Daniel Mendelsohn and The Lost

For our final book of the term, we'll look at yet another text that rewrites and reimagines history, Daniel Mendelsohn's The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million. Not just another Holocaust memoir, Mendelsohn's book searches for the history of his lost family members at the same time that it suggests the difficulties attendant to representing rupture and violence. Like both Maus and Lose Your Mother, The Lost is situated at the crossroads of memoir, historiography, and literary fiction. How does Mendelsohn's circuitous narrative strategies affect our reading of the text? What do these strategies say about the possibility of getting at the heart of meaning and narrative after the Holocaust?

Born in 1960, Mendelsohn has long been a prominent literary and cultural critic. He holds a Ph.D. in Classics from Princeton, and has written for the New York Review of Books for a number of years. He has also published a wide array of books, from a memoir about family and sexual identity, entitled The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity, a scholarly study of Greek tragedy, Gender and the City in Euripides' Political Plays, a collection of his essays on literature and the arts, How Beautiful It Is And How Easily It Can Be Broken, and a two-volume translation of the complete works of C. P. Cavafy.

Art Spiegelman and Maus

When Art Spiegelman published MAUS I in 1986, he transformed the medium of comics and greatly affected the American literary world. His work experimented with the traditional form of the comic strip at the same time that it altered forever the content associated with the medium. Spiegelman's choice to depict the Holocaust and its aftermath in a medium often associated (rightly or wrongly) with children, cartoons, and simple caricature changed both the landscape of the comic and that of Holocaust representation. Comics or "comix," as Spiegelman dubbed them, were suddenly taken much more seriously than ever before. MAUS I and II appealed to a broader audience than did the conventional comic strip. When MAUS won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 (after the publication of the second volume in the series), Spiegelman's work drew even greater attention. Since the publication of this magnum opus, he has become one of the comix medium's greatest advocates, traveling the country with his Comix 101 presentation and arguing for the importance of the form.

Spiegelman was born in 1948 in Stockholm, Sweden. His parents, Anja and Vladek, who appear as central characters in MAUS, were refugees, survivors of the concentration camps and World War II. Using the medium of the comic and the figures of the cat and mouse to represent Nazi and Jew respectively, MAUS tells Spiegelman's parents' stories, as well as his own. After getting his start by editing and writing for the graphic magazine RAW, in which early drawings from MAUS were serialized, Spiegelman went on to draw covers for The New Yorker for a number of years, eventually falling out with the editors due to the political nature of many of his drawings.




How does Spiegelman's medium affect his message in MAUS? Is there something sacrilegious about his representation of the Holocaust? Do we read his work as straight memoir, fiction, or some hybrid in-between genre? Has he chosen the appropriate vehicle for telling this story

Philip Roth and the Plot Against America

Philip Roth is one of America's most prolific and successful authors. Many critics have marked him as a likely recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature at some point during the coming years (a fact of which he seems very aware!). When the New York Times asked hundreds of the most prominent critics, writers, and editors to pick the best work of American fiction published in the last 25 years, six of Roth's novels made the top spot repeatedly. The essay accompanying the results of this survey stated that "[i]f we had asked for the single best writer of fiction over the past 25 years, [Roth] would have won."

Roth was born in 1933 and grew up near Newark, NJ--much like the protagonists of The Plot Against America and many other Roth novels. He was recognized at a young age, publishing Goodbye, Columbus in 1959 (when he was just 26). After receiving the National Book Award for this volume in 1960, he went on to publish a number of other texts that form the fundament of postwar American literary fiction. From 1969's Portnoy's Complaint to 1979's The Ghost Writer to more recent works, such as American Pastoral (1998), The Plot Against America (2004), and The Human Stain (2000), Roth has managed to write books richly evocative of the era in which he and his readers live. The book we'll be reading in class--The Plot Against America--is one of Roth's more recent, but it manifests many of the themes that have preoccupied the author since the beginning of his career. Following in the footsteps of Roth's "American trilogy" (American Pastoral, I Married A Communist, and The Human Stain being the triumvirate), The Plot Against America marks the development of a historically-conscious and socially- panoramic Roth. The novel is both speculative history and playful metafiction, simultaneously undergirding and subverting our ideas about the links between history and fiction. How does Roth's novel and its relationship to historical revision compare to the neo-slave narratives we've read in class? To Kushner or Doctorow? Less formally experimental than Doctorow, Roth is nonetheless interested in the ways in which the history of postwar America continues to haunt the present.

