Ah, it’s time to get back to work after a nice spring break. Unfortunately. I’ve got to finish the second half of Spinoza’s Theologico-Political Treatise and write a paper on the different societies posited by Hobbes, Rousseau, and Nietzsche. It’s a short paper, 4-6 pages, and I haven’t decided on a topic yet. I might try to work in utopian theory, or I might try to write a paper on how the organization and behavior of multinational corporations uses many of the ideas put forth by these fellows. I’m not dreading it, but I’m not looking forward to it either.
I also have about 16 or so student essays to comment on. My strategy this semester for 101 has been to give them lots and lots of writing to do, both in class and out, which is gives them plenty of practice and keeps them in “writing mode,” so to speak. The downside is that it’s not fair to give out work and then not comment on it, and perhaps because of the workload a good number haven’t put in much effort on the last essays in each series, the ones that would be good candidates for their final portfolios. Of course, this was also the case last semester when I gave out fewer writing assignments.
Like many educators, I struggle with the fact that a good number of students catch on quickly and progress by leaps and bounds, and others make it a habit of doing the least work possible. Of course, I want a 100% pass rate and I’d like students to get something out of the class but that’s largely out of my control. The hard part is trying to figure out if you could have done things differently and reached a few more students, or whether some students are just hard-wired against the subject matter (or you). I’m reasonably sure that as long as you’re thinking critically about your pedagogical practices and trying to make things work, you’re probably doing more good than harm.
Over break, I read two short books: Pedro Páramo by Juan Rulfo and The Woman in the Dunes by Kobo Abe, both of which are on my prelim exam reading list. Rulfo’s novel is widely regarded as a founding text of Latin American magical realism, a book that inspired many writers from “el boom,” and I too really enjoyed it. It’s a confusing text with a non-linear narrative and lots of dialogue without tags so you’re not always sure who is speaking and to whom. And then there’s the small matter that the dead talk to the living, and time jumps back and forth, so you can’t be quite sure whether the person speaking is alive (and thus the scene is in the past) or dead (and thus the scene in the present). Of course, past and present are pretty fluid.
As for how it fits into my area of study, it takes some brain power to figure out how Pedro Páramo meets, refutes or challenges definitions of magical realism, like this one, this one, or this one. Fun stuff.
What’s also interesting to apply the criteria put forth in those definitions to the Japanese Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes. Do they work the same way—at all? If they don’t, does that mean that Abe’s work shouldn’t be considered magical realism? Or are there flaws in the definitions? Both? And of course the grandmaster of all questions, if it isn’t magical realism, what is it? What category would use/invent and what other works would fall into it? For me, Abe’s novel reminds me mostly of Haruki Murakami and Franz Kafka—authors who do, or do not fall into the magical realist camp, depending on who you’re talking to.
Again, finding proper categories isn’t the be-all, end-all purpose. However, looking at how people choose to outline their definitions also shows what they value. For example, if you read my assessment of the essays linked about, you’ll see that I feel these authors are using their definitions to carve out a niche specifically for Latin American literature. Yet this spawns lots of other questions, like how applicable are these definitions to non-Latin post-colonial works from Africa or India? Carpentier’s theory of the baroque might work for India and some North African lit, but would it apply to a Sub-Saharan work like the Nigerian Ben Okri’s The Famished Road? What about to the positively austere The Woman in the Dunes? We return to the problem of whether the definition is broken or whether these works are something other than magical realism.
In the end, it’s mostly about finding interesting questions.
Current Mood: Okay | 