Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 352

May 23, 2014: AmericanStudying Harvard Movies: How High

[My alma mater has seen more than its fair share of cultural representations, including a number of film portrayals of the university. Those films have a lot to tell us, not only about images of Harvard but also about educational, social, and cultural issues through that lens. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such Harvard Movies and their meanings. Share your own thoughts on images of Harvard, college and higher ed, or related issues for an Ivy League-worthy weekend post, please!]
On what’s ridiculous, and what’s not, about our most hip hop image of Harvard.I can’t decide if I should be proud or ashamed of the fact that I’m about to dedicate a blog post to How High (2001), the college comedy starring rappers Method Man and Redman as two smart but unmotivated stonerswho end up (thanks to some super-weed and a ghostly intervention during their admissions testing) at Harvard. How High, which for some reason I can’t remember (not involving banned substances, I swear) I happened to watch from start to finish at some point, is definitely on the short list of the most crude and lowbrow works I’ve ever referenced in this space, an equal opportunity offender full of sexism, racism, every imaginable kind of stereotype about Harvard/education/society/humanity, and a fair amount of bodily fluid humorto boot.So How High isn’t going to win any awards, and I highly doubt it’ll be remembered among the other cultural images of Harvard I’ve discussed this week. But one interesting thing to note is that, its specific stoner focus notwithstanding, the film’s overall narrative utilizes many of the same stories and stereotypes I’ve analyzed in those other films: Method Man and Redman’s working class underdogs are contrasted with Harvard elitists, including a crew-team legacy snoband a staid dean; and their triumph involves uniting the rest of the more diverse and democratic Harvard community (including the elite women who become their significant others) around them and their cause and against those traditional but fraudalent Ivy League types. Across more than 40 years and a striking range of genres and themes, those dual and dueling Harvard stereotypes seem to have held an enduring power in our film representations of the university and its meanings.Despite those similarities, however, How High is different from any other film I’ve analyzed this week, and not just because of all the weed. While it certainly makes use of ethnic and racial humor, the film also portrays a far more multi-racial and –cultural Harvard community than any of the others, including its African American protagonists and their girlfriends, their Asian American roommate, the African American dean against whom they are contrasted, and multiple other characters. And, perhaps not coincidentally, the protagonists triumph not by rejecting Harvard in favor of a more diverse and authentic world (as does Brendan Fraser’s character in With Honors), but instead by helping make the Harvard community more diverse and authentic, and even converting that staid dean to their cause by the film’s conclusion. Am I saying that How High has the potential to change our communal narratives of Harvard, and through it of American higher ed and society more broadly? C’mon, man, what are you smoking?!Crowd-sourced post this weekend,BenPS. So last chance: other images of Harvard or higher ed you’d highlight? Related texts or works you’d share? Add ‘em for that weekend post!

May 22, 2014: AmericanStudying Harvard Movies: Love Story

[My alma mater has seen more than its fair share of cultural representations, including a number of film portrayals of the university. Those films have a lot to tell us, not only about images of Harvard but also about educational, social, and cultural issues through that lens. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such Harvard Movies and their meanings. Share your own thoughts on images of Harvard, college and higher ed, or related issues for an Ivy League-worthy weekend post, please!]
On the enduring appeal of fantasies, romantic and communal.Every September, as part of the first-year orientation activities, Harvard screens Love Story (1970) for its entire freshman class. The screening is partly self-referential, as the production was one of the last allowed to film on the university’s grounds (it caused sufficient damage to contribute toward a change in university policy that now prohibits such filming) and so offers a rare opportunity to see actual Harvard buildings and settings on the big screen; and it’s partly tongue-in-cheek, as orientation leaders and administrators dress up in ‘60s/’70s apparel as part of the experience. But however ironic our young American filmgoers might tend to be, there’s still something quite striking about an annual Harvard screening of a film designated one of the most romantic of all time.It’s not just that Love Story is self-consciously and thoroughly romantic, though—it’s that it creates its romance through a combination of just about every relevant cliché and stereotype, of both Harvard and love stories, possible. Its star-crossed lovers from opposite sides of the tracks (he an elite Harvard legacy and hockey player, she a working-class student supporting herself through school) fall in love at first sightand pursue their romance despite opposition from his snobby Harvard father, supporting each other through the darkest of times and coming out on top, only to meet a tragic fate through an unnamed terminal illness. Indeed, Love Story is such a collection of romantic clichés that it even coined its own, in the enduring catchphrase “Love means never having to say you’re sorry” (which is ironically perhaps the least accurate cliché in human history, as anyone who’s ever tried to make a long-term relationship work can attest).The film’s romantic fantasies are generally universal and longstanding, more connected to Romeo and Juliet than Harvard. But they certainly utilize two distinct but perhaps interconnected stereotypical images of Harvard and higher education in America—the elitist, legacy side embodied by Ryan O’Neal’s path to the school and romance; and the upward mobility, American Dream side exemplified by Ali McGraw’s. (In that sense and only that sense, perhaps McGraw’s untimely demise could be read as more cynical or socially critical than clichéd.) Just as the film’s lovers do, our current narratives of higher ed embrace the democratic, upward mobility image and reject the elitist, legacy one—and of course, the former is indeed a far more positive goal, one deployed in direct response to the latter’s historical and ongoing prevalence. But it’s worth recognizing that both are fantasies, simplified and romanticized images of identity and community that must be analyzed rather than taken for granted. I’d apologize for saying so, but blogging means never having to say you’re sorry.Last Harvard movie tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other images of Harvard or higher ed you’d highlight?

