The Danger of a Single Story

I think I might show this beautiful speech by Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie on the first day of my Outsider course in the fall -- it's 18 minutes well spent.

Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign. But stories can also be used to empower, and to humanize. Stories can break the dignity of a people. But stories can also repair that broken dignity.

The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner

In fact, in the spiritual world, we change sexes every moment.
--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Representative Men

I object to anything that divides the two sexes ... human development has now reached a point at which sexual difference has become a thing of altogether minor importance.  We make too much of it; we are men and women in the second place, human beings in the first.
--Olive Schreiner to Havelock Ellis, 19 Dec 1884 [quoted in Monsman]

I first tried to read The Story of an African Farm some years ago when I went on a Doris Lessing binge; I hadn't heard of the novel before reading Lessing's praise of it, and what she said intrigued me.  But I went into The Story of an African Farm expecting it to be, well, a story, and it was soon apparent that, for all the book is, it is only "a story" in the loosest sense -- indeed, it's more accurate to say it is a book containing a lot of stories, but even that misses much of what is wonderful and unique in Olive Schreiner's creation.

The next time I thought about reading African Farm was when I first encountered J.M. Coetzee's White Writing, wherein Coetzee seems somewhat dismissive of the book, noting that it is a kind of fantasy because the reader gains almost no sense of how the farm in the novel is able to be sustained.  I then assumed African Farm to be just another Africa-as-exotic-setting novel, something of historical interest perhaps, but not much more than that.

As I was first thinking about putting together a new version of my Outsider course, though, I came upon some references to Schreiner and this novel that piqued my interest and brought me back to it.  I wanted some context to consider the book in, so I grabbed library copies of Olive Schreiner's Fiction: Landscape & Power by Gerald Monsman and Olive Schreiner by Ruth First and Ann Scott.  These were extremely helpful, especially the Monsman, because he provides a valuable analysis of the book's structure, defending it from the many critics who have said that African Farm, whatever its virtues, is a failure as a novel.  Monsman places the book within a tradition of philosophical novels such as those by Walter Pater and Thomas Carlyle, although Schreiner's book is, to my mind at least, more accessible and emotionally affecting than those.  Nonetheless, they are important to mention in any defense of Schreiner, because it's too easy to assume a narrow definition of "the novel" and judge Schreiner a failure against it.  She clearly wasn't trying to create a book to fit that definition.

The Outsider and the Idea of Africa

[This is part of a continuing series of posts on a class I teach at Plymouth State University, "The Outsider".  I am one of many people who teach the course, and each instructor fits their own ideas and interests into a fairly general catalogue description.  All the posts related to this one can be found via the Outsider label.  Eventually, I'll even update the course's website, since it's now completely out of date.]

The last time I blathered on about my ideas for The Outsider, I was still a few weeks away from having to order the books for the class, and so the syllabus was still very much in flux. I hadn't even plotted it out day by day, so I didn't know if I could fit in all the various books I was thinking about fitting in.

After reading my post, the great and glorious Aaron Bady sent me a note, since much of what I was thinking about -- representations of the idea of "Africa" in colonial and then post-colonial fiction -- was stuff he's spent a lot of time studying. I felt a little embarrassed, because he actually knows what he's talking about, and I'm just following yet another of my many obsessions (really, I should rename this blog The Dilettante). But this obsession has been with me for at least a decade, and though there have been years in that time when I've not indulged it, it always comes back, and whenever it does it comes back stronger than before. (Actually, no. The strongest moment was a period of about three days when I was determined to visit and analyze the entire inventory of every bookstore in Nairobi. That was a period of temporary insanity. It began innocently and miraculously, but then...)

Anyway, Aaron made a marvelous suggestion: "What about Tarzan?" Tarzan is something Aaron knows a bit about, and more importantly, he's thought about Tarzan using just the sorts of templates and questions I want to use to think about that iconic guy. Aaron kindly sent me a paper he's working on about the Tarzan image and phenomenon, and I promptly plundered it for references and started burrowing (and Burroughsing ... ugh, sorry) around in the Plymouth State library, the Dartmouth library, Google Books, and, when desperate or particularly intrigued, various used book dealers.

