it's all narrative

The thing that struck me most on re-reading Gatsby was how much it felt like a novel written not long after 1929. The scathing indictment of excess and acquisitiveness—and the use of Gatsby as a dark parody of Horatio Alger—seems prescient in light of the stock market crash that came four years after it was published. Gatsby would work well taught alongside The Big Money, the third novel in John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy. Except that where Dos Passos published his novel in 1936 and wrote with the benefit of hindsight, Fitzgerald’s critique was aimed at the culture of excess and hedonism while it was at its apogee. With our benefit of hindsight, it is tempting to see Gatsby’s violent end as prophetic.

As I suggested in my last post, Gatsby’s principal figure of speech is understatement—but not even Nick Carraway’s tendency to be laconic (albeit elegantly and sometimes baroquely so, which is quite the needle to thread when you think about it) obviates the splendor and mind-numbing displays of wealth at Gatsby’s mansion. In many ways, Fitzgerald gives us a familiar contrast, between new money and old. The property and possessions of the Buchanans are impressive, but Fitzgerald’s description of the house articulates the comfort and complacency of inherited, dynastic wealth:

Their house was even more elaborate than I expected, a cheerful red-and-white Georgian Colonial mansion, overlooking the bay. The lawn started at the beach and ran toward the front door for a quarter of a mile, jumping over sundials and brick walks and burning gardens—finally when it reached the house drifting up the side in bright vines as though from the momentum of its run. The front was broken by a line of French windows, glowing now with reflected gold and wide open to the warm windy afternoon, and Tom Buchanan in riding clothes was standing with his legs apart on the front porch.

An example of an Hotel de Ville.

The first description of Gatsby’s mansion, by contrast, calls it “colossal affair by any standard” which was “a factual imitation of some Hôtel de Ville in Normandy, with a tower on one side, spanking new under a thin beard of raw ivy.” Fitzgerald never calls Gatsby’s mansion gauche or tacky in so many words; but the evocation of a palatial French manse, still so new that the “raw ivy” can’t hide its youth,” is in stark contrast with the easy elegance of the Buchanan home—whose ivy is so venerable that it is of a piece with the manicured lawn.

Beyond this initial description, however, Fitzgerald does not devote much time to the objective appearance of the house. Rather, the lion’s share of his descriptions of Gatsby’s home, over the course of the novel, is devoted to Gatsby’s stuff—most startlingly later on when Gatsby starts pulling his tailored, imported shirts giddily off his shelves where they’re piled dozens deep and throwing them to Daisy (I’ll have more to say about that later)—but the first party Nick attends begins not with the festivities but the goodies brought in to stock them:

Every Friday five crates of oranges and lemons arrived from a fruiterer in New York—every Monday these same oranges and lemons left his back door in a pyramid of pulpless halves. There was a machine in the kitchen which could extract the juice of two hundred oranges in half an hour if a little button was pressed two hundred times by a butler’s thumb.

At least once a fortnight a corps of caterers came down with several hundred feet of canvas and enough colored lights to make a Christmas tree of Gatsby’s enormous garden. On buffet tables, garnished with glistening hors d’oeurve, spiced baked hams crowded against salads of harlequin designs and pastry pigs and turkeys bewitched to a dark gold. In the main hall a bar with a real brass rail was set up, and stocked with gins and liquors and cordials so long forgotten that most of his female guests were too young to know one from another.

And it goes on … The reason I belabor this point is to emphasize the subtitle of this post: that Gatsby’s displays of wealth and excess are, quite literally, spectacular: that is to say, the very point of them is as spectacle, an answering beacon to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, in the hopes that she’ll see his display and eventually make her way over to one of his parties.

I’ll talk about that symbolic gesture in a moment—and more when I talk about the recent film version of Gatsby in my next post—but for now I’m interested in what Fitzgerald leaves unspoken. I concluded my previous post with a favourable comparison of Fitzgerald’s technique to Hemingway’s, namely, the calculated elision of detail. Gatsby, is, after all, a pretty economically written novel: my edition runs to 180 pages. I’d argue that it’s as much what Fitzgerald leaves out as what he puts in that fascinates so many readers. What exactly did he do to make his money? Who’s on the end of all those phone calls he takes? How did he manage to accumulate such vast wealth in a mere three years? At the very beginning of the novel Fitzgerald signals Gatsby’s “mysteriousness” by having so many random party-goers spin increasingly elaborate stories about him. And even though we do eventually get his backstory, we’re still only privy to a fraction of the story proper: namely, Gatsby’s obsessive, childlike, and ultimately doomed love for Daisy.

