These are some questions I wrote for my PhD graduate students over the years, for their comprehensive exams
Travel Writing
Charles Taylor, in Philosophy and the Human Sciences, Philosophical Papers 2 says, “A human being alone is an impossibility… Outside of the continuing conversation of a community, which provides the language by which we draw our background distinctions, human agency … would be not just impossible, but inconceivable. On our own, Aristotle says, we would be either beasts or Gods.” How do travel writers mediate aloneness and sociability? Do some travel writers seem to prefer being alone among foreigners? Is a travel writer essentially a human being alone?
Robert Walser
Walking is a crucial operation in Robert Walser’s fiction. Describe how the walk actually works for the fiction, for his characters’ readings of their lives and loneliness, or perhaps for the reader’s own rhythm of apprehending Walser’s tales. Pay close attention to the activity, which the psychoanalyst Robyn Skynner describes well: “To walk, we have to lean forward, lose our balance, and begin to fall. We let go constantly of the previous stability, falling all the time, trusting that we will find a succession of new stabilities with each step.”
20th Century American Sports Literature
After Ball Four was published, Pete Rose regularly shouted at Jim Bouton from the dugout, “Fuck you, Shakespeare,” when Bouton was pitching. George Carlin noted that,
Football is played in a helmet; in baseball they wear a cap. Football has a two-minute warning. Baseball has the seventh inning stretch. Football is rigidly timed. Baseball has no time limit—we don't know when it's going to end. Football ties go to sudden death; baseball ties go into extra innings. In football, you have blocking, hitting, clipping, kicking, the blitz, the bomb. In baseball you have the sacrifice. In football the object is to march into enemy territory and cross his goal. In baseball the object is to go home.
These distinctions between the pastoral and the industrial/military/urban or between the intellectual and the profanely stupid are not uncommon in this business of writing about American sports. Explore these binary oppositions in your readings.
David Foster Wallace
George Bernard Shaw occasionally apologized to friends when writing letters to them saying, “I’m sorry I didn’t have time to write a shorter letter.” The implication of this line is that it sometimes takes as much work and invention to write a short piece of prose as it does to write a longer piece. Discuss this issue (brevity or density vs. weight or length) in Wallace. Do his longer works (particularly Infinite Jest) suffer because of their length or are they better because they are long and full of footnotes and details? Are his succinct shorter stories and essays inherently better, more efficient and dense, or do they not allow the kind of roaming and vivid dreaming the longer works allow?
Walking
The American psychiatrist and schizophrenia researcher E. Fuller Torrey noticed that schizophrenics often have trouble doing standard inebriation tests, like walking a straight line heel to toe. How does walking a straight line—or simply walking, for that matter—pertain to sanity and order and reason in these readings?
Postmodern Fiction
The standup comic Steven Wright once said, “I stayed in a really old hotel last night. They sent me a wakeup letter.” This is a sly example of parataxis (as opposed to the more common type of sentence, hypotaxis, in which subordination is a crucial part of the sentence’s machinery). At its simplest grammatical level, parataxis is the placing of clauses one after another, without showing how they connect (by coordination or subordination), as in Tell me, how are you? Ernest Hemingway’s style is characteristically paratactic. Here is a bit of The Sun Also Rises: “It was dim and dark and the pillars went high up, and there were people praying, and it smelt of incense, and there were some wonderful big buildings.” One explanation for this method, which Hemingway and Gertrude Stein pioneered, is that writers began to distrust the whole structure of cause and effect in narrative. Life, they might have been theorizing, was far more complicated and yet less connected. Experience and consciousness are scatterings of details that could mean something when joined together, but the meaning is subjective, not scientific. The short story writer and translator Lydia Davis noticed that fiction in the twentieth century has steadily moved away from hypotaxis toward parataxis in the patterning of its sentences. Write about parataxis in at least eight of these texts. Go beyond the grammatical and syntactic in your discussion—to cause and effect, to the way these writers have tried to describe consciousness by means of grammatical and stylistic effects.
Samuel Beckett
Beckett, in Proust, says,
The laws of memory are subject to the more general laws of habit. Habit is a compromise effected between the individual and his environment, or between the individual and his own organic eccentricities, the guarantee of a dull inviolability, the lightning-conductor of his existence. Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit. Breathing is habit. Life is habit. Or rather life is a succession of habits, since the individual is a succession of individuals; the world being a projection of the individual’s consciousness (an objectification of the individual’s will, Schopenhauer would say), the pact must be continually renewed, the letter of safe-conduct brought up to date. The creation of the world did not take place once and for all time, but takes place every day. Habit then is the generic term for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects. The periods of transition that separate consecutive adaptations … represent the perilous zones in the life of the individual, dangerous, precarious, painful, mysterious and fertile, when for a moment the boredom of living is replaced by the suffering of being.
Write about habit in Beckett, or about this idea that the “individual is a succession of individuals,” or maybe basically about the world as a “a projection of the individual’s consciousness (an objectification of the individual’s will, Schopenhauer would say).” How does any of this work in his fiction? Since Proust is his first book, does he follow through on this thinking?
Flannery O’Connor
Oscar Wilde said, “When I think of all the harm [the Bible] has done, I despair of ever writing anything to equal it.” Flannery O’Connor might not have agreed with this sentiment, but she certainly might have let something like it issue from the mouth of Hazel Motes. “I’m a member and preacher to that church where the blind don’t see and the lame don’t walk and what’s dead stays that way,” he says. Talk about O’Connor’s unusual combination the spiritual and the skeptical in her fiction.
Lorrie Moore
Here is the opening paragraph to Lorrie Moore’s essay from 2000 on the James Cameron film Titanic (from See What Can Be Done: Essays, Criticism, and Commentary):
I sometimes think of female adolescence as the most powerful life force human nature has to offer, and male adolescence as its most powerful death force, albeit a romantic one. For those of you who thought rationality and women’s studies courses had gotten rid of such broad and narratively grotesque ways of thinking, welcome. Coffee is available at the back of the room.
“The clichés here,” she also writes of Titanic, “are sturdy to the point of eloquence.”
Write about Lorrie Moore’s sense of humor. She uses gallows humor, puns, wordplay, dark humor, light wit, and humorous literary references, among many other types of drollery. She is masterful at inserting humor into her stories and essays, most often poking fun at the unhappiness and self-absorption of her characters. How does this humor work as a narrative device? What are the elements of Moore’s humor? Why is she funny?