May 21, 2014: AmericanStudying Harvard Movies: The Social Network

[My alma mater has seen more than its fair share of cultural representations, including a number of film portrayals of the university. Those films have a lot to tell us, not only about images of Harvard but also about educational, social, and cultural issues through that lens. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such Harvard Movies and their meanings. Share your own thoughts on images of Harvard, college and higher ed, or related issues for an Ivy League-worthy weekend post, please!]
On success, rejection, and the roles of social communities in our lives.From the opening scene of David Fincher’s The Social Network (2010), the film (scripted by Aaron Sorkin) links two distinct narratives to one another: Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg)’s pursuit of admission to one of Harvard’s elite Finals Clubs and his relationship with his girlfriend Erica. When both of these quests end in failure—Erica has dumped him by the end of the opening scene, and not long after he is denied by his chosen Finals Club (while his roomate and co-Facebook founder Eduardo is “punched”)—the joint rejections provide the direct impetus for Zuckerberg’s creation of Facebook, which the film depicts from its earliest iteration as, at one and the same time, a misogynist “ranking of girls” and an alternative, more democratic kind of Harvard community than the elitist clubs.Whatever its grounding in the realities of Zuckerberg’s and Facebook’s stories, this narrative origin point provides a powerful duality for the film’s overall arc and themes: an image of “the social network” as based on both personal grievance and communal appeal, the worst and best sides of human identity and relationships. Moreover, these dual narratives nicely construct two sides to Zuckerberg himself: he benefits from the contrast with the Finals Clubs, which are portrayed (with some accuracy, as I also noted in Monday’s post) as elitist and cut-off from the rest of the community; but comes off looking far worse in his relationship with and payback toward Erica. That duality also informs Zuckerberg’s two most lasting professional relationships in the film: with the elite and snobby Winklevoss twins, in relation to whom Zuckerberg is mostly portrayed as a hero; and with the sympathetic and eventually aggrieved Eduardo, toward whom the film’s Zuckerberg behaves much more like a villain.I think these dualities also have a great deal of resonance with our broader narratives of higher education. After all, every experience of higher ed—an experience that more Americans now share than at any prior point in our history—begins with a moment defined by acceptance and rejection, by whether these communities welcome us into them or deny us entrance. On one level, that moment and process are distinct from, or at least more overt than, any other such decisions in our lives. But on another, they parallel many of our other social relationships—not only with dating and significant others, relationships which inevitably lead (as Zuckerberg came to realize) to either acceptance or rejection; but also with possible jobs and careers, with professional and social organizations, indeed with any community of voluntary affiliation. We’re all part of social networks, and that membership is almost always contingent and fragile—a fact captured concisely in the world of higher education.Next Harvard movie tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other images of Harvard or higher ed you’d highlight?