My basic concept of the course is one I soon discovered is discussed in detail in a wonderful book, Artificial Africas: Colonial Images in the Times of Globalization by Ruth Mayer. Or, rather, Mayer writes about some of the ideas I'll be using during the first half of the course: How, for instance, do people who come into the place they (or their authors) think of as Africa then represent that idea of Africa to their audiences? Or, to make it more obvious how the course material and course title go together: What happens when outsiders come in and start telling stories about the place they've come into? Do the stories they tell work to assuage their feelings of outsiderness, or even to reconfigure them as the insiders and the people who are natives as the outsiders? (With a colonialist mentality, is everything outside Europe or the USA? And so no matter where they are, will a European or American always be, or at least assume themselves to be, an insider?) And then, in the second half of the course, we'll turn things around a bit and look at other perspectives -- the empire writing back, to use the familiar postcolonial phrase. Finding ways for the silenced to speak, the erased to be recovered. For the insiders who have been represented as outsiders by colonialism to reclaim their insider status. (Or, I will ask the students eventually, is the binary itself too limiting? What does it hide from us?)

Here and Back Again

I went twenty days without posting here, and it's been an eventful time, pretty much all to the good.  I took care of some giant final tasks for my father's estate, taught some classes, made progress with planning classes for the summer and fall, volunteered on a movie shoot, wrote a screenplay for a web series a friend hopes to make in Minnesota (more on that as it develops), started another screenplay I hope to browbeat another friend into filming, wrote a very difficult review of a book I'd hoped to be able to say more good things about than I was able to (more on that later), and submitted a couple of short stories to places that might be friendly toward them, since though I haven't written any new stories in quite some time, I do have a couple that have proved difficult to place with publishers because I stubbornly insist that their weirdnesses, lacunae, contradictions, and nonsense are not flaws, but charming and essential features.

In amidst it all, there was some reading.  Here are a few highlights...

• I picked up a copy of Robert B. Parker's Looking for Rachel Wallace after reading Ron Silliman's praise of it. And it does, indeed, provide plenty of interesting fodder for anybody interested in such things as gender and machismo. It's also pretty darn entertaining.
  
  
• Speaking of machismo, I picked up Richard Sellers's Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed from the library because it looked like a light read and I realized I knew nothing about the actual lives of the four actors it discusses. It is, indeed, a light read, but also a depressing one -- it is nothing but stories of four immensely talented people being drunk, boorish, irresponsible, and destructive. I couldn't help thinking of a much better book, Tom Dardis's The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer, where the destructive effect of alcohol on the later work of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway is contrasted with the blossoming of Eugene O'Neill's writing once he quit drinking. Sellers makes a point of noting that Burton, Harris, O'Toole, and Reed all said they had no regrets about the effect of alcohol on their lives, but it's obvious from the book that their lives were deeply hurt by their drinking.
  
  
• I finally got around to reading Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo (aka Not Before Sundown), which won the Tiptree Award for 2004, and which I've been meaning to read at least from the time it won the award. I should have read it then. Actually, I wish I had read it before it garnered any accolades, because I think my expectations for it pretty much ruined it for me. I expected a truly great book, and got a merely good one.  And sometimes a bit less than merely good.  I found the insertion of various excerpts from fictional texts tedious and obvious, the story itself at times rather silly, and the final images more goofy than affecting. I certainly would not have disliked it all as fully as I did had I come to it blind, and I expect I would have found it more surprising and more compelling if I'd had no expectations of it being of a particular quality when I began. Alas. My loss.
  
  
• James Naremore's More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts was a great joy to read. Naremore wrote one of my favorite books on Orson Welles, as well as an early and perceptive little book on Psycho and, most recently, a pretty good study of Kubrick. But More Than Night may be his masterpiece -- full of insights that help make even some films I've seen many times seem almost new.
  
  
• Truffaut: A Biography by Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana was illuminating about certain moments in the life of one of my favorite filmmakers, but it was on the whole disappointing because it spends comparatively little time on each film he made, so it ultimate felt to me quite thin. I'll have to give Truffaut at Work at try, since the Dartmouth Library has a copy, and Bill Krohn's Hitchcock at Work is marvelous, marvelous, marvelous.
  
  
• Perhaps my favorite book read in the last month, if not during all of 2010 so far, is Helen Merrick's The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms. It's full of insights, provocations, information. I'll be writing more specifically about it in the future, but for now, just know that if you have any interest in feminism, cultural history, and/or genre fiction, you'll get a lot out of this book.

