Arundhati Roy and The God of Small Things

Our next work shares many concerns with the novels we've read so far in class. Like The Woman Warrior, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things revolves around gender and the haunting of the present by the past. Like Saturday, The God of Small Things is a novel deeply concerned with questions of ethics and the global twentieth century.

Arundhati Roy, its author, was born in India in 1961. Her father was a tea planter and her mother an activist, and much of Roy's career has concerned interrogating the links between commerce and colonialism, activism and art. Roy's early career was in writing for and performing in film. The God of Small Things, published in 1997, was her first novel. It won the prestigious Booker Prize, and became a commercial and critical success soon afterward. Since publishing this vaunted novel, Roy has mostly turned her attention to writing non-fiction and engaging in political action. She is a committed anti-globalization activist, and has used her prominent position as a writer to function as a critic of both Indian and American foreign policy. How do these later political preoccupations show up in Roy's text? Is The God of Small Things a political novel? If so, how?

Ian McEwan and Saturday

With Ian McEwan and Saturday, we are straying across the Atlantic to provide a point of comparison to the American fiction we're reading this quarter. McEwan has been fairly prolific. Born in 1948, he has produced not only Saturday (2005) and the award-winning Atonement (2001), but also a long list of earlier works that earned him the title of "Ian Macabre." In The Cement Garden (1978), Enduring Love (1997), and The Comfort of Strangers (1981), McEwan explores themes such as incest and the "enduring" love of a stalker for his prey. Also manifest in these early works is McEwan's growing preoccupation with the battle between reason and unreason, science and religion, and chaos and ethics--themes that will find their culmination in the work we'll be reading for class.

In many ways, McEwan's career, and particularly his work in Saturday, illustrate a return to ethics and a new humanism in twenty-first century letters. Hailed as one of the first great works composed subsequent to 9-11, Saturday has also consistently come under fire for its adherence to the tenets of formal realism and its reliance on traditional humanistic discourse as an antidote to the "barbarism" of the terrorists' threat. How might we read McEwan's rendering of the life of Perowne? What does the style of the novel and its interest in science and reason say about McEwan's discursive preoccupations? What does it say about the rupture that terror can create in the everyday? Is it, as some critics have argued, a somewhat conservative novel? Can a novel be conservative?

Blog Post Assignment

Post a blog entry about your reading of The Woman Warrior. Does the fact that the work is semi-autobiographical change how we read it? Is The Woman Warrior a work that deserves to be at the heart of the new American canon? (Think here about some of our earlier discussions about canonicity, and how the value of literary works is determined). We will discuss your comments in class.

Also, for those interested in seeing more from Maxine Hong Kingston's talk about writing, check out the following.

Maxine Hong Kingston and The Woman Warrior

Maxine Hong Kingston was born in California in 1940 to Chinese immigrants. The third of eight children, Hong Kingston became a passionate and prolific writer at an early age. She eventually majored in English at UC, Berkeley--the university at which she taught for many years after the publication of The Woman Warrior and various other novels and works of criticism.

Maxine Hong Kingston published The Woman Warrior: Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts in 1976. Like Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Hong Kingston's book introduced American readers to a never-before-witnessed topic: Chinese-American girlhood, and the unique marriage of gender and ethnicity present in growing up as a Chinese woman in America. Hong Kingston's book blends memoir, fiction, and biography together to create an unique document of the era and ethnic background in which she grew up. It also introduces a topic central to both her own literary project and that of Morrison--that of haunting. Are we all haunted by often silent and silenced familial pasts? Is the American story a narrative of erasures and the ghosts these erasures create?

Hong Kingston's work will allow us to ask many questions central, too, to our own project in Intro to English Studies. Using her book, we will discuss the ethics of representation. Does Hong Kingston have the right to represent her ancestors' stories? Is her hybrid text a response to the difficulties of representation? Is there something unethical or, rather, heroic about telling the stories that many think would be better off not told? The Woman Warrior will also help us to look at the place of the immigrant story in America and American mythology. How is the immigrant experience in America the ultimate American narrative, told over and over again in the many novels we will read this quarter?

Research Assignment Tips

For class on Monday, I'm asking you to engage in a small online research exercise to get you ready for writing research essays later in the term. One of the most important things to learn during your time here at UC is how to use the various online and real-time research resources available to us. For Monday, I'd like you to find one research article about Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, read it, and write a one paragraph synopsis of what you find, as well as a correct citation for the article.

In order to find a good, peer-reviewed article, you should use some of the following resources.

Most important for research in literature and the humanities are the following databases:

Jstor

Project Muse

Broader-based research databases can also be helpful. Check out EBSCO for a database that extends far outside the humanities disciplines.

And, probably your MOST important resource is the library itself. If you check out the links for "subject guides," "journals," and "articles" on the library's menu, you can explore a great number of resources useful in your research.

Note: You should be able to access the online databases directly from any UC computer or, if you are at home or not on the UC network, you can access the databases from the library website. There is an "off campus access" link on the left-hand side menu of the main library menu.

Introduction to Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison was born in Lorain, Ohio in 1931. She received her B.A. from Howard University and her M.A. from Cornell, where she studied the work of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner, two modernist authors who greatly influenced her later writing style. After a long and successful career in publishing, Morrison turned her attention to writing her own works and immediately became recognized as one of the strongest voices in contemporary American fiction.

Morrison wrote The Bluest Eye (1970), her first novel, while raising two children and teaching part-time. The preoccupations that Morrison manifests in this novel persist as themes throughout her career. In The Bluest Eye, as elsewhere in her ouevre, Morrison is concerned with representing the extremes of human affect and the collision between history and private life that characterizes American existence. The Bluest Eye is just one example of Morrison's interest in tracing the history of black life in America. She is one of the most important authors of the twentieth century and a major force in popularizing African American fiction, both as a writer and editor of other writers' work during her time in the publishing industry. Beloved, her neo-slave narrative about Cincinnati's Margaret Garner, won the Pulitzer Prize, but many other novels by Morrison were justly celebrated--from The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon, two earlier works, to Paradise and her recent novel, A Mercy. She is also famous for her many works of literary and social criticism, including Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. In 1993, Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Literature.