May 20, 2014: AmericanStudying Harvard Movies: Good Will Hunting

[My alma mater has seen more than its fair share of cultural representations, including a number of film portrayals of the university. Those films have a lot to tell us, not only about images of Harvard but also about educational, social, and cultural issues through that lens. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such Harvard Movies and their meanings. Share your own thoughts on images of Harvard, college and higher ed, or related issues for an Ivy League-worthy weekend post, please!]
On the character who reflects communal stereotypes—and the one who transcends them.Matt Damon and Ben Affleck grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, a community that—like any college town, of course, but I would argue with a particular intensity in this case—has a conflicted relationship with the prominent universities (Harvard and MIT) which it hosts. And when the two childhood friends wrote their first (and to date only) screenplay, for the film that became Good Will Hunting (1997; the two won the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for their work), they created a character who embodies the worst possible images of Harvard and Ivy League elitism: the long-haired, snobby, arrogant, academic fraud of a grad student with whom Will gets into a debate (standing up for his townie friend Chuckie, whose lack of intelligence the grad student has insulted) in a “Harvard bar.”The grad student’s ugliness could be read as just another version of the kind of elitism about which I wrote in yesterday’s post, but I believe that Damon and Affleck have taken the stereotypes even further in this case: the student admits to his own intellectual fraudalence and plagiarism, relishing the fact that he will achieve success and high status in any case thanks to his “degree” (in direct contrast to Will’s genuine but, as the student frames it, socially unsuccessful intelligence). Leaving aside the ironic reality that a graduate degree in History is no longer a guarantee of even a job, much less elite social or financial status, the real problem with this character is that, in a film full of impressively three-dimensional human beings (especially the two central adult characters played by Robin Williams and Stellan Skarsgard), he’s a cartoon, and a particularly unbelievable one at that.The character whom Will meets (and is at least partly trying to impress) during this same scene, Minnie Driver’s Harvard undergraduate Skylar, seems in some ways like another such stereotype, on the fantasy side this time: a British trust fund baby who’s both pre-med and beautiful. But after Will’s friends hang out with Skylar for a night, Chuckie notes that she has changed his perspective on Harvard students, and I would argue that the character has a similar effect on us as viewers—particularly in the scene when she fills Will in on her backstory, including the early death of her father that left her with that trust fund but with a hole in her heart as well. There are multiple characters and events that contribute to Will’s evolution in the course of the film, but Skylar has to be located at the top of that list, and I would argue that it’s precisely the way in which she challenges Will’s preconceived notions of class, elitism, institutions like Harvard, and his own future that produce such effects.Next Harvard movie tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other images of Harvard or higher ed you’d highlight?

May 19, 2014: AmericanStudying Harvard Movies: With Honors

[My alma mater has seen more than its fair share of cultural representations, including a number of film portrayals of the university. Those films have a lot to tell us, not only about images of Harvard but also about educational, social, and cultural issues through that lens. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy five such Harvard Movies and their meanings. Share your own thoughts on images of Harvard, college and higher ed, or related issues for an Ivy League-worthy weekend post, please!]
On stereotypes, realities, and elitism.In the most famous scene in the largely forgettable Harvard dramedy With Honors (1994), Joe Pesci’s homeless philosopher schools Gore Vidal’s snobby political science professor in the histories and ideals that comprise “the genius of the Constitution.” The scene nicely contrasts the Vidal character’s cynical pragmatism with Pesci’s eloquent idealism, a debate that the film frames overall through the way in which the two men serve as potential mentors and even father figures for Brendan Fraser’s about-to-graduate student. And the scene includes, on both sides of the debate, more complex truths about our founding era and document than you’re likely to find in most Hollywood productions. But it also relies, as does the film overall, on a reductive vision of Ivy League elitism.The film positions the Fraser character’s choice, metaphorically for much of its story and then very literally in its culminating events, as between Harvard itself (as embodied in his thesis work with Vidal’s professor) and the more messy but far more authentic world and life represented by Pesci’s character. What Harvard becomes in this narrative, then, is not simply an elitist set of attitudes about the world, but an overt, unflattering contrast to that world, one that must be rejected in order for real life to begin. To be clear, I certainly did encounter such sides to Harvard in my own time there—from the exclusive and exclusionary communities of the Final Clubs to an Economics professor who argued, as part of a lecture, that homelessness is a necessary process through which society weeds out those who cannot succeed in it (similarly, a roommate of mine was in a History class where the professor noted in passing that Africa’s nations were far better off under colonialism and would have been fortunate to remain in that state permanently). So the film’s stereotypes are not without validity.But on the other hand, my own experience of Harvard—which began one year after the film was released—was of a community that was incredibly diverse, not only in ethnic or cultural terms but also in regard to many other elements of identity (including class, political perspectives, religion, and numerous other life experiences). Such diversity, to be sure, is a relatively new phenomenon and emphasis, throughout higher education and at Harvard in particular. But it is and should be very much a central goal, and one that can only benefit from visions of higher education in which the university community is defined precisely by its reflection of the real world all around it, rather than by stereotypes of its contrasts with that world. Which is to say, as extreme or exaggerated as both characters are, Harvard and all universities are defined by both the Pescis and the Vidals, and are all the better for it.Next Harvard movie tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other images of Harvard or higher ed you’d highlight?

