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I've signed myself up to teach a lit class on "Difficult Literature" and it's had me pondering that term. Difficulty changes a lot over time, and ends up meaning many different things to many different groups of readers. Sometimes it's an aspiration that the literati are aiming for, like in the age of "high" modernism, when Joyce and Eliot and Woolf and Pound and so forth are all testing the boundaries of the language. Sometimes it's said in dismissal, as when critics or other writers are dismissing stuff as pretentious, or wanky, or somehow difficult only for its own sake. (And of course, usually these two meanings are never found far from each other.) Sometimes it means difficult as in hard to read emotionally, like with Thomas Hardy or Toni Morrison. Sometimes it's hard to read for content, like with William S. Burroughs or Kathy Acker. It can be hard to read mechanically, like Danielewski or concrete poetry. It can be difficult because it demands so much attention from the reader, like Nabokov or Gene Wolfe. Most often, it's a mix of most of the above. Given the title of the class, the students—most of whom will be high-level undergrad English majors—know what they're getting themselves into, so I can assign pretty much anything. I want it to be stuff that is generally accessible and won't break the bank; since I was hired on to teach 20th/21st-century Anglophone lit, it'll be mostly 20th/21st-century Anglophone stuff. Also, I want to cover a lot of smaller things rather than a few big things (so maybe one or two big novels, but no Ulysses or Gravity's Rainbow or Dhalgren or Infinite Jest, etc. except maybe in excerpts). But beyond that, carte blanche—and while my examples here are mostly fiction, it'll also have poetry and drama as well. What would you assign? If you signed up for that class, what would you expect or hope to read? And beyond that, and more importantly, what does "difficult" mean to you when applied to novels, poems, plays, etc., and how do you respond to it?
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May 2, 2015 03:27
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Thanks everyone for suggestions! Hope to hear lots more—Mange Mite posted:I would add in books that are enormously long as a form of difficulty, but I guess that doesn't quite fit into your plans for the class. Right, I could maybe do one big huge long novel, but more than one and it becomes a big huge long novel course. Which is also great, and I'd be excited to teach it—something like Tom Jones / Middlemarch / Ulysses— but here it wouldn't leave time for much else. End Of Worlds posted:Beowulf or Sir Gawain in the original Old/Middle English. Excerpts, at least, if not the entire works. Examine the idea of difficult language on a whole 'nother level. Great idea, and I may mix something in—although possibly on the other end of things, using Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker to show one potential future for English, which also would also allow us to loop back into its past. Hieronymous Alloy posted:Faulkner's Go Down, Moses is short and dense as hell, and full of short stories and novellas you can pick out if you want something shorter. Then compare/contrast with something nice and terse by Steinbeck or Hemingway. "Signs and Symbols" is a good call, I've used it before in arcs of narrative disability—stories that put you in the same frame of mind as an intellectually disabled (or neurodiverse, if you prefer) character within the story. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is the obvious example, though I think Philip K Dick's Martian Time-Slip is way more effectively deranging, as well as three or four different Richard Powers novels. I might, though, use Crying of Lot 49 to get them all good and apophenic. "Vane Sisters" is another Nabokov on the possible list. I've got the first half of The Sound and the Fury pencilled in for my Faulkner, but that's still so much. Could switch it to As I Lay Dying. Hemingway's a tricky one, but there's plenty of stories from In Our Time that would work, like "Big Two-Hearted River"; I find later Men Without Women era ones not nearly so subtle. TrixRabbi posted:Perhaps some Beckett? I'm particularly thinking of the Molloy trilogy although his plays would do well for the drama segment. In general, he gets a lot at language itself and how it shapes our perception. The Unnamable in a way is a being of pure language. Oh, definitely some Beckett. May go for the plays though, since I need a handful of those. Endgame maybe, if I want the full-on treatment, or Happy Days if I can bury a student neck-deep in sand. Hieronymous Alloy posted:Alternate plan: whole syllabus, just Finnegan's Wake, over and over again This sounds like my life, more or less. Will for sure do some very small readings from the Wake. I've had a lot of success in the past just turning a class loose on a single page or even paragraph, and seeing how much they can dig out of it.