Saidiya Hartman and Lose Your Mother

Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother is a non-fiction narrative of return and its futility. Hartman is a professor of 19th century literature specializing in representations of slavery. Her Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America appeared in 1997. In contrast to this work, Hartman constructs her memoir as a meditation on the impossibility of resolution. In contrast to both Morrison and Butler's neo-slave narratives, Lose Your Mother does not attempt to reimagine slavery and its immediate aftermath; instead, Hartman suggests that any attempt to do so necessarily runs up against the limits of the ethical imagination. In turns frustrating and beautiful, Hartman's text asks us to think about whether there are forms of literature commensurate to the task of representing the historical atrocities of slavery. How does Hartman's text contrast to that of Morrison and Butler? How does our often-frustrating experience of the text as readers affect our ideas about slavery, genealogy, roots tourism, and the politics of return?

Octavia Butler

Octavia Butler was the first science fiction writer to win the MacArthur Foundation "Genius" grant. Born in 1947, Butler grew up in California, raised by her mother and grandmother after her father died at an early age. Butler says that she was drawn to science fiction and fantasy at an early age, finding in genre fiction an escape from her shyness and general social discomfort. Kindred, Butler's 1970 neo-slave narrative, provides a powerful point of comparison with Morrison's Beloved. Using the conventions of the Wells-ian time travel narrative, Butler constructs a slave narrative that allows her protagonist to literally become a slave at the same time that she remains a contemporary woman. How do Butler and Morrison's depictions of slavery diverge? Why does Butler choose a science fiction format to construct a neo-slave tale?

Toni Morrison, Margaret Garner, and Beloved

Next week, we'll begin talking about Toni Morrison's seminal 1988 novel, Beloved. Beloved is a book rich with Cincinnati history. It fictionalizes the life of runaway slave Margaret Garner into a magisterial narrative about love, human rights, and our ability to truly "own" the lives we lead. Some of you might be familiar with the story of Garner. She was a slave on a plantation in Kentucky during the 1850s and escaped from her masters with her young children by night from Covington across the Ohio River into the Union enclave of Cincinnati. When slave-catchers reached the home where she and her children were hiding, Garner killed one of her children and attempted to kill the others rather than allow them to be returned to a life of slavery. An America already at odds over the issue of slavery was captivated by the story of Garner and her subsequent trial, which posed fundamental questions about liberty, personhood, and the law. When Junot Diaz was asked by Newsweek to name the 5 books of fiction that were most important to him, he placed Beloved at the top of the list, saying that "[y]ou can't understand the Americas without this novel about the haunting that is our past."



(l) Thomas Saterwaite Noble, "The Modern Medea" (1867)--painting based on Margaret Garner

Toni Morrison based Beloved loosely on the Garner narrative. She also wrote the libretto for an opera on the subject of the runaway slave's life, entitled Margaret Garner. Beloved and Margaret Garner are just two examples 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 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 the recently-released 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.

Tony Kushner and Angels in America

For class on Monday, we'll be reading Tony Kushner's play, Caroline, or Change. Kushner is one of the foremost playwrights of the twentieth and twenty-first century. His two-part Angels in America revolutionized American theater in the 1990s and helped to introduce the subject of AIDS into the national consciousness. In Angels in America, and in other works such as Hydriotaphia, A Bright Room Called Day, and Homebody/Kabul, Kushner focused on themes dear to his heart--politics and ethics, queer identity, Jewish culture, history, and race in America. In addition to his work as a playwright, Kushner co-authored the screenplay for the Spielberg-produced film, Munich. How does Kushner's approach to the Rosenberg trial compare to Doctorow's? How does his conception of history and the historical imagination pervade Angels and his portrayal of kinship and the AIDs epidemic?

Check the sidebar for Kushner resources.

Welcome and E.L. Doctorow

Welcome to Contemporary American Literature and the Historiographic Imagination. In this course, we will chart the ever-tenuous boundaries between writing fiction and writing history, as well as engage in debate about the political possibilities of re-vising historical narrative through fictional or non-fictional means.

Our first book of the quarter is E.L. Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, published in 1971. The Book of Daniel was Doctorow's first novel, and has since been superseded in reputation by his subsequent books, especially Ragtime. Like Ragtime, however, Doctorow's first novel manifests a deep investment in American history and its often-tragic effects on individual human actors. The Book of Daniel focuses on the Isaacson family, a Leftist clan living during the McCarthyist 1950s. Paul and Rochelle Isaacson, clear analogues for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, leave a legacy of pain and confusion after they are put to death for treason. The Book of Daniel is their son's story, but it is also a larger narrative of national loss, victimization, and Cold War paranoia. Doctorow weaves together the complex history of the Rosenbergs in postwar America with postmodern meta-literary techniques that draw attention to the roles of both author and reader in creating a text. How does The Book of Daniel allow Doctorow to construct an ambivalent meditation on authority, politics, and knowledge during the latter half of the twentieth century?

*For more on Doctorow and The Book of Daniel, see the resources sidebar.