Art & Identity in New Orleans

Below are four excellent blog posts from previous classes, all of which should give you a sense as to how you might approach your posts for this class. As a reminder of the requirements and guidelines for your post, here’s what the course syllabus states:

You are required to compose at least one blog post each week, although you are encouraged to create additional posts whenever you’ve got responses to the reading that you’d like to share. These posts should offer an analysis of thematic concerns, a discussion of elements of craft, or observations about the writers whose works we’ve read. These posts should be made before we discuss the works in class — in fact, we’ll use these posts as the springboard for many of our conversations. Your blog posts should not be commentaries on the quality of the works we’ve read, nor should they be reminiscences of personal experiences. They should be well-written, well-developed, clear, and engaging. These are not formal academic papers, but they are also not impromptu casual musings.

Rachel Davis’s post on Jhumpa Lahiri’s story “A Temporary Matter”:

I think it’s a testament to the craft of this story how difficult it is to read. This isn’t to say the vocabulary or structure is particularly hard to follow, but that the emotional depth throughout made it so I had to take frequent breaks while reading, in order to keep from being pulled into the depths of Shukumar’s depression.

Jhumpa Lahiri

I think one of the ways in which this effect is achieved is by setting Shukumar and Shoba as foils for each other, and flipping the perspective early on. Perhaps this is my bias as a reader, but the first few paragraphs I believed the story would follow Shoba as our point-of-view character. It spends time describing her actions, her “leather satchel, plump with files,” her appearance and how she imagined her life would be different. Looking back on it now, I know this displayed the level of intimacy between Shoba and Shukumar, but we hear barely even a mention of the latter in this section. In the first three paragraphs, we learn Shoba is a career woman (from her bag full of work she’s brought home with her), a person with a strict routine (from her gym bag), and is the responsible one in the relationship (from “reading the notice allowed, more for Shukumar’s benefit than her own). In the same section, we learn that Shukumar is her partner.

Shukumar, we learn over the course of the story, is a PhD candidate, dispassionately working through his dissertation, having taken a semester off from teaching to process the loss of their child. His agoraphobia, reluctance to work, and seeming lack of foresight (characterized by his wonder at Shoba’s preparedness) sets the couple against each other in ways that fully come to fruition at the ending of the story.

These seeds of characterization fully bloom by the time we’ve reached the end. Shoba, being responsible, forwardthinking, and sure of what she wants, has already found an apartment. Shukumar, being loving but lost, is blindsided. Still, the love between them is there, allowing them to share each other’s sorrows in the last moment of the story in ways that they weren’t able to achieve throughout, making this the real heartbreak of it all.

Mary Lizzie Hodges’s post on Cho-Nam Joo’s novel Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982:

This novel, like many of the others we have read for this class, gave an inside look at the life of a female in a foreign culture. The author did this particularly well by providing an overall description of her life as a whole. This novel was written in sections that divided different time periods of the main character, Kim Jiyoung’s, life, giving the reader a stronger sense of the entire culture, instead of just seeing through the lens a part of her life. Throughout the novel, we also saw a great deal into the lives of her family members, as well and their roles in society and their family, particularly Kim Jiyoung’s sister, mother, and grandmother’s lives and the ways in which they were similar and different to her own. We also saw the ways in which Kim Jiyoung’s brother and father’s roles and expectations contrasted from her own. The author provided many facts and statistics throughout the novel regarding gender roles in the Korean culture, predominantly focusing on the roles and expectations of women vs. men and the ways in which women have a disadvantage. The theme was centered around gender roles and expectations in Korea, as well as the ways in which they and the overall culture affect the mental health of females.

This novel is particularly fascinating because the narrator was actually a psychiatrist who was evaluating the main character, Kim Jiyoung, in order to attempt to properly diagnose her. To my surprise, I actually forgot about this halfway through the novel, and then I was reminded at the end, when the psychiatrist actually began to diagnose her. This is an interesting experience to have had reading this novel because it shows how deeply the reader is taken into the life of Kim Jiyoung. It’s also incredibly odd for the psychiatrist to have been aware of so many precise and emotionally detailed experiences of her life, in order to have provided such a detailed description to the reader. At the end, the psychiatrist told of his own life and place in society in comparison to Kim Jiyoung. Given that he was a male, his thoughts were somewhat unsettling, considering they implied that Kim Jiyoung’s life and problems were similar to other women in society and that this would continue to be the case for many women to come.