The untold account of his meteoric rise, however, is the foundation for the novel’s critique. Wealth in Fitzgerald’s novel—huge wealth, at any rate—is consonant with moral and spiritual carelessness. That is, in the end, Carraway’s verdict on Tom and Daisy: “It was all very careless and confused. They were careless people … they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money and their vast carelessness.” And while these damning words are directed at Tom and Daisy, they resonate with the memory of Gatsby too—for he is in his own way careless, reckless in his pursuit of enough wealth that Daisy will notice him there across the sound and see him as worthy of her love.

His parties are symbolic expenditure, and are symbolically wasteful; the aforementioned “pyramid of pulpless halves” leaving his house after every weekend is as apt a metaphor for his expenditures as any. But given the ephemeral nature of his spending, it begs readers to speculate on just how solid his wealth is. On reading the novel this time around, I kept coming back around to how literally unbelievable his riches are—for we know, once we have his backstory, that he came out of the war penniless. So if he was demobbed in early 1919, and then spent five months at Oxford, he had less than three years to accumulate the money he spends in the summer of 1922. In a recent New York Magazine article, Kevin Roose crunches the numbers, tallying up the likely costs of Galsby’s mansion and possessions and the amount he would have had to spend on his parties. His conclusion is that, even allowing for Gatsby to earn far more than was likely for a bootlegger to earn in the early years of Prohibition, he would have been experiencing significance shortfalls, and would most likely have gone into debt.

How much of this Fitzgerald worked out for himself is largely beside the point—and nor is it strictly necessary to apply the relevant numbers to the novel in a “how many children did Lady Macbeth have?” fashion. While there is more than enough there in the novel to suggest that Gatsby was living well beyond his means, he was manifestly living metaphorically well beyond his means. As already mentioned, Gatsby plays out the old chestnut of old money’s solidity versus new money’s upstart tactlessness; Gatsby himself is a paragon of hyperactive, conspicuous consumption. One of his most striking characteristics is his childishness, and his childlikeness: he has throughout the vaguely pathetic faith that his “success”—or perhaps more significantly, the outward signs of his success—will ultimately dazzle and woo Daisy.

If Gatsby is prescient in its vilification of the mindless drive toward wealth and accumulation that resulted in the stock market crash of 1929, it is more subtly prescient of the rise of a popular film genre during the Great Depression: the mobster film. Indeed, even if one didn’t know that Gatsby was written in the mid-twenties rather than in the midst of the Depression, one big clue lies in the person of Gatsby’s partner in crime. Modelled loosely on the Jewish gangster Arnold Rothstein, Meyer Wolfsheim is about as ugly an anti-Semitic caricature as one is likely to find, a figure right out of fevered late-19^th century paranoia—and indeed right out of Tom Buchanan’s “scientific” books about the coming “colored empire.” At first glance, Tom’s enthusiasm for geopolitical race theory reflects back on his jealously guarded privileges of race and class, but the depiction of Wolfsheim goes a long way toward giving credence to what Carraway calls his “impassioned gibberish.” Gatsby, it becomes clear toward the end, is not the sole architect of his own doom—Wolfsheim is the puppeteer, playing the role of the scheming Jew as he preys vampirically on Gatsby’s whiteness.

(I’ll have more to say about Wolfsheim in my next post, vis à vis Baz Lurhmann’s casting versus the Wolfsheim of the Redford version).

This dynamic between Gatsby and Wolfsheim, as I say, is more a product of late-19^th century thoughts and fears than what we see in the mobster genre of the 1930s—in which the (anti-)hero is more in the Horatio Alger mode, a scrappy young(ish) immigrant—usually Italian—who makes his way in the world of organized crime through his native intelligence and audacity. The mobster was a popular figure in Depression-era film specifically because he effected a critique of “legitimate” capitalism—he was the dark mirror to the robber barons, while at the same time offering the fantasy of wealth and excess.