May 17-18, 2014: Summer 2014 Preview

[It’s exam week, the final act of the Spring 2014 semester! So in this week’s series, I’ve recapped some of the best of my semester’s courses and conversations, leading up to this weekend post on my summer plans. One more chance to add your semester recaps, summer plans, or whatever else you want to share in comments!]
On one summer plan with which I need your help.I’ve got a lot of big plans for the summer: swimming pool visits with the boys; beach visits with the boys; museum and historic site visits with the boys; and, well, I’m sure you get the idea. I also have my annual summertime hopes for all that pleasure reading I don’t get to do during the academic year, and will share some of the books on that beach reading list (and hopefully get some of your own beach reading recommendations) as part of that annual series in a few weeks. But as always, I’ll also be continuing to pursue various parts of my public scholarly work, including this blog of course but also my next writing project, which will hopefully entail both a book and a website. And for that project, I could use some input from you all.The project will be entitled The Hall of American Inspiration, and I’ve already created a first, trial version of the website that will accompany the book version here. The main premise is two-part: that one important reason to better remember our histories is that we can find in them stories of inspiring lives and identities; and that many of the most inspiring such stories came about in the context of, and even in response to, particularly dark or difficult historical events and issues. I’ve written in this space about many of the figures I hope to include in the book and site, from Ida B. Wells and Ely Parker to Yung Wing, Jane Addams, and the figure with whose page I hope to start the site, W.E.B. Du Bois. I plan to use my written text and multimedia resources to highlight both the historical contexts and the lives of these impressive, inspiring individuals.But if this is going to be a legitimate Hall, it needs nominees and inductees provided by more voices than just my own. I’ve become a very big fan of crowd-sourcing through all the times I’ve done it in this space, and think that’ll be a crucial way for me to build up a broader list of figures for the Hall. And I don’t just mean public or historical ones, although any and all of those will be welcome—I’m very interested in more personal, familial, local inspiring figures and lives as well. So as I move into this summer’s more in-depth work on the Hall, I’d love to hear your nominees—feel free to share in comments or to email them to me, and add your voice and ideas to this work in progress, please!Next series starts Monday,BenPS. How was your spring semester? Plans for the summer you want to share?

May 16, 2014: Spring 2014 Recaps: Three Presentations

[It’s exam week, the final act of the Spring 2014 semester! So in this week’s series, I’ll recap some of the best of my semester’s courses and conversations, leading up to a weekend post on my summer plans. Add your semester recaps, summer plans, or whatever else you want to share in comments, please!]
On one takeaway each from three opportunities to share my work and ideas.1)      VA Festival of the Book: I followed up on my amazing experience back in Charlottesville in this post. So here I’ll add one more thought: that presenting on a panel on “hot-button issues” (my co-presenters’ books focus on abortion and health care) helped me continue to think not only about how my public scholarly work can engage with such contemporary debates, but also and just as importantly how I can do so without (I hope) being antagonistic  to any audiences or perspectives. That doesn’t mean that everyone will agree with my ideas and arguments, of course—but that I can, and have to, find ways to present them in a voice and tone that everyone can engage with, that feel in conversation with every reasonable perspective.2)      Leominster Public Library: As part of a series on race and Civil Rights, the Leominster (MA) Public Library screened part of the amazing documentary The Loving Story (2011), and I had the chance to follow up the screening with both some thoughts of mine and participation in a communal conversation. It was an inspiring experience for lots of reasons, but one definite takeaway for me was a renewed sense of how important stories are to our understandings of the past, of complex social and cultural issues, of America. The Lovings were no more representative of all (or any) American communities than Yung Wing and his students were—but both impressive stories can nevertheless help open up those communal histories and issues in provocative and productive ways.3)      FSU Center for Conflict Studies: As part of a year-long series of events sponsored by Fitchburg State’s Center for Conflict Studies, I took part in a panel discussion of the complex question: “Genocide and Mass Killings: Is the U.S. Different?” I learned a lot from my colleagues and co-presenters: Ben Lieberman on Native American genocides; and René Reeves on U.S. involvement in Latin America. And the panel overall, as well as the subsequent Q&A, reminded me that I need to continue working to put my ideas about America in trans- and international contexts, both because of how inseparable the U.S. and the rest of the world have always been and because such comparative analyses can open up perspectives on American history, culture, and identity that are not possible otherwise. I’ll keep trying to add that lens to my work!Summer preview tomorrow,BenPS. How was your spring semester?

