Bruce Bennett, Instructor - English Department

Modern Fiction - English 112

• Fall 2009
• Tuesday, Thursday
• 2:15pm - 3:50pm
• 3 units
• Transfers to UC/CSU

Books

• As I Lay Dying—William Faulkner (Vintage edition)
• The Stranger—Albert Camus (Translated by Matthew Ward) (Vintage edition)
• The Dew Breaker—Edwidge Danticat (Vintage Books)
• Lolita—Vladimir Nabokov (Vintage)
• Unaccustomed Earth—Jhumpa Lahiri (Vintage Contemporaries)
• On Chesil Beach—Ian McEwan (Vintage)

Overview of Modern Fiction

In English 112 we will look at how the "modernist" experiments in the arts of the early 20th century—the novel, painting, poetry—changed the shape of the novel in England, Ireland, and America. The novels we read today have been influenced by these early innovations in the form of the novel. Instead of the traditional plot-driven novel with chronological time, writers like William Faulkner, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf were searching for a new way to depict human character in fiction and, influenced by Freud's psychoanalytic theory, a new form emerged—the stream of consciousness novel. These writers focused on the psyche of their characters instead of events or plot; along with the increasingly interior subjectivity of the characters came psychological time, or "stream of consciousness."

William Faulkner's modernist novel As I Lay Dying, the story of a poor Mississippi family reacting to the dying Addie Bundren, their wife and mother, is told from the shifting viewpoints of a half dozen family members and friends, including the dying woman herself. Each of the characters is presented through his or her stream of consciousness. Since Faulkner doesn't interpret the characters for us, we have to probe their psyches and figure out what is happening within and among them.

Perhaps we can see some of Faulkner's influence in the connected stories that constitute the narratives in two contemporary novels—The Dew Breaker (Edwidge Danticat) and Unaccustomed Earth (Jhumpa Lahiri) that are part of this semester's Modern Fiction. In the powerful stories by Indian-American writer Jhumpa Lahiri, Bengali immigrants struggle to hold on to their culture while their children shed their Bengali heritage and absorb American culture.

Nabokov's controversial novel, Lolita, is a book that always arouses strong responses from my students. Written in the conformist 1950's by a Russian novelist living in America and writing in English, Lolita is told from the point of view of Humbert Humbert, a former professor and self-confessed pedophile who falls obsessively in love with a young girl, Lolita. This brilliant narrator anticipates our every moral objection to his repulsive behavior and counters it with his seductive, witty style. We will discuss how such a novel about the illicit passion of a middle-aged man for a young girl might be called "the only convincing love story of our century" (Vanity Fair).

Several of these novels raise troubling philosophical questions. Why does Meursault, the anti-hero of Camus's existential classic The Stranger, shoot a man he doesn't even know? Camus seems to be asking: What if causality itself—our need to understand why things happen as they do—is called into question? If, as Nietzche famously claimed, God is dead, what are we to do with the terrible freedom that results?

On Chesil Beach, a recent novel by English writer Ian McEwan, brings up another philosophical issue-- free will vs determinism: How free are we to define who we are? To what extent are our lives "determined" by such factors as genetics, race, class, gender etc.? This novel examines minutely the behavior and thoughts of a young English couple, Edward and Florence, on their wedding night. McEwan shows us that everything about their prior lives—their families, friends, class, and gender—is implicated in the few moments of sexual conflict and confusion that define the adults they later become.

The last novel, The Dew Breaker by Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat, takes us into the mind of an ordinary man who tries to overcome his brutal past in Haiti by assuming a new identity of husband and father in a Brooklyn community of Haitian immigrants. The Dew Breaker, an example of what Hannah Arendt called "the banality of evil," has caused extraordinary suffering within the Haitian community. This novel, echoing Faulkner, presents a mosaic of characters, all connected to the Dew Breaker , whose stories form a "community of suffering." One critic calls this book "a tale of crime and punishment in the great tradition of Dostoevsky."

Please contact me for additional information about this class.

Contact Information

Bruce Bennett
Instructor
English Department
(510) 659-6149
bbennett@ohlone.edu
Campus: Fremont
Office: Room 2304, Building 2, third floor

Office Hours: Posted outside my office.

Learn more about me: read the newspaper article that appeared in Ohlone's Monitor.