Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom

Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom Laurence W. Mazzeno • Sue Norton Editors Contemporary American Fiction in the European Classroom Teaching and Texts Editors Laurence W. Mazzeno Office of the President Alvernia University Reading, PA, USA Sue Norton Languages, Law, Social Sciences Technological University Dublin Dublin, Ireland ISBN 978-3-030-94165-9 ISBN 978-3-030-94166-6 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-94166-6 (eBook) © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © pixhook This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland ACKNOWLEDGMENTS The editors would like to thank the scholars who have contributed such fine work to this volume. We have been honored to shepherd their work into publication. Laurence W. Mazzeno would like to thank the staff at the Frank A. Franco Library, Alvernia University, Reading, Pennsylvania, and in particular Derek Smith, Interlibrary Loan Librarian; and the staff of the Jefferson County Public Library in Colorado. In these extraordinary times, their assistance has proven invaluable. Sue Norton thanks Dr. Ron Callan for his encouragement over many years. v CONTENTS 1 Introduction: American Fiction Abroad Laurence W. Mazzeno and Sue Norton Part I 2 3 4 Why Teach …? Toni Morrison’s A Mercy in Hungary: Racialized Discourse in the Classroom Ágnes Zsófia Kovács Charles Yu’s Interior Chinatown in Europe as an Evaluative Tool of U.S. Race Relations: “When you think American, what color do you see?” Harriet Stilley Octavia Butler at a Swedish University: Gender, Genre, and Intercultural Encounters Maria Holmgren Troy 1 13 15 31 47 5 John Updike in Serbia Biljana Dojčinović and Nemanja Glintić 63 6 Contemporary American Women Writers in Romania Ana-Karina Schneider 79 vii viii CONTENTS Part II 7 8 9 10 Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace: Contextualizing the “Systems Novel” in Estonia Toon Staes 99 117 The (Post)Apocalypse in Hungary: American Science Fiction and Social Analysis Vera Benczik 135 Gloria Anzaldúa at European Universities: Straddling Borders of Fiction and Identity Astrid M. Fellner 149 What Lessons Might Be Gained by …? Teaching Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah in Ireland: “If you don’t understand, ask questions” Clare Hayes-Brady 12 Teaching Philip Roth in Denmark: It’s Complicated Clara Juncker 13 Teaching Post-Black Aesthetics and the Coming-of-Age Novels of Danzy Senna and Colson Whitehead in Portugal: Reconsidering the Gap Teresa Botelho 14 97 Donald Barthelme at Sorbonne University: Narrative, Internet Memes, and “The Rise of Capitalism” Surya Bowyer Part III 11 How to Teach …? Teaching Marilynne Robinson, Democracy and the Mystery of American Belonging Through the PostChristian Eyes of Millennial Brits: “Homesick for a place I never left” Andrew Tate 167 169 185 201 221 CONTENTS 15 Teaching Jesmyn Ward and William T. Vollmann in Finland: Genres of Environmental Justice C. Parker Krieg Part IV 16 17 A Backward Glance o’er American Fiction in French Academia Sylvie Mathé American Literature: A Tale of Two Polands Robert Morace Part V 18 19 What Light from the Recent Past? Additional Resources Incorporating One’s Own Literary Criticism into the Curriculum: The Teachable Essay via John Updike’s Short Stories Sue Norton Sources for Further Study Laurence W. Mazzeno and Sue Norton Index ix 237 251 253 273 291 293 303 319 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Vera Benczik earned a Ph.D., in 2011, from Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary, with her dissertation on the use of the journey motif in Ursula K. Le Guin’s science fiction. She is a senior lecturer in the Department of American Studies at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, where she teaches courses on American and Canadian literature, science fiction, and popular culture. Her research interests lie mainly in the field of science fiction; her current projects focus on the spatial discourse of postapocalyptic science fiction narratives, and objecthood, spatial discourse, and gender in Margaret Atwood’s dystopian fiction. Teresa Botelho is an associate professor in the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences at NOVA University of Lisbon, Portugal, where she teaches American studies. She has written extensively on African American and Asian American culture and literature, drama and theater, visual culture, American politics, utopian studies, and science fiction. She is a member of the research group CETAPS (Centre for English Translation and Anglo-Portuguese Studies). Her current research focuses on technological utopias/dystopias and posthuman, postblack literature and cinema, the collaboration between sciences and literature, and literary and visual representations of 9/11. Surya Bowyer is a doctoral candidate working at the Science Museum Group, London, and the History of Art Department at Birkbeck, University of London, UK. Much of his current work is for or about xi xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS memory institutions—museums, archives, and libraries. He has worked variously as a