May 15, 2014: Spring 2014 Recaps: American Lit

[It’s exam week, the final act of the Spring 2014 semester! So in this week’s series, I’ll recap some of the best of my semester’s courses and conversations, leading up to a weekend post on my summer plans. Add your semester recaps, summer plans, or whatever else you want to share in comments, please!]
On the balance between me and the students in a survey course.A few years back, I published an article in the online journal Teaching American Literature in which I discussed my ongoings efforts to balance dictatorship and democracy—or, more exactly, teacher-provided contexts and student-provided analyses—in the American Literature survey classroom. I always begin my teaching from a student-centered framework, but had found that in my survey courses in particular I too often felt that we hadn’t had a chance to engage at all with key contexts, that by leaving things open to where the students’ responses took us it felt as if we were having at best partial conversations about our texts, authors, and related histories and issues. So I had begun to develop strategies for adding such contexts without relying too much—or ideally even at all—on lecturing and my voice to provide all the details about them.La lucha continua, and all of what I said in that article remains present in my evolving thoughts and work. But I have to admit that this semester I took things one step further, not throughout but in a certain crucial moment. We had reached the fourth and last day with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977), and as always I wanted to make sure that we discussed the culminating passage that I consider one of the most beautiful and important in American literature. But for a variety of reasons, I wasn’t sure how many of the students had had a chance to get to that point in the book: such reading questions are always a potential limitation in my courses; we had missed the important second class with the novel and had lost a good bit of momentum as a result; our discussion on the third day had suggested to me that almost no one in the class had managed to get into the novel’s second half, and/or felt comfortable enough with the book to share their thoughts. And so, rather than asking for their thoughts, I took our final few minutes of class and simply read aloud and analyzed that culminating passage myself.A part of me felt distinctly lousy about having done so, but I have to admit that the larger part felt one definite and one possible positive thing. The definite one was that I had made sure that everyone in the room was made aware of this amazing passage, and of some of the many layers that make it so complex and powerful. And the possible one was that my own thoughts on the novel and passage—about which I’ve thought and written multiple times, including in a chapter of my next book, so I certainly had a lot to say and share—might have added another layer to the class conversations and community, one that was as worth sharing (not more so, but as) as those of my students. That is, I’ve tended to think about a democratic classroom as one in which student voices provide our central and structuring element—but perhaps the truest definition is one in which all our voices, mine as well as theirs, have a role to play. Given the power dynamics and differential, there’s more to figure out about how to balance my voice with theirs, but this moment and course have re-committed me to that process for sure.Final recap tomorrow,BenPS. How was your spring semester?

