrument for mastering reality and making everything explicable and tame.  All these beliefs, postmodernists would say, can become
dangerous: they can be used to control people, or to make them adhere to some artificially constructed “norm.”

A classic example: two French psychoanalysts named Deleuze and Guattari wrote a famous book in the late 1960s called Anti-Oedipus, in
which they blasted psychoanalysis, weirdly enough, as an instrument of control that doctors and professionals use to make people conform to rules of proper modern society.  In psychoanalysis, the Oedipus complex (having to do with sexual urges a child feels for his or her parents) is supposed to be the foundation for almost everything human beings go through.  Deleuze and Guattari, however, say the Oedipus complex is a basically a fiction that Freud and his followers have inflicted on the world with the attitude “you’ll say mommy-daddy-me when I tell you to” (D & G's words).  The Oedipus complex, Deleuze & Guattari say, is a fake norm that’s been used to socialize and control countless people the world over – and to proclaim “sick” anyone who doesn’t play by its weird rules.

Deleuze and Guattari are philosophers, loosely speaking.  Artists have done lots to advance postmodernism, too, though.  There’s been
anti-rational painting (Andy Warhol), anti-rational music (John Cage), anti-rational theatre (Sam Shepard), and anti-rational architecture (Robert
Venturi), all of it meant to help people bust out of the boxes that organized, controlled, “logical” thinking forces us into.

There’s been anti-rational literature, too – and that’s where black humor comes in.  Black humor is the first wave of postmodernist literature, and it kicks into gear in the late ‘50s and stays big right through the 1960s.  The main thing black humor does is lampoon / mock / make comedy out of all sorts of systems of rationality.   In doing so, it often demonstrates another tendency many readers, maybe too simplistically, take to be its central feature: it finds comedy in “inappropriate” subject matter.  It’s that first thing it does, though, of course, that makes the black humor of the ‘50s and ‘60s particularly “postmodernist.”

Why should black humor get big at the point in American history when it does?  A few reasons, maybe.

1) American culture in the ‘50s and ‘60s is getting super-systematized and regulative.  People’s lives seem increasingly pre-planned,
pre-packaged, pre-fabricated.  School, work, retirement.  Office, home, shopping mall.  All this organization is starting to look a little nutty, a little
scary, a little too controlling.

2) The cold war is in full swing, and it’s the very emblem of both rationality (as long as both our country and theirs have a hundred times more
nuclear weapons than are required to kill every life form on the planet, we’ll all be safe) and total insanity.  It’s rationality that truly stands to turn
utterly deadly – and almost does in 1960 with the Cuban missile crisis.

3) The supposedly "oppositional" existentialism of the ‘40s and early ‘50s has turned into a kind of glib, dumb cottage industry.  Psychologists
are selling take-charge-of-your-life self-help books to the masses; Hollywood is pumping out “non-conformist” James Dean and Marlon Brando
flicks for teenagers….  The existentialism that had seemed so hip and oppositional for a while has become just one more thing that’s been
systematized, co-opted, and caged in by the “rational” mainstream.  Something else will have to step up to be “oppositional” – and that
something else winds up being black humor, which lambasts the rationality that seems to have swallowed up existentialism whole.
 

Some notes on the BLACK CULTURAL MOVEMENT

You could also call it the black aesthetics movement, or the black arts movement….  Basically, though, the black cultural movement, as we’re calling it, was at its height in the latter half of the 1960’s and into the 1970s, though echoes of it are definitely still around today: just listen to Public Enemy’s music, watch Spike Lee’s movies, read Toni Morrison’s novels, or see August Wilson’s plays.  If the movement has a single central purpose, it is to make African Americans (and, indeed, black people the world over) totally and irreversibly proud of their racial and cultural heritage.  One of the most commonly recited mantras of African-American activists in the late '60s and 1970s was "black is beautiful" -- an idea many black American people had never really had the chance to explore in previous decades.

There are a few other beliefs central to the black cultural movement.  The first is that art and politics are inseparable – that great art is born from political strife and can actually be an important tool for raising consciousness about the social problems oppressed people deal with.  This isn’t a particularly original idea in the late 1960’s; writers like Frank Norris and Upton Sinclair had believed way back at the start of the twentieth century that art could help bring about a socialist workers’ revolution, and their own novels (e.g. The Octopus and The Jungle) had tried, however unsuccessfully, to make that revolution happen.  In the 1960’s, though, black writers and artists bring this idea of the marriage of art to political change roaring back again – and probably to greater effect than those older socialists ever had.

A second idea big in the black cultural movement pertains to “black nationalism,” as it came to be known – a doctrine holding that if, in fact, black people have only generally suffered because of their exposure to white society, they should perhaps form a separate society having as little as possible to do with whites.  This belief, which was powerfully expressed in the politics of the Black Panthers and the sermons of Malcolm X (the earlier Malcolm X, at least), ran wildly contrary to the  “integrationist” agenda of many American Civil Rights supporters and was descended from the ideas of Marcus Garvey, an African American who suggested in the 1920s that black Americans move to Africa to found a new black-only nation.  In any event, many artworks by black Americans in the 1960’s deal in some way with this notion that separatism is preferable to integration – that black people will be better off if they avoid the dominant white culture and rid their “colonized” minds of the myths and standards white society has poisoned them with.