Gatsby thus straddles a significant cultural line—the novel is a reflection of unease and anxiety about affluence and ready wealth, while anticipating its glaring absence. When I say the novel is prescient about the coming rise of the mobster film, it is because I can too well imagine a dramatization of the flip side of Gatsby’s story: the chronicle of his meteoric rise under Meyer Wolfsheim’s tutelage, his ruthless and single-minded dealings, and the other lives he ruined in his pursuit of wealth enough to impress Daisy. Consider this exchange between Tom and Gatsby, after Tom has done some research:

“I found out what your ‘drug-stores’ were.” He turned to us and spoke rapidly. “He and this Wolfsheim bought up a lot of side-street drug-stores in Chicago and sold grain alcohol over the counter. That’s one of his little stunts. I picked him for a bootlegger the first time I saw him, and I wasn’t far wrong.”

“What about it?” said Gatsby politely. “I guess your friend Walter Chase wasn’t too proud to come in on it.”

“And you left him in the lurch, didn’t you? You let him go to jail for a month over in New Jersey. God! You ought to hear Walter on the subject of you.”

“He came to us dead broke. He was very glad to pick up some money, old sport.”

“Don’t you call me ‘old sport’!” cried Tom. Gatsby said nothing. “Walter could have you up on the betting laws too, but Wolfsheim scared him into shutting his mouth.”

That unfamiliar yet recognizable look was back again on Gatsby’s face.

“That drug-store business was just small change,” continued Tom slowly, “but you’ve got something on now that Walter’s afraid to tell me about.”

This is about as explicit as the novel gets about Gatsby’s business, but it’s enough to cast a pall over what has been tactfully glossed before as phone calls from Chicago or Philadelphia. We come at this point to see Gatsby in vaguely schizophrenic terms: he must be a ruthless bastard to have done as well as he obviously has in the world of organized crime, but we only get hints of it. Even here, confronted by Tom, Gatsby is mild and unruffled. It is only in his struggle to get Daisy to admit she never loved Tom that the veneer starts to crack—which is arguably the biggest insight we get into his character. There is something almost sociopathic about that need, like a child who has never been properly socialized, who on the cusp of getting most of what he desires will only be satisfied with total victory.

In my penultimate post on my last blog, I wrote at length about how HBO has ruined me: how I have become addicted to its long-form, complex narratives and character studies that unfold over hours and hours. With Gatsby I imagine a series that begins with him being demobbed, returning to the U.S. and setting his sights on Daisy … the three-year slog in the trenches of Wolfsheim’s cabal, and all of the ruthless decisions and lives he destroys, all of the parcels of his soul he ransoms for the wealth he imagines will win Daisy for him. The series (which only need run a season) could end with him meeting Nick Carraway at that party and his words “I’m Gatsby.”

One of the features of my new blog will be discussions of the course texts I’m teaching, though not necessarily as I’m teaching them. The first novel I’ll be doing in English 2213: Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction is The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald. I reread it just recently, apropos of the new film adaptation, and so am posting about it now. This post is the first of three.

This will be the first of three posts on The Great Gatsby, and will consider the novel’s stylistic elements, and Fitzgerald’s ostensible place amongst his fellow American modernists. The second post, which will hopefully be up in a few days, looks at the themes of excess and expenditure in Gatsby, and speculates on the nature of Gatsby’s apparently inexhaustible wealth. And finally, the third post will look at the recent film version directed by Baz Lurhmann, and consider what he got right and wrong, and how it reflects on our understanding of the novel

A caveat: these posts are not meant to be scholarly essays, nor are they prettied-up lecture notes. I’m more interested in approaching the texts from a slightly more personal and subjective perspective, and ideally starting a conversation. Undoubtedly some of what I write here will get recycled in lecture, but if you’re a student who has found your way to this blog, you absolutely should not treat these posts as me putting my lecture notes online. You have been warned.

Before picking up the novel at the beginning of May, it had been twenty-three years since I’d last read The Great Gatsby. Like many people, I read it in high school—in my case, for OAC English (OAC = Ontario Academic Credit, the now-defunct year five of high school for those planning on going to university). That was the first and only time I read it, and I realized that with the exception of two short stories it was the only fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald I’d ever read.