May 14, 2014: Spring 2014 Recaps: Sci Fi/Fantasy

[It’s exam week, the final act of the Spring 2014 semester! So in this week’s series, I’ll recap some of the best of my semester’s courses and conversations, leading up to a weekend post on my summer plans. Add your semester recaps, summer plans, or whatever else you want to share in comments, please!]
On a few ways to parse the differences between two imaginative genres.As I see it, a class like Introduction to Science Fiction and Fantasy, which I I taught for the third time this spring, has a couple interconnected but distinct goals. (Toward its content, I mean; I discussed goals for the students’ skills and voices in my preview post.) For one thing, it’s an opportunity to introduce a wide range of authors and works, of examples of what these genres (and related ones like the weird tale) can include and entail. I do that by using two anthologies of short stories alongside our five longer works, so we’re able to read a couple dozen different authors by the end of the semester. But there’s also another layer to the class title, and it’s the way in which a class like this can introduce the genres themselves, and thus help us discuss how we describe and define literary and cultural categories like them.There are of course no set answers for those definitions, and indeed I stress throughout the class how much the opposite is true: that my interest is in what the students would emphasize, how they can make their own developing definitions part of their final paper work (among other spaces for such ideas). Moreover, I think that such definitions develop at least in part through comparison and contrast, through a sense of what differentiates (in this case) fantasy from science fiction. This semester the students came up a number of interesting ideas about those differences: a sense that science fiction deals more with making the familiar look new to us, while fantasy creates an unfamiliar world and draws us into it; a perspective on the role of black and white/good vs. evil narratives in fantasy compared to gray area/ambiguous narratives in science fiction; and a take on non-chronological/episodic literary structures in science fiction contrasted with more straightforward journey structures in fantasy, to name three examples. As we came to the conclusions of our class discussions, and specifically to the final conversation about our last novel, Dan Simmons’ Hyperion (1989), I found myself articulating a definition of my own that I hadn’t ever quite developed before. It seemed to me, re-reading Simmons’ novel this time around, that he utilizes mysteries in a way that feels common to science fiction: foregrounding the mysteries, making them a primary element to his worldbuilding, and then moving his audience through the novel by gradually revealing more and more information to explain those mysteries. Whereas fantasy, I would argue, often foregrounds heavy expositional worldbuilding, explaining a good deal of its world, and then creates an increasingly mysterious or uncertain journey for its characters (and audiences) within that world. And it’s worth noting that each of these concepts would fulfill distinct human needs: an intellectual desire to grapple with the universe’s mysteries, on the one hand; and an emotional urge to imagine our own unfolding journeys as part of a larger world of meanings, on the other. No wonder these genres are so primal and popular!Next recap tomorrow,BenPS. How was your spring semester?

PPS. After I scheduled this post, my talented student Harrison Chute shared the following salient Orson Scott Card quote: "Science fiction is about what could be but isn't; fantasy is about what couldn't be."

May 13, 2014: Spring 2014 Recaps: The Post-War Novel

[It’s exam week, the final act of the Spring 2014 semester! So in this week’s series, I’ll recap some of the best of my semester’s courses and conversations, leading up to a weekend post on my summer plans. Add your semester recaps, summer plans, or whatever else you want to share in comments, please!]
On two provocative questions raised in a course’s compelling conversations.In the semester preview post on my American Novel Since WWII course, I focused on questions of likability, and on a couple narrator/protagonists (Sylvia Plath’s Estherand Jeffrey Eugenides’ Calliope) whom my prior section of the course hadn’t found likeable. For whatever reason, this time around the class responded very well to both of those novels, and were similarly willing and able to give an entirely non-traditional and very challenging novel like Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo their time and effort. Indeed, the whole semester with this great group was successful, and I mostly just had to stay out of the way of their voices and conversations. And no series of conversations were more communally engaged, nor more provocative, than those focused on Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho. If you know either the novel or the relatively close film adaptation, you know that one of the central questions about American Psycho is whether its narrator/protagonist Patrick Bateman is actually carrying out his brutal serial killings or simply imagining or hallucinating them. The question goes to literary issues (such as narrator reliability), genre issues (whether the novel is horror or social satire, for example), and social issues (including whether Bateman represents an extreme or a norm within his 1980s yuppie culture), among other ramifications. The students engaged with all those issues, using evidence from the novel very effectively to support their perspectives, but they also came to a very strong communal perspective on an even more complex and crucial point: that the existence of the uncertainties and ambiguities is itself an analytical point, a way to understand what Ellis is doing and how his novel works.Those issues are at least somewhat specific and unique to Ellis’ novel, but in the course of our conversations about American Psycho the students also raised another, broader and equally provocative question about how we define the work. Compared to the three books we had read before it (Plath’s, Reed’s, and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five), Ellis’ novel was far more mainstream and popular, a massmarket bestseller by an author with an established reputation for such hits. In fact, as I mentioned in class, it is likely one of the few such truly bestselling, popular works I’ve taught—even works like The Great Gatsbythat are very well-known today did not sell particularly well in their own era. And that sense of popularity, rather than simply identifying Ellis’ novel as something different from our other readings, provoked the students to a series of strong and evolving discussions about topics like audience and expectations, author’s purpose and intention, and the roles literature and art can play in reflecting, contributing to, and challenging their societies. Just one more layer to this course’s very compelling communal conversations.Next recap tomorrow,BenPS. Thoughts on this topic? How was your spring semester?