Meanwhile, just a few days ago I discovered that over a year ago Norton released a Critical Edition of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, edited by Francis Abiola Irele. I love the Norton Critical Editions, but the NCE of Things Fall Apart may be the best one I've seen. The novel itself takes up just over 100 pages, and the whole book is nearly 600 pages long -- rich with background material, interviews with Achebe and other people, reviews, analyses, various material related to Achebe's critique of Heart of Darkness, etc. It's a thing of wonder and beauty.

I immediately wanted to use it in a course. But what course? I don't get to teach an African literature course, and would be hesitant to teach one at the college level, anyway, at least beyond the introductory level -- my interest in African lit is the interest of a passionate hobbyist, and my knowledge is full of gaps, ignorance, and, I'm sure, inaccuracies.

But I've been struggling to come up with a new syllabus for a course I'm teaching for the second time in the fall, The Outsider. My previous syllabus wasn't a disaster, but I'm more experienced with the sorts of students who take this course now, and I wanted to change a few things (not so much the texts, most of which actually worked pretty well, as my approach and writing assignments). The thing that I kept coming back to was the experience of teaching Nervous Conditions, a book I had had great luck with in a high school course on African novels. My Plymouth State students almost unanimously hated it -- mostly, I discovered, because they had trouble understanding it. Not the language, which is perfectly straightforward, but the cultural background. In the high school class I used the book in, by the time we got to it we had spent a few weeks learning about themes of certain similar types of African literature and the cultural situations of some of the writers. We'd had a bit of that in my first try with The Outsider, but not to an extent where it sunk in enough. College students in central New Hampshire in general education courses need to spend real time on learning about the world from which writers write if those writers are not writing from worlds that appear frequently in the students' experience of life and of media representations. Indeed, when it comes to an African country, the students need even more time to work through their knowledge, perceptions, and assumptions because so much of what they know, perceive, and assume is reductive or, often as not, flat-out wrong. Thus, Kafka made more sense to them than Dangarembga. I had not been prepared for that.

Thinking about this and about the wonderful Norton edition of Things Fall Apart , I had a eureka moment -- why not devote the entire course to African literature and perceptions of Africa in non-African writing? Surely, I could do this while also sticking to the basic idea of the Outsider course.  The general course description requires only that the course look at literature and film, include discussions of the individual in relationship to society, and emphasize differences in cultures, and include such topics as "gender, sexuality, race, class, wealth, behavior, and socialization."  No problem.  And with a course of this level -- the most basic and general offered by the University -- I wouldn't need more than my own hugely-incomplete-but-adequate-enough-for-this-purpose knowledge.

What would happen, I thought, if we read not just Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart, but also The Story of an African Farm and King Solomon's Mines? And then move from there to books by post-Independence African writers? (That would also let me use another great Norton book, Modern African Drama). I immediately started making a list of possible texts -- and then realized I should probably limit myself to books currently in print, since that would make things a bit easier when it comes to making books available to 25-30 students...

Lo and behold, lots of things I wanted to use are currently unavailable. I was particularly annoyed to discover that Ngugi's Devil on the Cross is out of print. Grrr. One of the most important novels by one of the most important African novelists. Not available. And so many others, too. Not available.

But many great books are available, and I've ordered copies of some I haven't yet had an excuse to get hold of. Now I've got the excuse. I expect at least some of my posts here over the next few months will be about the books I'm either revisiting or encountering for the first time as I prepare for the course. I'm looking forward, too, to rereading Things Fall Apart, which I last read no more recently than nine years ago.  First up, though, will be The Story of an African Farm, which, I'm sad to say, I've never read before.

Scattered Thoughts on Michael K. and Others

Early this week, I thought I'd write a little post about J.M. Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K, since I just got finished teaching it in my Outsider course and wanted to preserve a few of the things I'd thought about -- each reading experience of the novel has been, for me, quite different. But then I got to thinking about futurist fiction in South Africa before the end of apartheid, since I had started doing some research on the subject recently (mostly spurred on by a footnote in David Attwell's J.M. Coetzee: South Africa and the Politics of Writing), digging up out-of-the-way articles and out-of-print books, and I thought, Well, I can put some of that into the post, since it's interesting, but I wanted to do more research before saying anything in public, but I didn't have time, and, well ... here we are. No post all week. But lemme tell ya, the one in my head, WOW! It's a doozy, you betcha!

