Week 9 Section

1. General stuff Philip K. Dick—endings Ursula Le Guin Tomás Rivera FaeMyenne Ng Week 9 Section

2. General Stuff • Absences: Sorry to send a “chastising” e-mail; I want everyone to do well. • Apparently course evals have gone out; do please try to do them for the prof and for me, especially if you’re going to say nice things (kidding—say what you want, be brutal, seek revenge, etc. But please be constructive.). • No, Steinbeck will not be on the final (I confirmed this with the prof). Next week I’ll give you a final exam review sheet (hooray for lengthy documents!). • FYI: Here are the TAs for Lit. for next year: • US Lit sequence: 2 sections with Joo Ok Kim (from DOC) • Brit Lit sequence: 2 sections with Lisa Vernoy (from Warren) and 1 section with Kate Slater (from DOC) • Multi-Ethnic Lit: 2 sections with Sally Giles-Rodriguez (from DOC/Muir) and 1 section with Katrina White (from Spanish) * All people named above are fantastic and will be 5th- and 6th- year Lit. Ph.D. students next school year. Third-World Lit will have Nadine Wassef as one (excellent) TA plus someone unknown to me— perhaps not a Lit grad.

3. Office Hours • Office Hours for weeks 9 and 10 (default location is Lit. 238 unless otherwise noted or arranged by appointment): • Thursday 5/26: 3:30 to 6:30 PM • Friday 5/27: noon to 6:30 PM • Sat. and Sun: e-mail me • Monday 5/30: noon to 6:30 PM • Tuesday 5/31: 10:00 to 10:45 AM; 12:30 to 1:30 PM • Wednesday 6/1: 10:00 AM to 4:30 PM • Thursday 6/2: 3:30 to 6:30 PM • Friday 6/3: 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM • Saturday 6/4: out of town; e-mail me • Sunday 6/5: noon to 6:30 PM [at Starbucks on Regents] • Monday 6/6: 8:00 AM to 6:30 PM PAPER 2 DUE BY NOON *you can give me your paper; SASE optional • Tuesday 6/7: 10:00 AM to 2:30 PM FINAL 3:00-5:59 PM

4. Philip K. Dick—Endings • What do you make of the ending of “The Mold of Yancy”? • What do you make of the ending of “The Minority Report”? • What do you make of the ending of “Service Call”?

5. “Service Call” • Note that thereare two wars—a war between America as the West and Russia as the East (which the West wins) and a war over swibbles, but the repairman doesn’t say much about specific ideologies that the swibbles are upholding. He notes Contrapersons, loyalty, dissent, etc. but is rather vague about specific ideologies that the swibbles (and society) are upholding. Repairman: • “My goodness, people were shifting back and forth between the two camps—it was revolting” (31). • “I mean, it was the last war. It was the war between the people who wanted swibbles and those who didn’t” (31). • “Originally it was able to differentiate the camp-shifters into two groups: those who had really seen the light, and those who were insincere. Those who were going to shift back . . . who weren’t really loyal. The authorities wanted to know which of the shifters had really come over to the West and which were spies and secret agents. That was the original swibble function. But that was nothing compared to now” (31). • “There won’t be any more conflicts, because we don’t have any contrary ideologies. As Wright showed, it doesn’t really matter what ideology we have; it isn’t important whether it’s Communism or Free Enterprise or Socialism or Fascism or Slavery. What’s important is that every one of us agrees completely; that we’re all absolutely loyal” (32). • “You know the sense of security and satisfaction in being certain that your ideology is exactly congruent with that of everybody else in the world” (32).

6. “The Word for World is Forest” • What are some of Le Guin’s engagements with various ideologies (e.g., on race, humanity, slavery, gender, environmentalism) that struck you, and why?

7. …y no se lo tragó la tierra/…And the Earth Did Not Devour Him (Rivera) • Did you pick up on a narratorial thread from the beginning, or do you view this as a series of vignettes? Or can it be both, or have you changed your mind? • Lost in translation • Do consider how the dialogue, in particular, can take on a different feel and pick up different patterns when in translation (especially with slang and idiomatic phrasing). • Notice the parts of the original text that are in English, not Spanish, making the original a bilingual text: • When the boy is picked on at school and called “Mex” (note that he even responds to the taunts in English, saying “Yes” when repeatedly asked, “You hear me?”). After, the principal is apparently on the phone talking in English about how it’s not a big deal to expel him. This is in “Esqueduele/It’s That It Hurts”—pp. 17-18/93-94 • When the mother is accused of shoplifting in “La nochebuena/The Night Before Christmas”—pp. 57/133 • Buried in the stream-of-consciousness section where someone says to “get away from that goddamn window” and one child tells another in English that they can’t play together anymore because his Mom told him “that mexicans [sic] steal” in “Debajo de la casa/Under the House”—pp. 73/149

8. Bone (Ng) • Think thematically: • paper • bones • speech and language • naming • generational differences • culture • race • marriage and gender • family (sibling relations, parent-child relations, non-biological family relations) • suicide, loss, and guilt • luck vs. choice • the space of the city • domestic space • movement (travel, immigration, labor, nonlinear narrative) • money and labor