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May 6, 2015 00:17
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TrixRabbi posted:Any English Lit major will have read Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the like in their intro courses. Those are like fundamentals of English literature that hopefully everyone in the class will already be familiar with. Don't waste their time making them reread it. Rereading has its own challenges and difficulties, of course, but yeah I'm not too keen on putting them back through medieval texts they've already had with people who know way, way more about them than I do. Pretty inevitable that modernism will be a major fixation of the class, but I don't just want to recapitulate TS Eliot's high-modernist narrative of lit history. "Modernism" has gotten to be a really slippery word, and it's clear by now that all those changes were underway well before Ulysses or The Waste Land came out, so really it's all modernism Nagato posted:Personally, rather than reading modern literature that was purposefully written to be difficult, I think it would be a good use of class time to read ancient literature that is considered difficult nowadays simply because it was written for people with longer attention spans. For example, the Iliad and the Odyssey ask timeless questions but they require a good amount of thought and discussion to coax out. I agree that it would be wonderful to read a lot of these longer works that there generally isn't time for in a classroom setting, but I do have to generally stick with English language lit, since the class is offered within an English dept and it'll be mostly upper-level majors. Also, since the course title is "Difficult Literature," I think I have to assign at least some literature that was written with difficulty in mind, so that we can talk about why that particular type of difficulty might have seemed so important to those writers, or to the critics and readers at that time and after. Also, you have the "attention span" thing almost precisely backwards—oral storytelling, which the Iliad and Odyssey come out of, required simpler overall plots (like retelling stories everyone was already familiar with) and less character depth because you can't expect an audience to keep everything straight when they have to keep all the info in their heads. Technological changes like writing and printing, and sociological changes like leisure time, all make it possible for literary works to become more complex. (Note that this does not necessarily mean "better.") Ben Marcus is a fantastically weird writer, though, and I'll probably tack some or all of The Flame Alphabet to the end of the course. elentar fucked around with this message at 02:25 on May 6, 2015 |
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May 6, 2015 02:09
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precision posted:The books people call "genre trash" typically do not explore or even attempt to explore any substantial themes beyond the superficial ones that prop up the story. This is a really unproductive way of looking at literature though—for one thing, it assumes that we have a really firm grip on what "substantial themes" are important, and that's just not borne out historically. A lot of stuff that people thought was just total schlock turns out to be really important in helping us understand blind spots in that place and time. I mean, porn and erotica is just one major area that can tell you loads about a culture, but it applies to a lot of other forms and authors as well. Am I saying that GoT is going to be some great epic milestone to the readers of the future? Of course not. But it could easily still be read and analyzed as reflecting important things about the US and world over the past 20 years, even if it's not "exploring substantial themes." And it's definitely interesting that it's the example people go to in order to define "genre trash." . Meanwhile, a bunch of stuff that people have rated really highly as literature (and not just on the basis of sales, either) can fall off the face of the earth, if later generations of readers come to the conclusion that those books or authors don't have as much to say anymore. And then, sometimes people will come back around to those authors again, and they'll have a revival. These fluctuations in literary fortune say as much or more about the people reading the books as it does about the books themselves, and there's defintely not any stable point you can stand on and separate things out into "literature" and "trash" for all time. Even further, a lot of the books we regard as canonical literature now wouldn't have happened if the people who wrote them hadn't been passionate readers of more disposable literature. Cervantes read all those courtly romances that Don Quixote acts out. Jane Austen (who is about as canonical as you can get) loved and hated Gothic novels in equal measure. Joyce and Pynchon and Borges and a lot of other great authors read and found worthwhile stuff in absolutely everything, etc. Dragging it back to the actual thread: pulp fiction, trashy fiction can actually be really difficult for people to come to grips with, precisely because it's so easy to dismiss, and so hard to actually read with eyes open. Like what you like, and call out what you don't—but call out specific things, and keep in mind that every book has something to teach, however unintentionally.
