In response to the hopelessness of the human condition in general, and the prospects for the North American and British male in particular, the contemporary male novelist has been howling angrily for quite some time. The 20th Century has been a complete disaster and the 21st century will likely be even worse.
With characteristic dark humor, he describes his course thus: All three authors appear in a 2013 Columbia course Shteyngart teaches called “ The Hysterical Male,” a class specifically designed, it seems, to examine the neurosis of the white (or Jewish) male writer. Also on his list are Saul Bellow’s Herzog and Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint. In a Barnes and Noble author profile, Shteyngart lists two of Nabokov’s books- Pnin and Lolita-among his ten all-time favorites. Ballard, and of course, Nabokov, who also turns up as a favorite for another Russian expat writer and author of Absurdistan, Gary Shteyngart. She includes not a few “writer’s writers”-Kafka, J.G. Smith’s list trends somewhat surprisingly white male. The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Muriel Spark Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, David Lodge See the list below and make of it what you will:īrief Interviews with Hideous Men, David Foster Wallace In 2009, Smith lent her literary sensibilities to the teaching of a weekly fiction seminar called “Sense and Sensibility,” for which we have the full booklist of 15 titles she assigned to students. I’ll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions about what their syllabi show us about their process.įirst up, we have Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth and, most recently, NW: A Novel. Let’s take two case studies: exemplars of contemporary literary fiction, both of whom teach at Columbia University. Many, if not, most writers teach-whether literature, composition, or creative writing-and examining what those writers teach is an especially interesting exercise because it gives us insight not only into what they read, but also what they read closely and carefully, again and again, in order to inform their own work and demonstrate the craft as they know it to students.
0 kommentar(er)