This really should be an embarrassing admission for someone whose avowed specialty is twentieth-century U.S. fiction (and to a certain extent it is), but the truth of the matter is that Fitzgerald never loomed large, or really at all, in the firmament of my studies. No one I knew, professors or grad students, worked on him in any scholarly way; he did not show up on courses during my undergrad or grad years; and I have never felt much compulsion to include him in the courses I have taught. Part of this absence proceeded from that fact that most everyone I knew had read The Great Gatsby in high school, and it had taken on that stigma of being a “high school book.” When Fitzgerald got mentioned, it was usually in the context of his wife Zelda, who was and has been in the process of undergoing scholarly recuperation, or in terms of his friendships within the 1920s Paris scene.

I confess that, until picking up Gatsby again, his place amidst his Paris peers has largely been how I have thought of him these long years. I did not read him again after high school, but I read those peers voraciously in undergrad and glutted myself on the expat Parisian scene: Joyce, Pound, Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Henry Miller, and so forth. In addition to reading their works, I also read a slew of memoirs and biographies of the period, which is mostly where Fitzgerald made his appearances. He has thus been, in my mental map of modernism, the dipsomaniac butt of Hemingway’s jokes whose wife was either crazy or more talented than him or both (depending on whom you spoke to).

Reading him again today, his prose still feels oddly out of step with his fellow moderns: the writing is lush and elevated, almost Edwardian in its manners. And his subjects—the wealthy and feckless scions of the jazz age—are effectively an alien species when held up to Hemingway’s brittle, damaged men and women, Faulkner’s haunted vestiges of the Old South, Woolf’s complex and psychologically daunting character studies … At first glance (and indeed, in my vague memory before picking the book up again), Gatsby seems obsessed with surfaces: the characters are described in pungent detail, and the descriptions of their behaviour slots them into a set of types. Only Jay Gatsby appears to have much of an inner life, and that is only because he comes with a ready-made air of mystery fostered and furthered by everyone else’s rampant speculations.

On second and third glance however, it becomes apparent that the novel is preoccupied with surfaces—which I italicize to emphasize a fine distinction between superficial writing and writing about superficiality, which may itself take the guise of shallowness. One of the criticisms often leveled against the novel is that the prose is beautiful but empty—that Fitzgerald is quite brilliant at writing exquisite sentences that do not, ultimately, mean much of anything. Certainly, that was Jared Bland’s assertion in his May 3^rd column in The Globe and Mail, where he writes:

Consider the following passage from the novel’s closing pages: “He must have looked up at an unfamiliar sky through frightening leaves and shivered as he found what a grotesque thing a rose is and how raw the sunlight was upon the scarcely created grass. A new world, material without being real, where poor ghosts, breathing dreams like air, drifted fortuitously about … like that ashen, fantastic figure gliding toward him through the amorphous trees.” This isn’t simply a question of taste. It’s a question of emptiness. Amorphous trees? Ghosts breathing dreams like air? Scarcely created grass? None of these things actually means anything, just as there’s really no such thing as “riotous excursions with privileged glimpses into the human heart,” just as “the full bellows of the earth” don’t really blow “frogs full of life.” This is all lyricism, all metaphor, yes. But it is void lyricism, hollow metaphor.

I don’t know that I agree with his argument—“amorphous trees” seems a perfectly crumulent image to me, and the figuration of ghosts that breathe dreams like air is one I could spend a long time unpacking, both in the context of the novel and out. But let’s provisionally grant Bland’s premise, because, truth be told, there are a lot of moments in the novel when it feels like Fitzgerald is performing a charlatan’s magic trick, or offering a fireworks display, all in the name of dressing up emptiness and vacuity as something spectacular; he does seem, to paraphrase an obscure Irish poet, to spend the novel sliding across the surface of things. But I differ with Jared Bland’s assessment of “void lyricism”—the metaphors are not themselves hollow, not when Fitzgerald employs them as he does in the passage Bland quotes. Rather, it feels as though he spends his precious prose on objects and characters not worth his skill.

But this dissonance between his prose and its objects, of course, is the novel’s ironic center. And for all the occasional flourishes Fitzgerald employs (his occasional “spectroscopic gayety,” to use an appropriate example), I’d argue that the novel’s most marked figure of speech is understatement. Perhaps that seems counter-intuitive at first glance, considering the frequent descriptions of excess and frivolity, but what struck me most consistently as I re-read the novel was how often Fitzgerald blandly drops comments or observations that beg to be unpacked and expanded on.