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May 15, 2015 05:20
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Thanks everyone for continued suggestions! Lots of good stuff, and all appreciated.UnoriginalMind posted:I think an excerpt from JR by Gaddis would be a nice way to bring people to bear on Postmodernism. Maybe just showing off a few pages and how he slips between characters and settings. I was not able to finish it, but it's style is a fantastic thing to experience, however difficult to endure. Mr. Squishy posted:Why not Carpenter's Gothic, for brevity. Also, you get the benefit of showing how Gaddis hides his plot which wouldn't come across with an extract. Hell, even shorter go for Agapé Agape, since Bernhard's ruled out for not being anglophone. Gaddis is definitely on the shortlist, and I"m trying to figure out whether to do excerpts alongside others, or throw them one of the short novels. Agapé Agape didn't do much for me when I read it on release, but maybe it will once I revisit it now I'm getting older. At some point I'll drop The Recognitions and JR on a grad class and see what we can all make of it. Bhaal posted:I think a lot of good options have been covered, but just to throw out a suggestion that springs to mind and hasn't been mentioned: Absolutely will have some McCarthy on there, though maybe Blood Meridian? Whatever I do of his forces confrontations with genre, historical and ongoing violence, etc, plus there's his own infuriatingly terse and contradictory statements about his own work to deal with. taco show posted:Gertrude Stein! Yes, Stein for days (two of them, in fact), and I'd still lean Sound and Fury. Albee's a great call; nothing about Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf is difficult to parse, but the whole experience is as draining as anything you could hope for or dread. Some of the other dramatists I want in there are the likes of Caryl Churchill, maybe "The Skriker," and I'm sure I'll break my own Anglophone thing to put in some Artaud or Brecht. cats on the beat posted:I have no idea what I would assign for your class, but to respond to the rest of your questions I would hope to read books that are not often encountered by Western audiences. This may mean they are books in translation or books that present ideas and themes that are written for non-Western audiences. It would be interesting to read these kinds of books and pick apart the question of "difficult" literature - does the language or writing style make these books "difficult?" Does the sense of foreign or Other identities make the book difficult to understand? You could talk about the difficulty of translation or book economies that make encountering books by non-Western authors difficult, and why that may be a problem. Thanks! All interesting, for sure, and I would love to do a version of the class that's all literature in translation; however since I'm hired for this year anyway to do English-language lit, I'll stick mostly to that. Calvino's possible because of the lightness and shortness of his prose, both of which will probably be pretty necessary a couple months in. Might do instead "If on a winter's night a traveler" or Castle of Crossed Destinies though. odincode posted:"Pale Fire" by Nabokov for structure Probably won't do this only because I teach it in almost everything else, and I read it constantly, and live and breathe it. Lolita's difficult too, of course, but maybe too often read and too specifically focused? I would love to teach Ada, or Ardor, since that's a super weird and difficult book, but too long for this class and there's just no way to excerpt it productively. Burning Rain posted:make them read robert shields' diary in its entirety, then fail them if they don't remember all the entries. The diary is fascinating! Will keep in mind if I do life writing at any point. Not much of one for sadistic assignments on top of sadistic reading though. Thanks for reminder on BS Johnson, The Unfortunates is definitely a candidate. I also thought about putting one of Lynd Ward's wordless wordcut novels on there—I'm not averse to adding out and out comics, either, but might wait on that for an actual comics course. Never gotten around to reading that Seth, will take a look at it. Mange Mite posted:Henry Darger oh god
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May 20, 2015 09:13
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By the way, anyone who clicked on this thread would probably be interested in Larry McCaffrey's list of the best hundred English-language books of fiction of the 1900s. There's a lot to argue with there, obviously, and like any such list you could nitpick it for days but I like his list more than just about any other because it rewards experimentation, it doesn't discount genre (but it also doesn't praise it to the moon), it's open to collections of stories as coherent fictional statements, it doesn't elevate misery for the sake of misery (though it may overrate depictions of evil), etc. etc. Plus the only way you'll have read all hundred already is if you're McCaffrey himself. I've slowly been working my way through it for years now, not in any particular order. Will be doing so for years more yet. elentar fucked around with this message at 09:22 on May 20, 2015 |
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May 20, 2015 09:18
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Invicta{HOG}, M.D. posted:...you'd really get groans with excerpts from Finnegan's Wake.... Oddly enough, I've only ever had good experiences bringing in excerpts from the Wake; the key for me has been to get them reading out loud to each other, usually in groups to start then joining all together, using no more than a page or so at a time. Once they realize that, yes, they actually do have to come to grips with what's in front of them, they usually start picking apart the portmanteau words, and end up with really interesting thoughts about language and about the conventions of the novel. But then, the Wake is one of my things, so it could just be that. Still, I learn new things every time from them. Mr. Squishy posted:The titular story in Oblivion is a dream of a dream of a dream of a dream, which is always a bit fun to trace out, and Mister Squishy from the same collection is a similarly nested tale told exclusively in market research jargon. I might do bits of The Pale King, which lends itself quite well to excerpting, and lets me talk about "anhedonia" and other fancy ways of making boredom fascinating—plus there's the difficulty of the work's incompletion, and how far to trust the people charged with bringing such works to press. If I do it I'll probably also do Kafka's Castle or Trial earlier in the semester. Will check out the Potter, thanks!