Mary Rossi’s post on George Saunders’s story “The Semplica Girl Diaries”:

In an interview with The New Yorker, George Saunders mentions that the inspiration for “The Semplica Girl Diaries” came from a dream that he had many years ago; he then goes on to say the following: “Einstein said (or, at least, I am always quoting him as having said), ‘No worthy problem is ever solved within the plane of its original conception.’ So this was an example of that: my ‘original conception’ (i.e., the dream and its associated meaning) had to be outgrown—or built upon.” For me, this quote also best describes fantastic fiction in general. In “The Metamorphosis,” Kafka uses Gregor’s transformation to explore ideas about identity and self-worth; in “The Husband Stitch,” Machado uses the green ribbon to explore ideas about patriarchy and sexuality; in “A Change in Fashion,” Millhauser uses outrageous fashion trends to explore ideas about autonomy and objectification. These are just a few examples, but I think it’s safe to say that the fantastic is almost always metaphorical; it provides us with a way of examining and identifying our own fears and dilemmas by cloaking them in something much simpler.

In “The Semplica Girl Diaries,” the main “real” topics here are, as Saunders also states in his interview, immigration, poverty, and women’s rights. The family’s need to keep up with the Joneses comes at the cost of the freedom of the destitute girls that they “employ.” Thomas mentions that each of the girls applied for the job, and the father remarks that they appear happy enough; to me, this sounds like what many Americans (usually hardcore conservatives) bring up when they talk about the immigrants living in this country, that these people should be grateful and happy that they have the opportunity to live and work in “the greatest country in the world.” Because of their privileged position, the family (as well as the other families who have Semplica Girls of their own) is seeing the situation through rose-tinted glasses; as long as the girls appear happy, then it must be true, and as long as they volunteeredto be here, then surely they are perfectly content.

Eva’s character in this story appears to represent the guilt felt by many people (myself included) due to their own privileges and successes—privileges and successes that many other people do not (and possibly never will) share. She appears to be the only truly compassionate one in this cast of characters; even at the story’s end, the father remarks, “Why would she do? Why would she ruin it all, leave our yard? Could have had nice long run w/ us.” He then ends the story with the following line: “Note to self: call Greenway, have them take ugly thing away.” He appears to have learned nothing from this experience, showing how entrenched he is in this privileged lifestyle; the loss of the SGs is just a minor inconvenience, and before long, everything will go back to normal. This mirrors the attitudes of many people in real life when it comes to issues like deportation and poverty—as long as things continue to work out fine for them, what does it matter what their neighbors or coworkers are suffering through?

For me, fantastic fiction will always be the best genre for exploring the world’s problems (as well as the majority of people’s responses to them). George Saunders has always excelled when it comes to including social and political commentary in his stories, and “The Semplica Girl Diaries” is no exception.

Raven Minyard’s post on Julia Armfield’s story “Stop Your Women’s Ears with Wax”:

Julia Armfield’s “Stop Your Women’s Ears with Wax” turns the idea of the obsessive teenaged fangirl on its head; instead of lusting after boy bands, the girls in this story obsessively and savagely follow an all-female band. By doing so, Armfield essentially gives power to the women in her story, letting them take full control over themselves by allowing them to lose control.

Julia Armfield
(Photograph © Sophie Davidson)

With the rise of the boy band, so came the rise of the so-called “crazed” female fans — the ones who cry over the members, who camp out for hours to get tickets to concerts, and even the ones who try to sneak into hotels to meet them. These types of fans are clearly seen in Armfield’s story, but the fact that they behave this way over a female band is what makes the story intriguing. As a whole, teenage female fans have been and are still often mocked for their dedication to musicians — specifically the conventionally attractive male ones. Older people, often men, look down on these girls because they believe the girls only care about the bands because of their looks.

However, this is not the case with the band in “Stop Your Women’s Ears with Wax.” Their looks are never mentioned, “and yet every night, the feeling is clear: a rushing, wild euphoria. You’ll kill us if you send us away.” (88) To the fans of this band, the music is important: “They make music about yearning, about hunger.” (92) In other words, they make music about the experience of young women. It is clear in several points throughout the story that the band and their fans are still judged by those involved in the music industry, but those voices are drowned out by the women finding their own voices. “The call, the drag, the ache, the yearn, the need, whatever you want to call it” allows them to unleash their emotions and desires and to be as savage as they want — even though it goes against what is expected of young women. By unleashing the feral violence seen throughout the story, women are able to drown out those who try to dismiss them.