The American Novel Since 1945: Lecture 1 Transcript January 14, 2008 << back Professor Amy Hungerford: This is "American Novel Since 1945." Welcome. I am Amy Hungerford. Today I am going to do a couple of things. In the first half of class, I'm going to tell you a little bit about the class and introduce some of the questions that we will think about over the term if you stay in this course. In the second half of class, I will introduce to you and start telling the first story of the term, and that's about Richard Wright's Black Boy, which is our first reading of the term. In between those two parts, I will ask that anyone who is shopping the class and would like to leave at that time do so then. I would be grateful if you would wait until that point if at all you possibly can. It just makes the whole thing work a little easier and it prevents that drop in the pit of my stomach when I see half of the class leave. So I will indicate when that moment is. Come on. Make yourself comfortable on the floor if you can. My goal in this course is to allow you or to invite you to read some of the most compelling novels written in the last little over a half century. This includes a whole range of thematic concerns. So when I look down at my list of novels--which I have not brought with me (I trust you can find it on the web; I didn't want to kill trees by making enough of these for all of you)--when I look down at my list of books and I think about what these books are about, I see war. I see war, all the way from the Trojan War, to the Mexican-American War in the 1840s, all the way up to the Vietnam War. I see love, in all kinds of guises: be they criminal as in Lolita, pedophiliac love; be they sort of ideational romantic, John Barth; be they campus love, that's The Human Stain, Philip Roth; all kinds and forms of sex and love, and then there is politics interweaving with all those things. There are questions of identity and race. There is a nervous breakdown that actually happens right here in New Haven in one of these novels. That's in Franny and Zooey. I see women who give up on housekeeping altogether and let their house go to ruin and become vagrants. I see suicide. I see slavery. All these things you can read about in these novels, but reading these novels is not just about reading about those things. It's also going to be the process of watching an artistic form unfold
