Mapping the TransatlanticHUM 3285: British and American

LiteratureSpring 2011Dr. Perdigao

April 27, 2011

Multiculturalism• Netherland

• Original settlers

• Idea of American identity

• Walcott’s “The Season of Phantasmal Peace,” multitude of nations

• Dimock’s idea of an American literature and identity

• Brathwaite on “nation language”

• Rushdie on English as “Indian literary language”

• Harlem Renaissance, constructions of race

• “Recitatif” and the removal of codes

• Playing in the Dark and ideas of the “other”

Reconfiguring terms• Postcolonial revisions

• From Conrad to Achebe

• Mrs. Dalloway to The Hours

• The Great Gatsby to Netherland

• Change in protagonist—from central authoritative account of British society, American society—to ambiguity, uncertainty

• Destabilizing perspective, allowing for gaps between stories, uncertainties in identity along the lines of race, class, gender, sexual orientation

• Examining gaps within language, between representations

• Play with possibility and questioning of limitations

Changing Perspectives• DeLillo’s sense of starting at the towers: Falling Man

• Dimock’s idea of an “American literature” and identity

• O’Neill’s play with negating position of being survivor and eyewitness

• Changes everyone feels in 21st century, shared experience alongside singularity of event

• Nostalgia for past, recognition of contemporary times

• Yeats’ “The Second Coming,” centre cannot hold

• Mrs. Dalloway and Netherland—idea of London

• The Hours and Netherland—idea of New York at the turn of the century and twenty-first century

Expatriating• Center as British and American identities

• Destabilized along the lines of race, class, gender, sexual orientation

• Crosby’s “Harry Crosby’s Reasons for Expatriating”

• Fitzgerald and Hemingway for the moderns; Cunningham and O’Neill for the postmoderns

• What does it mean to be an American, when outside of that culture—Fitzgerald, Hemingway, even O’Neill (as Hans loses sense of belonging anywhere after living in NY)

• Passing—ways of negotiating ideas of fixed identities; “Recitatif” as passing

• Ways to reconceive, remap identity?

Retellings• “Lost in the Funhouse”—revising conventions of traditional literature

• Metafiction, self-consciousness of the act of constructing and interpreting narrative

• What are the possibilities for storytelling after World War I?

• Shift to realism with Owen and Sassoon as counters to Brooke (Hugh Grant)?

• WWII—Spiegelman

• Ideas about American involvement in Vietnam in poetry—Bly, Komunyakaa, Levertov

• American culture—Ginsberg

• Post-9/11 narratives—DeLillo, O’Neill, Rothberg, Baudrillard

Memory and Rememory• Memorialization—from WWI poetry to Lowell to Netherland’s “aftermath”

• What is this “postmortem” peformed in the twenty-first century, ways to assess where cultures are, what they have been?

• What can art do? Ekphrasis—represent the visual, as performance

• How do we represent experience?

• How do those retellings reshape identity and place?

Rises and falls• Mrs. Dalloway—Septimus’ choice, role as “visionary”; crisis in text; party barely

escapes

• Passing—Irene’s choice or accident? Erasure from story, narrative, blacking out

• The Hours—Richard’s death—defining own terms; brings characters together; party revised to become that for the “as yet undead”

• Netherland—Mehmet’s fall; evaded death; return “home” to avert crisis; loss of meaning with wings that don’t work

• “Flying Home”—Todd navigating Icarus storyline; fall back to the past; storytelling rather than literal flight

• Ulysses—Stephen Dedalus (sorry!)

• Auden poem on painting of Icarus

• Falling Man—constructing art or perversion of reality?

Recovery• Smith—waving or drowning, or both?

• Rich—diving into the wreck, trying to find treasures and remains

• Plath—Lady Lazarus rising from the dead

• Netherland—Chuck’s body recovered at the beginning

• Heaney—recovering bog bodies, transformation in poetry

• What is the survivor’s story? What has been lost? What can art do in that space?