Monthly Archives: January 2015

English 383A: Transnational Politics and the Post-9/11 Novel

24 Saturday Jan 2015

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Spring 2015

University at Buffalo

Beyond Globalization: Beijing, China

Beyond Globalization: Beijing, China

Literature after September 11, 2001 reflects a shift from the provincial politics of nation-states to that of transnational politics—issues that require adjudication across national, geographic, cultural, linguistic, religious, and racial borders. In the epoch of globalization, these are conflicts that are unlikely to be resolved without the cooperation and understanding of diverse peoples willing to set aside sectarian interests. If the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 brought to a close an overt dichotomy in international politics and deprived Western writers of a reliable foil, the events of 9/11 not only redirected our “intelligence community” from counter-espionage to counter-terrorism but also compelled writers to attend to a multilateral political terrain. This new political paradigm is both transnational and asymmetrical. The system of global capitalism, for which the secular ideals of representative democracy are a thinly disguised “advance man,” contends with the emergent threat of a transnational theocracy that is resistant to the agnostic, graphical, and consumerist Western ideology.

Chris Corder (2001): 911 Apocalypse

Chris Corder (2001): 911 Apocalypse

We will read some works of fiction that directly represents the events of 9/11 and others that reflect changes in the political and cultural milieu in its aftermath. Don DeLillo has called this the “Age of Terror,” and in Falling Man (2007), he eschews documentary realism in favor of representing 9/11 through the cognitive and psychological trauma of a World Trade Center survivor whose recuperation is the beginning of a “counternarrative” to terrorism. Orhan Pamuk sets Snow (2004) in the village of Kars in far eastern Turkey, away from the multicultural city of Istanbul that links Europe and Asia, in order to foreground the tensions and resistance between Islam and Turkey’s secular state as girls, forbidden to wear head scarves to school, commit suicide. J. M. Coetzee, in Diary of a Bad Year (2007), fashions a multi-tracked narrative in which the author-surrogate Señor C. ventures a series of “strong opinions” on anarchism, terrorism, the state, Al Qaida, democracy and so on that question the purpose of writing in an ethically confused and disputatious world.

Graydon Parrish, The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy, 2002-2006 September 11th, 2001

Graydon Parrish, The Cycle of Terror and Tragedy, 2002-2006 September 11th, 2001

These and other works of contemporary fiction—including Ken Kalfus, A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (2006), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011), and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2008)—suggest that, rather than suffering from self-absorption and disaffection, innovative fictions have engaged global politics. As Pamuk contends, it is through novels that world citizens do their deepest thinking about themselves.

Kathryn Bigelow, dir. Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

Kathryn Bigelow, dir. Zero Dark Thirty (2012)

We’ll also screen films that present differing views of the role of state power in the transnational political drama, including Kathryn Bigelow, dir. Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Alain Brigand, prod. 11’09″01 September 11 (2002), and Errol Morris, dir. Standard Operating Procedure (2008).

 

English 353: Experimental Fiction: Multimodality in the Novel

24 Saturday Jan 2015

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Mel Bochner, Language Is Not Transparent (1970)

Mel Bochner, Language Is Not Transparent (1970)

Spring 2015

University at Buffalo

We will read a selection of “books” that question every aspect of what it means to be a print novel. These are multimodal works that integrate text, pictures and design elements; and yet they are books you can’t read on a Kindle™. We experience multimodality as the environment of our daily life, in various platforms that include the urban streetscape, art galleries, digital “desktops” and other electronic media. Multimodality is as new as the iPhone with its “app” icons and voice assistant, Siri, but as old as the New England Primer. Multimodal literature both resists and appropriates digital technology in the print medium. Most literary works are language-centered: they call on the reader’s store of linguistic competency and comprehension of the text, but they subordinate or exclude pictorial or graphic elements. The experience of reading a multimodal novel, however, requires that the reader negotiate between the verbal and the visual, always aware that the bound book is also an expert technology. We will examine the effects of multiple reading paths on narrative structure; the physical manipulation required to read these books; and the “self-conscious” reading that is required by works that call attention to themselves as books.

Tom Phillips, A Humument

Tom Phillips, A Humument (1980)

Works for extended discussion will include: Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions (2006); Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes (2010); B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (2009); Vladimir Nabokov’s The Original of Laura (Dying is Fun) (2008); Tom Phillips’s A Humument: A Treated Victorian Novel (fifth edition, 2012); Art Spiegelman’s MetaMaus: A Look Inside a Modern Classic (2011); and Steve Tomasula’s VAS: An Opera in Flatland (2004).

English 357: Film Adaptation of the Novel

24 Saturday Jan 2015

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Winter Session 2015

University at Buffalo

Cloud Atlas

This installment of Contemporary Literature will examine film adaptations of the novel. Literary fiction provides a rich, original source for story, character and setting in feature films. And yet the director, screenwriter, and actors are inevitably faced with challenges in successfully transferring a predominantly textual art into a visual and auditory medium. Especially with well-known classic works such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925), recently adapted by director Baz Luhrman, the problem of fidelity to the original novel arises. The editing of long prose fictions to fit within the typical two-hour duration of feature films gives the most gifted screenwriter migraines. Sometimes, however, a script must be augmented with scenes or characters not present in the original for a coherent representation of the story on screen. Literature that heavily relies on interior monologue and narration rather than external dramatic action or dialogue poses a nearly insurmountable hurdle for adaptation. And we should consider that novels are most often sole-authored works of the imagination that, in the words of Irish writer and humorist Flann O’Brien, are “self-administered in private,” while films are very much collective enterprises demanding the skills of hundreds of people and, ideally, screened in public theaters to large appreciative audiences. In this compressed winter session we will have time to consider carefully two bestselling and critically acclaimed novels and their nearly as successful film adaptations. We’ll first read David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), with its six overlapping storylines and recurrent characters; and we’ll view its ambitious adaptation by directors Tom Tykwer, Andy and Lana Wachowski (The Matrix Trilogy) in 2012. AtonementThen we’ll read Ian McEwan’s historical novel of class and moral responsibility, Atonement (2001), set in England in 1935, during World War II, and in present day England. Its adaptation by director Joe Wright in 2007 confronts the multiple historical settings and the complex subjectivity of the novel’s characters. This course will be conducted online through UB Learns, with digital streaming of the films. Students will be required to participate in weekly graded discussion boards and writing assignments on both novels and films.