History as Fiction -- Elizabeth

                Back in January, at the very beginning of this course, we had various discussions about the nature of postmodernism and how we might understand it in our own lives. Through these discussions we ended up landing on the topic of memes, the distinctive “Gen-Z nihilism” brand of internet humor, and how the current popular culture we (by “we” I mean The Youth) have grown up in arguably incorporates tenets of postmodernism into our most fundamental worldview. As the novels we read have gotten progressively closer to the present day in terms of when they were set and published, it seems to get more and more interesting to look at how postmodernism in literature is related to the postmodernism that we see, now, in our everyday life.                 As we’ve been reading Libra , one of the ways it is different is how, compared to all of our previous novels, the historical event it is centered around...

Disclaimer: this blog post has nothing to do with what we’re reading in class, I was just thinking about some stuff and curious about other people’s thoughts on it. Also, I realize I kind of made Oklahoma seem like a terribly racist and awful musical which it isn’t. It’s a fun time, the music is good, everyone involved has been working very hard and doing a genuinely great job -- please do come see it!!               Wednesday is opening night for Uni’s production of Oklahoma! , a heartwarming story of two melodramatic love triangles and the good-natured (I think?) conflicts between the Farmers and the Cowmen. So far I’ve seen the whole thing about four times from the slightly-obscured viewpoint of the pit orchestra. In doing so I started thinking about the ways in which the musical Oklahoma! is actually really interesting to think about as an expression of many of the same themes we’ve been discussing about history as fiction in this class. ...

             After being absorbed in Vonnegut’s borderline-nihilistic Tralfamadorian philosophy for about a month, you could be forgiven for being relieved to open up Octavia Butler’s Kindred instead. Finally, a character who actually cares about the plot, and who seems to actively seek to exercise agency and influence their own fate rather than resigning themselves to being another meaningless cog in the abstract machinery of history. And it’s true: for the first few chapters, it’s clear that Dana does genuinely care -- and not only out of the self-interest inherent in her task of saving her ancestor. When she meets Rufus when he is a child, she wonders if she can beat the odds of the time period and prevent him from becoming the kind of person his father is. When she first pieces together that he and Alice must be her own ancestors, she instinctively begins to think about Alice and Rufus being married when they’re older -- despite the fact that in 1...