Supplemental Readings: Contemporary Edition

This semester’s “Contemporary U.S. Novel” syllabus has six primary texts:

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996, 1104 pp.)
Barbara Kingsolver, The Poisonwood Bible (1998, 576 pp.)
Colson Whitehead, John Henry Days (2001, 389 pp.)
Jonathan Safran Foer, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005, 368 pp.)
Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2007, 352 pp.)
Rivka Galchen, Atmospheric Disturbances [...]

Why I’m in Favor of the Google Book Search Settlement

When Google announced their book-scanning project five years ago, most academics I talked to about it were pretty happy. These days a lot of that enthusiasm seems, if not to have disappeared, then at least to have been tempered by serious doubts. I share some of these, but on the whole the settlement is [...]

There are Parallels and there are Parallels

Finally, my answer to the first of the questions I posed about Disgrace. I’m answering it last because it’s the most important and because the solution depends on the positions one has taken on the others.
Question 1

What is the relationship between the two rapes?

Short answer: As a moral matter, they are unrelated. It is tempting [...]

On Lucy’s Response to the Attack

Answers to two more of the basic questions about Disgrace, this time concerning Lucy’s reaction to her rape.
Questions 2 & 3

Why does Lucy refuse to report her rape or otherwise pursue legal remedy for it?
Why does Lucy remain on the farm after the attack?

Short answer to both: Because Lucy represents one, abnegatory pole of the [...]

On the Killing of Dogs

Answers in this post to two more of the baseline questions about Disgrace, both of which concern Lurie and the significance of his relationship to dogs.
Questions 6 & 5

In what sense, if any, is Bev and Lurie’s euthanasia of the dogs an ethical/merciful/loving act?

Short answer: As ethical in sum, but complicated by the awareness that [...]

Answers to Some Questions about Lurie

Continuing with answers to the prerequisite questions about Disgrace, a couple on Lurie.
Question 8

How are we to treat Lurie’s opera?

Short answer: As an aesthetic failure, thus as non-redemptive.
It’s tempting, I think, to see the opera first as an opportunity for social rehabilitation—which is Lurie’s own early hope for it, though never his primary motivation—and second [...]

The Inquiry and Lurie’s Defense

Here’s the first of my answers to the questions about Disgrace raised in this post. The questions were posed in arbitrary order, but the answers try to work forward in some semi-logical way, hence they don’t follow the original order.
Question 4

Why does Lurie give up his job by refusing to defend himself before the inquiry?

Short [...]

Eight Questions about Disgrace

A while back, I blogged about some issues in Coetzee criticism. As I’m continuing work on my own essay about Disgrace, I’ve come up with a list of questions that I think every critic should be able to answer about the book before writing on it. These aren’t the only relevant questions, of course, nor [...]

The Shakespeare Industry

Loosely apropos Ed Finn’s panel at DH on Pynchon, Matt Jockers and I were trying to guess the most-published-upon author in English. I figured Shakespeare, he suggested Joyce. This morning I ran a couple of quick queries on the MLA database and came up with the following:

Shakespeare Joyce
2008+ [...]

The Formal Charge Against Lurie

A bit more on Disgrace. Talking things over with Liz Evans, she pointed out that the specific charge leveled against Lurie by Melanie Isaacs isn’t entirely clear; we’re never told anything beyond the fact that it involves an alleged breach of “article 3.1 of the university’s Code of Conduct,” which “addresses victimization or harassment of [...]