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May 20, 2015 13:20
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Slaan posted:An excerpt from the Silmarillion by Tolkien may work for this. There are several self contained stories like Hurin and Turin which aren't too long. The difficulty comes from Tolkien using these tales more to flesh out his world rather than to develop themes or tell a story. They could help you show how authors develop complex worlds around their characters. May be taking this more seriously than it deserves, but: I have a lot of time for Tolkien, and especially the Silmarillion, which I think demonstrates both his virtues and flaws very well. It's the sort of work that, were it found in fragments, would be considered a mythic masterpiece—but as with all his work, the impulse to exhaustive completion takes over, and spoils a lot of the best parts by bogging them down in overly meticulous detail. I'd probably teach some in any course on fantasy literature, but not in this one, there's way better and stranger works for showing the workings of complex, fantastic world-creation that add a lot of other stuff to the mix as well. For instance, Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, or sections of Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home, or Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker, or Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman, or Leslie Marmo Silko's Ceremony etc., etc. A human heart posted:You could also use some extracts from books by Dr Seuss, the difficulty comes from the use of rhyme, which can be challenging if you haven't encountered it before. Heh. Hell, maybe I'll give them some Seuss to read alongside Edith Sitwell and Gertrude Stein.
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May 25, 2015 21:18
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Shibawanko posted:Calling a class "difficult literature" sounds kind of silly. Strangely, I have identified what it is I care about and chosen books I actually like, though whatever blatant bias I have (or show consistently in the classroom) is for an open pedagogy: I want students to be aware of and participate in the construction of the class. So I had 2/3 or so of the syllabus already written when I made this thread, but I wanted to know what sorts of things I was overlooking, so I could adjust the pre-constructed portion as needed and have candidates to fill out the other 1/3 with. Also, even more directly, one of the assignments will be for them to bring in and present their own difficult literary texts—so by polling the room here, I'm hoping to get a notion of what might or might not turn up in an open forum, so that I can nudge response along accordingly. Less directly, this school has a really heavy creative arts component, so until I get in the class with them, I won't know whether I have a roomful of poets, or dramatists, or fiction writers, or something in between. I have to be able to give a cross-section of what "difficulty" means, while also adjusting so the plurality of works are ones they're most strongly engaged with. As to the class name, it isn't simply just "Difficult Literature" because of all the required prefixes and flags for enrollment. But that is in the title, because I want students who know what they're getting into, and are excited about or at least prepared for it.