I do plan on writing an essay about such futurist South African fiction as Karel Schoeman's Promised Land, Nadine Gordimer's July's People and A Sport of Nature, Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians, and Mongane Serote's To Every Birth Its Blood ... but I need to read them all first.

Until then, some humble and probably obvious notes on Michael K....

When Coetzee is at his best as a novelist -- Barbarians, Michael K., Disgrace, Elizabeth Costello -- there is simply no other living writer I would rather read. All of his other books at the very least reward the time spent reading them (I'm quite fond, too, of his memoirs, Boyhood and Youth). As I read Michael K. this time, I tried to think about what it is in Coetzee's work that so appeals to me. It's no individual quality, really, because there are people who have particular skills that exceed Coetzee's. There are many writers who are more eloquent, writers with more complex and evocative structures, writers of greater imagination.

And then I realized that I was marking up my teaching copy of Michael K. as if I were marking up a poem. I looked, then, at my teaching copy of Disgrace, from when I used it in a class a few years ago. The same thing. Lots of circled words, lots of "cf."s referring me to words and phrases in other parts of the book. Lots of sounds building on sounds, rhythms on rhythms in a way that isn't particularly meaningful in itself, but that contributes to an overall tone-structure, a scaffold of utterance to hold up the shifting meanings of the story and characters.

The other writers I think of as doing this sort of thing -- Gaddis, DeLillo, and Pynchon come to mind, though more as 2nd-cousins than twin brothers -- do so on a larger, more baroque scale. Coetzee is closer to Beckett, but more concrete (less dense than early Beckett, less ethereal than later). The biggest influences on Coetzee, it seems from some of his interviews and essays, have been Kafka and Beckett, and if forced to say which writers of the last 100 years matter the most to me right now, I'd say, myself, Kafka and Beckett, with Coetzee somewhere close behind them, hand-in-hand with Paul Bowles, Virginia Woolf, and maybe a couple of others, depending on my mood. This says less about literature than it does about me, about what it is I look for in fiction -- there is a bleakness of vision to most of these writers, often a fierce anti-sentimentality (which, in their best works, does not preclude humanity or descend to the converse of sentimentality, macho frigidity), and a great depth of language within relatively compressed fictional forms. My love for this sort of writing is also my limitation as a reader; I am, I think, capable of appreciating the DeLillos, Gaddises, and Pynchons of the world, but I am not someone who can truly love their work. (Instead, I end up loving them for certain sentences and paragraphs. There are passages in Mason & Dixon, Underworld, and The Recognitions that reach toward the height of human accomplishment with language -- perhaps these are simply feasts too rich for my metabolism.) Similarly, many more lush or emotive writers are capable of effects I can notice and see as skillful, but ultimately they ... well, they make me gag.

Once I got past obsessing over why a book like Michael K. appeals to me so deeply, I was able to focus on other things. My students struggled with matching their expectations for what a novel should be and do to what this novel is and does, and much of our time in class was spent on finding patterns -- patterns create meaning, I told them, and so when you get stuck, look for patterns. I had them find passages in the novel having to do with time, fertility, authority, children, communication (speech, words), and places where characters talked about the meaning of things, or where they assigned meaning to things. I made them search through the book as if on a scavenger hunt (which proved difficult for most because they had read quickly and hadn't written anything in their texts, but working in groups they stumbled along). As they talked amongst each other, sharing discoveries, they found that the novel was not the amorphous, "pointless" thing they had perceived it as, but rather a web of repetitions and reiterations. If I'd truly been prepared, I would have then given them some words of Barry Lopez from the introduction to About This Life:

Stories do not give instruction, they do not explain how to love a companion or how to find God. They offer, instead, patterns of sound and association, of event and image. Suspended as listeners and readers in these patterns, we might reimagine our lives.

Among other things, what we find in the patterns floating around the character of Michael K. are questions about what it even means to say "the character of Michael K.", because the story we are told (or, more accurately, stories) is one in which people impose meanings onto him and he resists them. As readers, our instincts encourage us to find meanings and apply them just as much as the other characters in the book do -- we want to sum him up in the mostly simplistically Freudian ways we can, which is how we read most narratives these days -- what motivates the characters, what secrets need to be revealed for them to overcome the obstacles in their lives, how can they come to peace with their childhoods, etc. We've been fed this predictable sort of psychodrama for at least a century now, and it fuels not just morning soap operas on tv, but most of the bourgeois literature of our era and many earlier eras (more often than not, good books are good in spite of their psychologizing).