A third key belief is that there is something fundamentally, identifiably black about black people’s art and culture, even if that “something” is often hard to name or pin down.  If European-descended culture often seems sort of repressed and moralistic, then African-descended culture is more sensual, or even sexual (“funky,” Toni Morrison says in The Bluest Eye); it may also seem less judgmental and more tolerant of differences.  If European-derived art is shaped by restrictions of form and propriety, made into definitive, finalized “texts,” then African-derived art is looser, freer, more improvisational, and closer to an “oral” tradition that never totally fixes or finalizes artwork.  (You might think, for instance, of the difference between "classical" music and jazz.)  If this is true – if there is something different about black perception, black art, black culture, black language – then only black forms of music, language, dance, painting, etc., are capable of expressing black experience.  It is only fitting, then, many black artists of this movement say, that black artists use black forms of art and language in their works, no matter how improper or “unacceptable” a white art establishment might say they are.
 

Some Notes Relevant to WOMEN’S FICTION AFTER 1970

Let me tell you about a few fundamental beliefs of the feminist movement of the 1970s  – beliefs many feminist thinkers still hold today, and whose influence is writ large on the work of lots of female (and sometimes male) artists and writers after 1970 or so.

The most fundamental claim of the feminist movement, maybe, has been that modern Western societies (including our American one) are essentially patriarchal in nature; that is, they’ve been designed by men (as opposed to women – that’s not an all-inclusive word meaning “humankind”) to serve male interests.  Up until quite recently, after all, women have been unable to vote, own property,  have reproductive
rights, divorce abusive spouses, hold office, go to prestigious universities….  They have, in short, been treated as property – or as domestic slave labor, many feminists would say.  And though we have, in the twentieth century, done away with many of the institutional and legal injustices women used to face (women can now vote, hold office, own property, etc.), many feminists say there may still be a cultural bias against girls and women in our society: they’re often expected to be pretty, quiet, small, respectful, nurturing – all qualities that can prevent them from enjoying not only their own potentialities but the fruits of the many legal victories they’ve seen in recent decades.

This business about cultural bias leads us to our second important feminist precept: that the personal is political.  By the 1970s, feminists had won a great many battles, as mentioned above, in the courts – yet many women were still being oppressed in an arena that legislation couldn’t hope to reach: the arena of personal life.  At home, women were still expected (even if not legally obliged) to clean the house, raise the children, cook the meals.  In schools, girls were still expected to be pretty and quiet and to “choose” home economics classes over, say, physics classes.  In romantic relationships, women were still expected to defer to men, to be couth and not too desirous of sex.  This all led feminists to realize that people’s day-to-day lives are political, and that kitchens and classrooms and even bedrooms are real political fronts -- that is, places where power relationships are forged and negotiated, even though the law can’t hope to control what goes on in those places.  More radical feminists of the last thirty years have suggested that only an essentially separate women's culture, with its own art, its own social and cultural institutions, and even its own language, will ever really end the cultural prejudices against women they see continuing to this day.

A corollary of the above idea about the personal being political is the equally important notion that “macro“ (or large) political systems can’t be made too central in the fight for gender equality. The Democratic party versus the Republican one; liberal social policy versus conservative; courts versus legislatures….  This is all very nice, and great gains have been made in the courts, and by enacting new laws like those giving
women suffrage and the right to safe abortions.  A really smart feminist knows, though, that macro-politics are only half the battle: a micro-politics capable of grasping the significance of interpersonal relationships – of what goes on between individual men and women in individual homes and workplaces – is equally necessary.

One more big idea: many feminists during (and after) the ‘70s asserted the need to rescue women’s history  -- a history of women thinkers and innovators and artists and victims and heroes whose stories were often pushed aside by male institutions that often chose not to value them.  Feminist historians and artists and scholars suddenly became interested in finding their forgotten predecessors, and as they “rescued” those forgotten women from obscurity, their works and stories did, in fact, become part of the curriculum now taught in schools.   Zora Neale Hurston – an African-American writer of the 1930s and ‘40s many of you may encounter in college – is now a towering figure in American literature, though she was all but totally forgotten before the 1970s.  Same goes for Kate Chopin, whose turn-of-the-century novel The Awakening has become a classic after being rescued from obscurity.  Lots of feminist artists have been similarly interested in rescuing the stories of women (or types of women) either forgotten or, maybe, misunderstood in the past : a film called Elizabeth from a couple years ago might be a good example.
 
 

Take-Home Midterm Exam
(Given out in class on 6/6, due on 6/11)

Part I
(50%)

In a two to three-page essay, please explain what sorts of issues and propositions the Philip Roth of Goodbye, Columbus (1960) and the John Barth of The End of the Road (1958) would most likely agree and disagree on.  Be sure to cite (i.e. directly quote) at least one important passage from each novel as you write.

Part II
(25%)

In a (roughly) one-page essay, please explain to me how the presence of any one character except Neil Klugman in Goodbye, Columbus helps Philip Roth to advance an existentialist agenda.  Use good quotes from the text when appropriate.

Part III
(25%)

In a (roughly) one-page essay, please explain to me how the presence of any one character except Jacob Horner in The End of the Road helps John Barth to advance an postmodernist and/or "black humorist" agenda.  Again, use good quotes from the text when appropriate.