Nostalgia comes in all different forms. I admit that in my own reading of Super Sad True Love Story I "identify" with Lenny Abrahmov more than Eunice and her friend Precious Pony or some of the other characters we will be meeting. However, I do not think that Lenny is an "objective" voice in the novel nor do I think Lenny's own positions, thoughts, or desires are unproblematic. The novel traps me in some ways by making me long for those days of "non-streaming media artifacts," even if I still participate (and not only participate, but claim to be STUDYING) daily within the digital ecology via facebook and other social media, sharing everything from videos, blogs, quotations from said "non-streaming media artifacts," links to news stories, comments on news stories, and sometimes just stupid shit I think sounds cool.
This post will be about how (I think) you can get the most of your reading experience and classtime.
1.) Don't be afraid to reflect on your own personal experience of love, technology, or politics when reading these novels.
For most of my literary career, I have tried to bracket my 'personal' experience when interpreting novels, but this is because I knew I was embarking on an academic career of Literary Criticism. Let's face it, most of you are in the middle or toward the end of your time at University of Florida and already have studied a particular field. If I'm not mistaken, none of you are literary scholars. So, although I will be introducing "literary" issues in this course, I also want you to encourage to use these novels to reflect on your own experience. I can tell you right now that despite the fact I am relatively young and Lenny is 39 (not really all that old), I feel like I have experience some of his thoughts, desires, and worries (death? AH! But immortality. . .). I think also that we can almost agree that Lenny's "love" for Eunice is more like a strange teenage crush or infatuation. I'm gonna go out on a limb here and say we've all felt this -- maybe even for someone 'younger', 'out of our league', or, even, like he perceives Eunice (and sometimes who perceives herself in this manner) 'damaged'. In relationships, do we not tend to try and think about "changing" the other person? Do we not position ourselves as a "savior" of someone? Do we not consider how this other person can "save" us? Let us not shy away from these issues in class and in our reading experience.
Even outside the "love" relationship, are any of you just not concerned with death? I know I am, but I've watched too many Woody Allen films and read too much Heidegger. Have any of you thought about the balance between political/collective engagement and personal relationships? (Lenny: "I mean, what if Eunice and I just said 'no' to all of this?" -- SSTLS, 94)
That said, your journals and major papers should make an argument about the text and include citational evidence. What does it mean to make an argument about a text? It's to not only identify general themes (which we did very well today), but to start saying what the text is saying about these themes (and even, sometimes, *real world* events). How can we do this?
2.) Use your disciplinary knowledge to isolate ideas and themes in the text that interest you.
Do you study economics? What does the text say about the economy?
Do you study psychology? What kind of psychological issues might you identify in Lenny and Eunice? Sociology? What does the novel say about our culture AND a culture we might become?
Do you study communications? What is the text saying about how we communicate in a media saturated culture?
Do you study health? Don't get me started on the ways in which this 'health obsessed culture' mirrors our own. Or perhaps even shows us a society in which we all eat healthy and non-animal products? Is this a satire or utopia? What about the ideas between quality and quantity of life?
Do you study political science? What does this novel say about recent political events (indirectly) -- Occupy Wall Street ('tent cities'), the war in Iraq (Venuzuela), the common claim that though we are a 'two party system' we are essentially a one party system. What does it say about the Israel/Palestine conflict? What does it say about immigrant experience in America (particularly Russian)? So many things can be addressed.
Do you study engineering? How are transportation/cities etc. represented in the novel? How might we think of the "engineernig" of the human body (biology, your in on this one too!)
Do you study religion? How is "jewishness" or "christians" portrayed in the novel? Is there a way in which even the "secularized" society might still have a 'religion' (desire for immortality perhaps?). I must here direct you to a popular figure (and a key figure in Google innovation) Ray Kurzweil, a proponent of Transhumanism. Could we not see this man (this white, Jewish, man) as 'Joshie Goldmann' and vice versa?
You can see how, particularly in this first novel, ALL of you have an angle on the novel aside from the more typical 'universal themes' of love and death (these are particularly tied together in Russian Literature. c.f. Woody Allen's Love and Death.)
3.) WRITE/converse as you read
Record your thoughts. Blog (I can show you how to set one up if you don't know). Respond to my blog posts. Write IN the novel. Talk about the novel with people who haven't read it (or who have). Bring up aspects of the novel if they connect to your experience. "Live" with this novel. Come talk to me about it during office hours individually (or on Skype).
4.) With this novel in particular, read/watch the news (even the 'fake' news -- the onion, Jon Stewart, Colbert)
This novel is filled with reflections on media. Think critically while using your various technological devices and social media. Think about how you may be contributing to the circulation of something, etc. etc.
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In some ways, I see this novel as a possible dystopian media saturated America. But digital media harbors potentials difficult in a print/literate culture. It is not inherently the end of society nor going to lead to the kind of horrors of culture that Lenny both diagnoses AND tries to fit himself into.
I think this novel is not merely a satire of digital media, but also has a lot to say about the kind of subjectivities that are formed through certain media. I want you to think about the tension between the individual and the collective, the personal and political (which our most perceptive feminists have always maintains that the personal IS the political).
In my reading, this novel does not endorse the idea that we should go back to the days of "smelly old books" but rather to harness the affordances and benefits of our media situation for a new collective action and subjectivity rather than for surveillance, constant streaming of meaningless events, and the disintegration of unique idiolects of immigrant cultures
But the novel asks the questions, all ripe for argumentative papers or journals:
Can we actually have one without the other?
What is the kind of writing/media we will value in the future?
What is the role of the State (the 'government') in our age? Given Lenny's Russian heritage, do we not detect a little bit of a worry of a totalitarian state a la some of the Communist regimes of the past?
What is an 'authentic' human relationship? Do they exist?
What is our role as individuals in collective political and cultural action?
Come up with your own! And remember:
Together, we [might] Surprise the World!
Put'er there, Pa'dner!
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