Polling the Audience
So, anybody got any ideas for a sixth book? Twentieth century, American, good read?
posted by Tara | 9:17 PM
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7 Comments:
Baldwin, Giovanni's Room
Morrison, Beloved
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Heller, Catch-22
(Can you tell I'm brainstorming to choose books for my fall 1900 to present American lit class?)
Paul--Hello! Good to hear from you. Are you teaching those four?
I'm definitely doing Morrison (it's my department's common text for one of the other classes I'm teaching). The Baldwin is too racy for my school. I want to do Faulkner but think it might be too hard (As I Lay Dying might be more accessible). And Heller is someone I've been meaning to read but haven't yet. I think there's a movie version of Catch-22 that make it worth having novel-to-film adaptation discussions at the end of the semester (to go along with Beloved). There's also a slew of Edith Wharton novels that seem to go over well with undergrads though I haven't taught any before. (I'd probably go with Age of Innocence and do a movie comparison, too!)
Here's my list of "likely" or "definitely" texts so far:
Short stories:
Cather, "Paul's Case"
Hemingway, "Hills Like White Elephants"
Viramontes, "Cariboo Cafe"
Yamamoto, "Yoneko's Earthquake"
Carver, "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love"
O'Brien, "The Things They Carried"
Plays:
Williams, The Glass Menagerie
Novels:
Morrison, Beloved
Poetry:
TS Eliot
Gertrude Stein
Langston Hughes
WC Williams
Wallace Stevens
Elizabeth Bishop
Adrienne Rich
Non-fiction:
Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
I'm having a hard time choosing another novel or two. :P
How about The Fountainhead?
Mark Helprin, A Soldier of the Great War
(beating Anjuli to the punch)
"Possession," by A.S. Byatt
"The Brothers K," by David James Duncan
I can't recall what teaching points they'd include, exactly; only that I enjoyed them immensely.
Tara, I think our reading tastes are pretty parallel, I think I have nearly all those books you mentioned on my personal shelf...
two possibilities that come to mind:
E. Annie Proulx, The Shipping News,
Don Dellilo, White Noise or Underworld
Some other authors that come to mind that I haven't necessarily read in awhile, or extensively: Louise Erdrich, Joan Didion, Susan Sontag, Cormac McCarthy, Amy Tan
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