For example: right at the beginning, as he briefly tells the story of his own background, Nick Carraway says: “I graduated from New Haven in 1915, just a quarter of a century after my father, and a little later I participated in that delayed Teutonic migration known as the Great War. I enjoyed the counter-raid so thoroughly that I came back restless.” Take a moment to reread those two sentences. He dispenses with the traumatic experience of the First World War so casually, it barely seems worth mentioning—except that the culture of the 1920s, in America and in Europe, was fundamentally shaped by the memory of war. (And yes: this will be something I belabour in class, considering that our second novel will be A Farewell to Arms). Though Fitzgerald himself did not fight in the war—he enlisted and was stationed in Alabama, but the war ended before he was shipped overseas—he was friends with Hemingway, and moreover spent a lot of his time in France, where memory of the war was somewhat more acute than in the U.S. It would be easy to dismiss his dismissive characterization of the war, except that the war is a subtle presence in the novel. He met Gatsby overseas, and whatever other lies Gatsby tells himself and others, his experiences in the trenches (and ostensible heroism) appear in the novel with the burnish of truth. Couple that with the fact that the near-hysterical partying at Gatsby’s mansion functions almost as an apotheosis of the “Jazz Age” hedonism that was itself a desperate attempt to forget the war’s trauma (potential students: at this point in class, expect an extended riff on Paul Fussell’s book The Great War and Modern Memory, and possibly Modris Ekstein’s The Rites of Spring).

But in Carraway’s economical retelling, the war was an exhilarating “counter-raid.” That Carraway comes back “restless” begs speculation. Restless how? He says it moved him to “go East and learn the bond business.” There is such a careful detachment in Carraway’s narration—of which his tendency toward understatement is a big part—disaffection from all those with whom he interacts (including and especially Gatsby) that it is not hard to infer emotional damage. In the end, Carraway describes Gatsby and the Buchanans—and everyone else he meets in their orbits—with the disconnected distaste of an alien, at first slightly (but only slightly) enamoured of their beauty and manners, but in the end completely disgusted with them all.

I find it rather amusing and perhaps a little ironic that, in the end, what I admire most about The Great Gatsby’s style is a trait most often attributed to Hemingway: the tendency to leave the vast majority of the material and substance of the story unsaid. Hemingway’s reputation was that of the great leaver-outer of things (it’s a literary expression. Look it up). He’d write a story that was two thousand words and then pare it down, pare it down, until it was half the length, or less. To give Scott Fitzgerald his due, however, where his buddy’s prose was so self-consciously spare—you can’t really read Hemingway without being aware of what he’s not telling you—The Great Gatsby manages to be exactly that pared down and spare, while seeming baroque and excessive. That`s a pretty impressive line to navigate, I must say.

We’ll be revisiting this comparison when I post on A Farewell to Arms. But for now, advantage: Fitzgerald.

Next up: leaving behind this whole question of understatement and considering Gatsby’s (literally) spectacular wealth!

One of the things I want to do with this blog is post about what I’m teaching. The plan, more generally, is to offer commentary on whatever I’m reading of interest anyway, but I intend to post more extended thoughts on those texts I’m covering in class. Which is not, I hasten to say, that I will just be posting tidied-up lecture notes—rather, I hope to inspire discussion about those texts I’m covering in the classroom.

I’m looking forward to teaching this fall, even though it will be pretty insanely busy. I have three classes: English 2213: Twentieth Century U.S. Fiction; English 2815: Introduction to Literary Theory and Criticism; and a graduate seminar titled The Banality of Magic: Fantasy, Myth, and Humanism.

It probably seems premature to talk about this now, but I don’t intend to post my thoughts just when I’m covering the books in class. Rather, I’ll post as I read the texts … and at this point, the first of those posts will probably go up in a few days. I’m also not sure what I hope to accomplish by talking about this now, unless people reading this blog feel inclined to read what I’m covering and talk back to my thoughts in the comment sections. For the record: that would be awesome. As I said in my opening post, I’m all about narrative … but I’m also all about conversation. Philosophically speaking, that is what I love most about the humanities, about the arts and about literature: it’s all about taking part in a big conversation. Think of it like a MOOC—a Massive Open Online Course—except, you know, not massive. And not evil. And you won’t be graded.

