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A Glimpse Into Our Future

I took a different approach to the semester project. My historical narrative is the present (2020), viewed from the future. Essentially, I'm analyzing the present as history and digging into our perception of reality. Now more than ever before, our understanding of reality is extremely fragile and being tested. Why not play around with that? I struggle with how much to give away here, but I also know that my project might need a bit of explaining. So if you just want to dive in right now, I encourage it. But if you don't mind a few spoilers, read on. My story takes place in the year 2080, though the specific year doesn't matter too much. The idea that the world is a simulation is front and center in a disturbing way, since every person on Earth now exists solely as a line of code in a program simulating some parts of physical life. They don't understand physical existence, so the concepts of going places or doing things don't entirely make sense to them. It'...
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Rufus's Confusing Personality

If there's one thing Octavia Butler is good at, it's creating a book that'll make you feel all sorts of different ways. Throughout Kindred , I struggled with my feelings about Rufus's character. How are you supposed to feel about a somewhat sympathetic slaveowner? See, I'm kind of a softie. Not overly so, but I'm pretty easily touched when people are sweet or thoughtful or emotional, especially if they're not typically so. Rufus slowly coming to love his children and care for them touched me a little bit. By the last part, Joe was calling him Daddy. He wouldn't even entertain the idea of selling his children. I think he did mean to free them in the end, even though Dana forced his hand a bit. He was talking about sending Joe to school in the North and completely approved of educating him. But that was really the nicest aspect of Rufus. He's a possessive person and won't let anyone he "loves" go. When he comes into possession of his f...
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The Pirates of Slaughterhouse-Five

There's one tiny, rather unimportant detail from Slaughterhouse-Five that I can't take my mind off of. It's near and dear to my heart, and while I know it doesn't matter to most of you, nor will you remember that it even happened, it's very important to me that you all receive the correct information.  "Hail, Hail, the Gang's All Here" is not a song from Pirates of Penzance .  I know the chances of any of you remembering even reading those words are very low, which I understand. The majority of the world, unlike me, doesn't have an affinity for comic operas written in the 1800s. To be entirely fair, Pirates of Penzance is one of Gilbert and Sullivan's more famous operas. It's well known more in the theatre world than the non-theatre world, but if you've heard of Gilbert and Sullivan, Pirates is most likely the show you've heard of. And if you know any of the music, you probably know "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major...
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Gender, Continued

Yesterday Erin and I threw out a set of questions to chew on after class: does Reed's sexism subvert his postmodern intentions? That is, does the overwhelming masculinity in Mumbo Jumbo limit its postmodern deconstructions and criticisms of Western society? Does your interpretation of Mumbo Jumbo change when you consider the gender politics of the novel? They're purposefully confusing and hard to answer questions. I will admit right now that I myself can't answer them, and I read the article they came from/were inspired by. So this blog post is less of an answer and more of a speculative journey you may accompany me on, if you so choose. To some extent, it seems that Reed's sexism, misogyny, and lack of women in Mumbo Jumbo doesn't matter. There's already so much going in this book that you might skip right over it and never see it. I definitely didn't notice the glaring lack of female characters in Mumbo Jumbo until Erin and I found our article for the ...
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Toy Story, Mumbo Jumbo, and Overthinking

We're only a few days into Mumbo Jumbo , but it's already a wild and confusing ride. Ishmael Reed shoves us into uncomfortable territory by breaking every convention he possibly can. He's got random sections in italics, no quotation marks, then suddenly quotation marks, and most notably, puts the first chapter of the book before the publication and title pages. Through this odd choice of ordering, he forces us to recognize that Mumbo Jumbo is a book. We consciously have to flip the pages, noticing the copyright and the ironic disclaimer that all of Reed's characters are fictional -- any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. We actually read the epigraphs for the first time because they're shoved into our faces. "This is a book," Reed says. "Think about how it is a book. It is not real." Or is that what he's saying? We're not very far into Mumbo Jumbo , so I can't honestly say. ...
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Rape is a Felony, Stanford White

The issue of consent in Ragtime  is one of relatively little importance. Doctorow has plenty of other far greater issues he's chosen to tackle, but I think the idea of consent deserves a few minutes of consideration. From the get-go, consent basically didn't exist in Ragtime . Of course, we know that consent didn't exist in the 1900s, so this is a historically accurate fact of the time period, which we see play out in several couples.  Father and Mother don't seem to have a lot of chemistry in the first place, which is already worrying. But E.L. Doctorow's description of their sex life lacks a certain energy: "When the entire house was asleep he came to her room in the darkness. He was solemn and attentive as befitted the occasion. Mother shut her eyes and held her hands over her ears" (11-12). Mother clearly isn't into what they're doing, which doesn't make the act consensual at all. But she resigns herself to having sex with Father, beli...
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