curator, librarian, and university lecturer. Topics covered by his recent publications include Donald Barthelme, the Wayback Machine, and photographic self-portraits. Between 2018 and 2019 he taught at Sorbonne University’s Faculté des Lettres. Biljana Dojčinović is a professor in the Department of Comparative Literature and Theory of Literature, Faculty of Philology at University of Belgrade, Serbia. She was one of the founders of the university’s Women’s Studies Center and the Indoc Center of the Association for Women’s Initiatives. She is a former editor of Genero, a Serbian journal of feminist theory; her 1993 book Gynocriticism: Gender and Women’s Writing was a pioneering work that introduced the category of gender into literary studies in Serbia. She has written on American literary figures, with a special focus on John Updike. She serves as a member of the board of directors of the John Updike Society and on the editorial board of the John Updike Review. Astrid M. Fellner is the Chair of North American Literary and Cultural Studies at Saarland University, Germany. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Vienna. She was a Distinguished Visiting Austrian Chair at Stanford University, visiting scholar at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and the University of California Irvine, and held a Fulbright appointment at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the co-founder of the UniGR-Center for Border Studies and of a trinational and trilingual M.A. program in border studies. Her publications include Articulating Selves: Contemporary Chicana Self-representation (2002), Bodily Sensations: The Female Body in Late Eighteenth-Century American Culture (forthcoming), and several edited volumes and articles in the fields of border studies, Chicanx literature, Post-revolutionary American literature, Canadian literature, and gender/queer studies. Nemanja Glintić is a doctoral student in the Faculty of Philology at the University of Belgrade, Serbia, and a Serbian language lecturer in the Faculty for European Languages and Cultures at Guangdong University of Foreign Studies, Guangzhou, China. Until 2018 he worked as a language and literature teacher at a primary school in Belgrade. Clare Hayes-Brady is Lecturer in American Literature at University College Dublin, Ireland. She has written and presented widely on aspects NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii of contemporary American literature, with a particular focus on gender identity and voice, and is the author of The Unspeakable Failures of David Foster Wallace (2016). Clara Juncker is an associate professor at the University of Southern Denmark, Odense, Denmark. She is the former Director of the Center for American Studies, President of the Danish Association for American Studies, and President of the Nordic Association for American Studies. She has written widely on American literature in journals on both sides of the Atlantic and is the author of books that include Trading Cultures: Nationalism and Globalization in American Studies; Through Random Doors We Wandered: Women Writing the South; Transnational America: Contours of Modern U.S. Culture; Circling Marilyn: Text, Body, Performance; and Black Roses: Afro-American Women Writers. Ágnes Zsófia Kovács is an associate professor in the Department of American Studies at the University of Szeged, Hungary. She has written two books, The Function of the Imagination in the Writings of Henry James (2006) and Literature in Context (2010), and she has co-edited Space, Gender, and the Gaze in Literature and Art (2017). She served as guest editor for AMERICANA in 2008 and 2016, preparing the special issues “Multiculturalism in American Literature and Art” and “Henry James Appropriated”; and edited Jon Roberts’s A Life Less Damnable in 2013. C. Parker Krieg teaches in the Exploratory Studies Program and English at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, USA. He recently held a Postdoctoral Fellowship in Environmental Humanities at the University of Helsinki, Finland, affiliated with the Faculty of Arts and the Helsinki Institute for Sustainability Science. His research and teaching focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American literature and culture, environmental justice, and cultural memory studies. His journal articles appear in Textual Practice, Studies in American Fiction, A/B: Autobiography Studies, and Literary Geographies. He contributed chapters to Transportation and the Culture of Climate Change, Close Reading the Anthropocene, and Food in Memory and Imagination: Space, Place, and Taste. He is the co-editor of Situating Sustainability: A Handbook of Contexts and Concepts (forthcoming, Helsinki University Press) and of the forthcoming series, Global Challenges in Environmental Humanities (Bloomsbury). xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Sylvie Mathé is Professor Emerita of American Literature at Aix-Marseille University (LERMA), France. She is the co-author of American Fiction (2000) and the author of the monograph John Updike: La Nostalgie de l’Amérique (2002), as well as of a wide variety of essays on nineteenth-, twentieth-, and