I should at this point offer a caveat for my (actual) students: some of you will almost certainly find your way to this blog (hallo!) and if you do, you need to know that my posts on course material are not the equivalent of me posting lecture notes online. There will certainly be overlap. But these meditations here are not definitive, and will not cover everything covered in class.

That being said, please feel free to respond and comment. It will not count toward class participation, and you’re welcome to post anonymously if you’re shy (please refrain from character assassination and trolling). But please: join the conversation.

I won’t say anything for now about the theory and crit course—I’ll speak to it when I’ve settled on the theorists we’re covering. But here are the reading lists for the other two courses.

Twentieth-Century U.S. Fiction

The reading list is (in the order we’ll do it):

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury
Flannery O’Connor, The Violent Bear it Away
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon
Julia Alverez, In the Time of the Butterflies

2213 is a course I have taught every year since I started at Memorial, and one I have had an awful lot of fun with. The main problem it poses is in trying to cover a century of fiction in thirteen weeks. Which of course cannot be done: as I tell my students, survey courses like this one are like a greatest hits album. They give you a sense of the material, but a very shallow and un-nuanced one. I have figured out that six novels is about the optimum number of texts to cover in a semester—five if one or more is really chunky, seven if one or more is really short, but the average is about six.

Knowing you can’t cover all the bases, and that it’s futile to try, is liberating … but it still poses a few organizational difficulties in terms of coverage and representation. As tempting as it would be to scrunch the entire course into six post-1980 novels, that would be cheating (I save that sort of thing for my fourth-year seminars). So you want to get an even spread (more or less) across the century, and you want to aim for balance in terms of men vs. women writers, white versus writers of colour, and so on.

This year, apropos of Baz Lurhmann’s adaptation, it occurred to me that I’ve never taught The Great Gatsby—until recently I had not, in fact, even read it since high school. The thought prompted me to add other classic novels I have not read in years and years, and before long I’d settled on The Great Gatsby, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner (nope, never taught The Sound and the Fury—my go-to text there is As I Lay Dying, and I once taught Light in August).

Of course, now half the course was very white, very canonical, and very dead. So to balance things, the second half of the course will be a trio of extraordinary women writers: Flannery O’Connor, Toni Morrison, and Julia Alvarez.

One of the issues one deals with in teaching survey courses is coverage—six novels doesn’t really give you a lot of room for movement, and in trying for a representative selection of twentieth-century fiction, you really want to try to be actually representative of American voices. And alas, with only six novels to work with, there is absolutely no way under heaven to cover all your bases. It simply cannot be done. So you try for symbolic victories.

It’s always a balancing act, and in my opening lecture I always give a long list of the novelists we won’t be covering … in the hopes that my students understand that a thirteen-week course makes them about as much of an expert on twentieth-century American fiction as someone who likes “Hey Jude” is a Beatles expert.

The Banality of Magic: Fantasy, Myth, and Humanism

I really, really hope some people reading this saw the title of this course and had a moment of either confusion, anger, or just a general “WTF?” Hopefully, someone thought “The banality of magic? Isn’t magic by definition the opposite of banal?”

If anyone thought anything along those lines, that makes me happy. The title is of course a nod to Hannah Arendt’s phrase “the banality of evil,” the main trope of her book Eichmann in Jerusalem. My topic is far less significant, but the rhetorical gesture is the same. The course looks at contemporary fantasy’s tendency to articulate a markedly secular, humanist perspective—which is somewhat counter-intuitive for a genre that has traditionally been preoccupied with supernaturally-infused neo-medieval stories and settings. But when one reads Neil Gaiman or George R. R. Martin—or even J.K. Rowling—one finds an inversion of the relationship between the supernatural and the mortal, the magical and the mundane, than was typical in the defining texts of the genre.

I won’t belabor the course’s overarching thesis here. Suffice to say, I foresee many posts to come in which I work through these questions, given that this course is representative of my current research … there is an awful lot I have to say on the topic. So without further ado, here is the reading list, again in the order we’ll likely cover it in class:

Neil Gaiman, American Gods
Terry Pratchett, Witches Abroad
Bernard Cornwell, The Winter King
J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Lev Grossman, The Magicians
George R.R. Martin, A Game of Thrones
Richard K. Morgan, The Steel Remains

There’s a lot I could say about this right now, but I’ll refrain. As I said before, there will be an awful lot of posts on fantasy and how we define in it in the coming weeks.