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Jun 1, 2015 01:19
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anilEhilated posted:Also your name, address and social security number. Heh. Well, in the end, the class ended up getting moved to the spring, because they had to shuffle assignments around for various reasons. So I've got a little while longer to tinker with it, and I'm playing around with various cross-sections of the shortlist below. (If you posted something and it's not on the list, I probably thought about it and left it off, but I may have just forgotten or deleted accidentally. I'll come back around to it in either case though.) Caveats: obviously, it's like four classes' worth of material. It skews toward prose, especially the later we get; that's mostly what I'll be paring away to get to the final list. There's a lot I'm not happy with: it's too white, for a start, and mostly too straight. It's also oddly light on '70s and '90s stuff. If I get to teach the class again, I'll probably swap out all except a couple of the works. * = excerpts
edit: oh, and also: I don't have time to formally cover film or visual art or music or anything else, but I want to sort of gesture in that direction at least to set the mood for some of the classes, so I'll probably play some things like Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, or a track from Trout Mask Replica or things like that, and put some slides up for stuff that goes along with recognizable literary moments like cubism, surrealism, abstract expressionism, art brut etc. elentar fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Jul 10, 2015 |
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Jul 10, 2015 06:02
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If I was going to add something like that I'd probably go with Céline's Journey to the End of Night and some selections from his descent into raving anti-semitic fascism and Holocaust denial, then connect back to him in the course via his revival through the Beats. (I really do wonder what he and Allen Ginsberg actually talked about...) Sadly I think hate of the nakedly political sort is all too easy to grasp at present—and reading outright neo-Nazism etc. can make it easy for students not to examine their own preconceptions because, hey, at least they're not those guys. edit: incidentally, the class is going to be meeting in the spring, just in case there's anyone out there wondering why I haven't posted a final list yet. will finalize in a month or two when I have to get the books ordered in. also I love 2666 but would never teach it, maybe not even in a grad class. Savage Detectives, maybe, though not for this one either. elentar fucked around with this message at 06:21 on Aug 31, 2015 |
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Aug 31, 2015 06:09
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So here's what I'm going with, though I might still fiddle with bits of it: Week by week 1: Intro; Edgar Allan Poe, "The Purloined Letter" 2: Comte de Lautréamont, various poems; T.S. Eliot, "The Waste Land" 3: Sherwood Anderson, stories from "Winesburg Ohio"; Edith Sitwell, various poems; Gertrude Stein, various poems 4: James Joyce, excerpts from Ulysses and Finnegans Wake 5: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse 6: Jean Toomer, excerpts from Cane; poems from the Harlem Renaissance 7: Djuna Barnes, Nightwood 8: William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury 9: spring break 10: Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman 11: Ezra Pound, excerpts from The Cantos; Allan Ginsberg, "Howl"; selections from LANGUAGE and concrete poets 12: Russell Hoban, Riddley Walker 13: Samuel Beckett, Endgame; Caryl Churchill, The Skriker 14: Toni Morrison, Beloved 15: Kathy Acker, Empire of the Senseless 16: Lydia Davis, various short shorts, Conclusion There's a lot of compromises in there, obviously, but I think it's an interesting enough cross-section. Now to see if anyone actually signs up for it. The bonus of the class is that since the reading is so intense, the writing component will be fairly tame.
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Nov 22, 2015 19:30
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Earwicker posted:Curious why you chose Ginsberg. If anyone from that particular crowd is "difficult" it's Burroughs especially his work with cutups. The only difficult thing about Howl is most of the time you won't know who/what he's referring to unless you read a bio or general history of that scene, but aside from the references it's very straightforward, much moreso than most "beat" poetry I would say. That's definitely one of the tweaks I might make, although I'll cover Burroughs alongside Acker late on (and have them make cut-ups etc.) The Beats on the whole seem fairly conservative in retrospect, especially against some of the other experimentation going on. Maybe I'll switch him out for Zukofsky or something. I have a secondary worry that if I keep steadily raising the bar throughout, keeping them at a uniform level of discombobulation, that they won't ever feel themselves capable of grappling with any of the literature on even terms. So having one or two subtly "easier" works scattered throughout isn't necessarily a bad thing, I think, at least to give them moments of looking at something and thinking, That's not really that difficult. But there's also plenty of flexibility in the back half of the list where I can just change thngs on the fly if I get a room full of poets, or short story writers, etc.
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Nov 23, 2015 16:33
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CountFosco posted:What's difficult about the purloined letter or beloved? "The Purloined Letter" is an example of the depths potentially hidden in even a seemingly simple story. It's one of the most contested in academia this last half-century or so, with Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, Barbara Johnson, Shoshana Felman, Jane Gallop, Jerome McGann, and plenty of others all taking swings at it. Also, it's something short that we can come into class and talk about the first day or two, while enrollment's still getting sorted out. (I was going to use "The Turn of the Screw," but it's a little too long to allow for all the other stuff that needs to happen at the start of a class.) I don't think that Beloved is word-for-word as challenging as some of the other books are, but it's far more emotionally difficult to process than most of them, and it can't be easily reduced to just the mechanics of the prose the way some others of them can. Also thought about Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony, and Octavia Butler's Kindred. And Salvador Plascencia's The People of Paper, which is one of my absolute favorite books but just didn't seem to fit in quite the same. Might change my mind there.
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Nov 28, 2015 04:54
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