Some critics have faulted Michael K. for the second section, which, two-thirds of the way into the novel, stops everything and shifts the viewpoint. Suddenly we are outside K's point of view, looking at him through the notes of a doctor. When I first read the novel (ten years ago now), I, too, was thrown off by the second section, mostly because the first had so overwhelmed me with the vivid, visceral imagery created by perfectly ordinary words. The shift seemed like a cheat to me, as if Coetzee couldn't admit how powerful and evocative the first section was, or was afraid of it. Cynthia Ozick made a good case against it:

If ''Life & Times of Michael K'' has a flaw, it is in the last-minute imposition of an interior choral interpretation. In the final quarter we are removed, temporarily, from the plain seeing of Michael K to the self-indulgent diary of the prison doctor who struggles with the entanglements of an increasingly abusive regime. But the doctor's commentary is superfluous; he thickens the clear tongue of the novel by naming its ''message'' and thumping out ironies. For one thing, he spells out what we have long ago taken in with the immediacy of intuition and possession. He construes, he translates: Michael K is ''an original soul . . . untouched by doctrine, untouched by history . . . evading the peace and the war . . . drifting through time, observing the seasons, no more trying to change the course of history than a grain of sand does.'' All this is redundant. The sister- melons and the brother-pumpkins have already had their eloquent say. And the lip of the child kept from its mother's milk has had its say. And the man who grows strong and intelligent when he is at peace in his motherland has had his say.

Where I differ with Ozick now is that I don't think the doctor does understand K, and I don't think the explanation he offers is persuasive (it would be were K a relative of Forrest Gump, perhaps). The doctor ascribes a meaning to K based on his own desires and disappointments, and it is the process of meaning-making that we follow in the second section, and it is revelatory and chastening, because who among us has resisted the same urges while reading the first section? It's important that people have misnamed K by this point, calling him "Michaels". He cannot be bound up in a meaning anymore than he can be bound up in an internment camp, and they mistake his meaning as they mistake his name. We'll get no sustenance by cannibalizing him for our metaphysics; he's just skin and bones.

The last fifteen pages of the book return us to K's point of view and his peregrinations. Now we as readers are more prepared. We should know by now to be suspicious of our impulses, to know that what we want to do says more about us and our world than about K and his.

The movement of the novel is, broadly speaking, from city to countryside to city to countryside -- except the last movement to countryside is imagined. K lies on a pile of flattened cardboard boxes in the little closet room where his mother had lived in the city, and he's probably dying, and he thinks back to what has happened to him and where he has been, and he begins ascribing more meaning to himself than he ever has before, a meaning built from references to a life lived in cages and to gardening and staying close to the ground (shades of Being There, but with more complexity, sophistication, and depth). A motif of things underground fills the book -- sometimes from urges and ideas that are paranoid and crazy, sometimes from ones eminently practical -- and every reader sees all the attention given to seeds and growing things, to life that sprouts out of the ground. The symbolism is obvious, and I think Coetzee knows this, because it's not for us that he has created these particular symbols, but for the characters in the book (Michael K. particularly) who need something to grasp in their search for meaning.

On the penultimate page, K thinks in a parenthesized paragraph:

(Is that the moral of it all, he thought, the moral of the whole story: that there is time enough for everything? Is that how morals come, unbidden, in the course of events, when you least expect them?)

The tone is uncertain, and I think we should be wary of accepting the moral K thinks he has found. It may be one of the meanings available from this life, but even K's life is richer than to be summed up in a moral. We cheapen existence when we simplify it into morals and mottos and triangles. We need resonant imagery to replace our slogans, charts, and graphs -- and so Life and Times of Michael K ends with a beautiful and perplexing image: Michael imagines a companion (one that bears some similarity to the doctor's first impression of Michael himself), and he imagines the farm in the country, and he imagines a well and a teaspoon and just enough pure water to sustain life. There is meaning there, but it must be felt in the rhythms of the word and thought, it must be welcomed into the mind like a koan or a magical riddle that asks for no solution. As long as he keeps from solving the puzzle of himself, Michael K will live.

The Outsider and the Syllabus

One of the courses I'm teaching at Plymouth State University in the fall is called "The Outsider", and I've been struggling with the syllabus for the past few weeks. There are lots of reasons for this struggle, and as struggles go, it's been a fun and productive one. But every time I think I'm almost done with the syllabus, I decide to make a few changes...

