• