Prize Fiction: August 30, 2021 Reading Log
Tara Menon “On the 2020 Booker Prize”
Menon makes it very clear in the beginning of the article that there was much controversy and differences of the 2020 Booker Prize shortlist nominations than in past years. She states that it is the “most diverse shortlist in history of the prize.” Since opening up the Booker Prize to Americans in 2014, there has been plenty of uproar about it, especially since the 2020 shortlist. She also makes it clear that she does not favor the inclusion of Americans either. Menon makes the interesting point that her problem with Americans being let into the prize is that the American writers are backed by the heavyweights of the publishing industry and her worry is that now that they have entered the race that many non-British writers will never be shortlisted. She then goes on to review each of the 6 shortlist nominations for the 2020 Booker Prize. Starting off with a review on Real Life. The way she describes the book as through the eyes of a grad student who struggles with work and things that would most definitely be relevant to everyone in this class who is reading this book. I am very excited to read this book because although I can not relate to the main character, Wallas, as he experiences receiving microaggressions and additional obstacles just because of the color of his skin, I can relate to be a struggling student in college. But given that she added that many often read the book at face value of reading the book as campus microaggression, I will keep that in mind when we read it. I also found it interesting that she mentioned that the only people who truly know Wallas are the readers. This is interesting to me because it happens a lot in books where the reader always knows more about the characters because we get to “hear” their thoughts and “see” things through their point of view. It is also exciting that Wallas has a relationship with a white male and we get to hear about both of their lives and experiences. Next, Menon talks about Shuggie Bain. We get to see Shuggie’s trauma in real time and we see that he struggles with his sexuality. This book is thoroughly Scottish which I am excited about because I do not recall ever reading a Scottish book. Apparently the characters speak in dialect, which I am a bit nervous about since I sometimes struggle with understanding the plot of a novel if I cannot understand it due to the language differences but I am still very excited. Apparently this novel is in contrast with Real Life because in this one “everyone is lonely, everyone is in pain, and everyone is worthy of our sympathy.” The book also shares multiple perspectives, not just through the main character, Shuggie. It also shares an interesting perspective into the battle of addiction with Shuggies mother. While I am hesitant to say that I will like this book because of the struggles of the children with their absent parents and an alcoholic one, I am looking forward to reading the book that won the 2020 Booker Prize as it must have been very good. The next book Menon introduces is This Mournable Body. It is said that this book is part of a trilogy, which is interesting in itself because we will be reading only this book. This book is more so based on how Zimbabwe is independent and recovering from the war that ended it. The novel is said to drag us readers into the story by being told in a second person present tense. Which is personally exciting because I don’t read many books written in second person. I am a tad bit nervous with how well I will keep up with the story because Menon claims that the book can be a bit tiresome and alienating which reminds me of when I read Slaughterhouse Five in high school. She then transitions into a review of The Shadow King. In the review, Menon says that the book is mainly about the war. I am nervous about this reading because whenever war is involved in a book, I tend to lose interest and focus. However, this book seems to be from the view of women who fought in the war alongside the men which reminds me of my favorite movie, A League of Their Own in which the women played baseball because all the men were at war and they wanted entertainment. I am pleased to see that this book is written from the women in the war, I have not read a book like this in my life yet and I am intrigued to see how it is written. The idea that “a villain in one context is a victim in another” and that people are neither wholly good or wholly bad. Like many books about war, this novel goes over the war crimes committed. However, it claims to take a different approach by talking about it on a much more personal level rather than a large scale. Menon says that this novel is more about resistance than war. Following The Shadow King, Menon reviews The New Wilderness. This is a novel based in the future in a society that has been environmentally destroyed. A number of humans are selected to participate in a study on the only remaining patch of wilderness as the rest of it has been taken over to be used for resources. I am very excited for this novel because I like stories set in the future and that talk about important topics like climate change and the very real outcomes that could happen if we do not get it together. This novel seems to be a somewhat dystopian society among the people living in the wilderness. I am excited to see the interactions between the people living in the wilderness. Lastly, Menon reviews Burnt Sugar. A novel follows a woman who is taking care of her sick mother who had been abusive to her as a child. She believes now that her mothers suffering is redemption to what she did to her as a child. For this novel I am a bit less excited to read this because I find it extremely difficult for me to read novels where there is a bad mother daughter relationship. I do think it’ll be interesting to see an American write about India and life there.
Alison Flood “Barack Obama to take part in 2020 Booker Ceremony”
Obama taking part in the Booker Ceremony is particularly important because he is an American, which is notable because Americans were not included in the Booker Prize competition until 2014. With Obama, who is a former US President, taking part in the Booker Ceremony, it targets and reaches a larger audience. He was popular among many Americans and the fact that he was at the Booker Prize Ceremony, drew more Americans to the Ceremony and to the Booker Prize as a whole. In the article, it was expressed that Obama is an avid reader and this was just as much of a big deal to him as it was to the Booker Prize as a whole. I do not like the implication that the author of the article made that the ceremony was moved two days due to the release of former President Barack Obama’s new book. I do not like this because given that the ceremony and book prize in general was excluded from Americans until recently, I do not believe that an American, former President or not, should have influenced the ceremony in any way.