One of the challenges is the breadth of possibilities -- the course is supposed to do a few different things, including introduce first- and second-year students to basics of literary study and critical thinking. It's also supposed to be interdisciplinary (which for this course has traditionally meant a mix of literature and film). And it should have some sort of historical component. But it shouldn't be backbreaking because it is, after all, a general education course for first- and second-year students, many of whom have no desire to become English majors.

Oh, and then there's the fact that outsiderdom and otherness are such common elements of literature that you could almost pick a bunch of books randomly and they'd fit the topic.

Naturally, my first attempt at a syllabus had the students reading something in the vicinity of 5,000 pages per month. I began to narrow it down by giving myself permission to exclude things that I know in my heart are essential -- for instance, I stopped trying to fit in something from every era of the last 3,000 years of the world's history. That wasn't enough of a restriction, though, so I allowed myself only a few works from the 19th century (Woyzeck and "Bartleby" were the two pieces that appeared most frequently on my various lists). Then I gave myself permission not to cover all regions of the globe, though I did promise myself that I would include at least one text that did not originate in North America or Europe.

For a little while, I had what I thought was a finished draft of the syllabus. It began with Octavian Nothing (paired with the movie If...), continued with Woyzeck, moved on to some stories by Kafka paired with a documentary about Henry Darger (In the Realms of the Unreal), transitioned to Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K (and the documentary Amandla!), then Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (and Ousmane Sembene's film Black Girl), then Suzan-Lori Parks's play Venus (with The Elephant Man), and finally finished up with Delany's Trouble on Triton and a bunch of movies about crossing and transing gender which, I thought, students would choose 2 of to see (Breakfast on Pluto, Transamerica, Orlando, Beautiful Boxer, Boys Don't Cry, maybe even Some Like It Hot, who knows!).

When I reread this syllabus, I decided it was not only too ambitious, but verging on the insane. First- and second-year students, I kept saying to myself. Not all English majors... I reread some of Trouble on Triton. Oh no. No no no. It would take an entire term to get them through it. I started plotting things day by day. There weren't nearly enough days.

I scaled back. I rearranged. I rethought. What if we started with a month of short stories by Kafka, Camus, and Paul Bowles? Then move on to Coetzee and Dangarembga, which I thought I might pair with something by Kenzaburo Oe, either A Personal Matter or one of the stories in Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness. Then pair Woyzeck and Venus and finish with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Parable of the Sower, adding Blade Runner as a movie to go along with them and keeping most of the other movies except In the Realms of the Unreal.

This was better, but again when I plotted it out day by day, there just weren't enough days. Too many of the discussions would be rushed, too much would feel crammed in. I loved the idea of doing Kafka, Camus, and Bowles together, but I couldn't entirely justify the amount of time it would take to do it right. (Those three writers together deserve a course unto themselves, maybe with the addition of some native, post-colonial North African writers, depending on the focus.) Do Androids Dream and Blade Runner also felt like they belonged somewhere else, much as I adore them. So I adjusted again.

For a little while, I tried everything I could do to fit in both Woolf's Orlando and Charlie Anders's Choir Boy, but I would need at least another month of classes, and I couldn't bear to cut anything more to fit these two in, alas. Someday...

As of tonight, then, here's the list of texts. It may change a bit, but probably not drastically, unless I suddenly awake with a brilliant idea for how to better meet all the various needs of the course and also teach some stuff I'm qualified and excited to teach.....

• Kafka short stories
  
• Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K.
  
• Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
  
• Büchner, Woyzeck
  
• Parks, Venus
  
• Maureen McHugh, China Mountain Zhang
  
• Butler, Parable of the Sower
  
• Films: Amandla!, Black Girl, Herzog's Woyzeck (and maybe János Szász's, but I haven't had a chance yet to see it), and The Elephant Man

The McHugh and Butler are probably the most likely to be changed, if anything changes, partly because the timing is still tight -- I may look for a shorter Butler novel, and I need to reread China Mountain Zhang, since it's been quite a few years since I first read it. But the list feels right, book orders are due very soon, and I need to convince the library to buy the films they don't own. We shall see.

Clearly, though, I am having fun with the opportunity to design classes after a year of teaching a curriculum that I had no hand in designing...