twenty-first-century American fiction (Hawthorne, Crane, James, Hemingway, Steinbeck, Salinger, Didion, Styron, Hawkes, Pynchon, Ozick, Carver, Auster, DeLillo, and Updike). She is the editor or co-editor of L’Antiaméricanisme—Anti-Americanism at Home and Abroad (2000), Amérique Fin de Siècle (2001), J. D. Salinger “Profils américains” (2002), Regards croisés sur Chicago (2004), Cultures de la confession (2004), Que peut la littérature? (2011), San Francisco à l’Ouest d’Eden (2012), European Perspectives on the Literature of 9/11 (2014), and Regards croisés sur la Nouvelle Orléans (2016). From 2008 to 2014 she was the editor-in-chief of the online journal E-Rea. With the LERMA research group at the University of Aix-Marseille, she is engaged in the elaboration of an online Critical and Historical Dictionary, part of the project “Mediating American Literature.” Laurence W. Mazzeno is President Emeritus of Alvernia University, Reading, Pennsylvania, USA. He is the author or editor of more than twenty books, including volumes on Ernest Hemingway and John Updike. He has collaborated with Sue Norton on a number of scholarly projects. He serves as the associate editor of Nineteenth-Century Prose and series editor for McFarland Publisher’s Nineteenth-Century Companions Series. Robert Morace is Distinguished Professor of English at Daemen College, Amherst, New York, USA. He is the author and editor of six books on contemporary American, English, and Scottish literature and is completing a book on post-devolution Scottish fiction. His recent work has appeared in Critique, Generation X Goes Global, Symbiosis, Scottish Studies International, The John Updike Review, and The Wenshan Review (Taiwan). He serves on the editorial boards of Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction and Symbiosis: Studies in Transatlantic Literary & Cultural Studies and is the literary advisor for two recent volumes in the Contemporary Literary Criticism series. Morace has taught at Warsaw University and Beijing University of Chinese Medicine. Sue Norton is Lecturer in English at Technological University Dublin, Ireland. With Laurence W. Mazzeno, she co-edited and con- NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xv tributed to European Perspectives on John Updike (2018). Her work on writing and literature has appeared in The Journal of Scholarly Publishing; The Explicator; The Irish Journal of American Studies; The John Updike Review; American, British, and Canadian Studies Journal; New Writing: The International Journal for the Practice and Theory of Creative Writing, and in other journals and periodicals related to English studies and education. Ana-Karina Schneider is Associate Professor of English Literature at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania. Her publications include Critical Perspectives in the Late Twentieth Century: William Faulkner, A Case Study (2006), Studies in the Rhetoric of Fiction (2015), and Understanding Anne Enright (2020), as well as textbooks and study guides for classroom use, and an assortment of articles on contemporary British and Irish fiction and English studies in Romania. She is the editorin-chief of American, British and Canadian Studies. Toon Staes teaches English and American literature at the University of Antwerp and at Katholieke Universiteit (KU) Leuven, Belgium. He has written several essays on contemporary fiction and narrative theory and is writing a book on the systems novel. Research for his essay was sponsored by a Mobilitas Pluss research grant (MOBJD391, “Complex Plots: Narrative Representations of Complexity”) and by the Estonian Research Council (Grant 1481, “The Role of Imaginary Narrative Scenarios in Cultural Dynamics”). Harriet Stilley holds a postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Edinburgh’s Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, and a postdoctoral visiting research fellowship at the University of Oxford’s Rothermere American Institute. Her work has appeared in the Cormac McCarthy Journal, the Journal of American Studies, and the European Journal of American Studies. Her monograph, From the Delivered to the Dispatched: Masculinity in Modern American Fiction (1969–1977), was published in late 2018. Andrew Tate is Reader in Literature, Religion, and Aesthetics at Lancaster University, UK. He has written widely on fiction, theory, and theology; his most recent book is Apocalyptic Fiction (2017). He contributed a chapter to European Perspectives on John Updike (2018). xvi NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Maria Holmgren Troy is Professor of English and the Director of the Research Group for Culture Studies (KuFo) at Karlstad University, Sweden. Her publications include Nordic Gothic (2020), co-authored with Johan Höglund, Yvonne Leffler, and Sofia Wijkmark; Making Home: Orphanhood, Kinship, and Cultural Memory in Contemporary American Novels (2014), co-authored with Elizabeth Kella and Helena Wahlström; In the First Person and in the House: The House Chronotope in Four Works by American Women Writers (1999); and articles and book chapters on works by, among others, Octavia Butler, Elizabeth Stoddard, and Pat Barker.