Bernard Evaristo “The Longform Patriarchs, and Their Accomplices”
It is very interesting how people used to tell stories and how they created them. Like I could not imagine having to come up with a story and knowing what elements it should have, such as having an entertainment piece that kept their kids attention. The stories were also passed down orally which means that over the years, before they could get written down, they were often changed. Bernard talked about how white men were being taught novels by white men with white protagonists. This would begin to influence future generations to do the same. I agree that there needs to be different perspectives and ways to write novels in order for the readers to become more educated and cultured. Bernard also mentions how having only male writers and novels will hinder any future authors in the sense that they will not be able to write with any sense of diversity. He also brought up the point that if anyone in the future were to try to learn about the 20th and 21st century by just reading our novels from this time period, they would incorrectly interpret history.
September 1, 2021 Reading Log
Susan VanZanten Gallagher “Contingencies and Intersections: The Formation of Pedagogical Canons”
The imaginary canon consists of those works that scholars and critics have argued are “great” in one respect or other; it may occasionally take tangible form, such as the Modern Library’s recent list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century, but few instructors actually teach such a canon. It seems clear, however, that the process involves, [End Page 54] among other things, the wide concurrence of critics, scholars, and authors with diverse viewpoints and sensibilities; the persistent influence of, and reference to, an author in the work of other authors; the frequent reference to an author within the discourse of a cultural community; and the widespread assignment of an author or text in school and college curricula.”
John Alberti (1995) acknowledges that college syllabi have undergone radical transformations in the past twenty years, with many women and minority writers now included, but he fears that these texts are often taught only by means of New Critical strategies of close reading, rather than from a critical perspective that highlights the way social, ethnic, and gender positions construct aesthetic and cultural value. If instructors continue to employ only a New Critical methodology, Alberti (1995: xv) claims, students will simply conclude of the new pedagogical canon (1) that many women and minorities write just as well as white men, and (2) that a particular text by a woman or minority is representative in some way–leading either to reductionism or tokenism.
Even an innovative methodology such as that described by Anne L. Bower (1995), in which the thirty students in her “Introduction to American Literature” choose the particular texts (from a given anthology) that the class as a whole would read, is not so much an exercise in the eradication as in the creation of a canon. Gilman may not yet be part of the imaginary canon as defined by the likes of George Will, but her recent critical and pedagogical popularity certainly makes her a viable candidate, and many might argue that she has indeed “made it.” Cutter admits, “Our most radical substitutions eventually become our canon,” but continues, “I am not sure how we can escape this institutionalization of what we teach as the ‘canon,’ except to keep shifting what we teach and emphasizing that our choices are based on thematic usefulness and our own peculiar interests and idiosyncrasies, rather than on some inherent, transcendent, value-neutral standard.” “I think about eight months after sending it to them I had to come here on business and I popped round to the office and asked if they’d read it,” she explains in a British interview, “and they said ‘No, we get so many manuscripts, but we will read it’ and they did!”
Nervous Conditions moved across the Atlantic when the editors at Seal Press, a small Seattle company with a commitment to “introduce the new words and ideas of women writers,” read the Women’s Press edition soon after it was published, thought it was “incredible”–in the words of Seal publisher Faith Conlon–and quickly moved to obtain the American rights.
Although many instructors may never bother to read a journal essay on an unknown author, it is far more likely that we would attend a conference session to hear a paper about a familiar text and then, by the coincidences of programming, accidentally hear a paper about an unfamiliar text that prompts us to read it. Dangarembga was nineteenth on his survey, which was heavily dominated by South African authors, but Nervous Conditions was sixth on the list of novels by non-South Africans that were most frequently taught (after such standards as Things Fall Apart, A Grain of Wheat, Anthills of the Savannah, Petals of Blood, and The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born). While instructors may have been looking for a text to “represent” African and/or women’s voices and perspectives, according to Conlon, they were also concerned with the thematic usefulness of the book for the common reader and the extent to which the text achieved some kind of aesthetic effect. Examined from this perspective, Nervous Conditions has much to say to a first-year American college student in its story of a young person leaving home to obtain an education, a person who is eager to abandon her old life and develop a new self, a person who simultaneously finds herself homesick, nervous, awestruck, and skeptical upon entering a strange place. Tambu’s struggle to define herself in terms of both her family and her education, her traditional upbringing and the new world opened up by education, [End Page 63] makes her accessible to American college students, even while many of the cultural practices and assumptions that she describes remain unremittingly different, foreign, or other. The imaginary canon plays a more important role in the construction of pedagogical canons when it comes to upper-division undergraduate courses in which the instructor may want to expose the English major to some of the most frequently cited or discussed texts in a field. Finally, we need to be cognizant of and careful about the way the competing interests of our ethical commitments, aesthetic concerns, need for teachability, desire to expose our students to cultural differences, and the nature of the imaginary canon all contribute to each pedagogical canon that we dare to bring into being.
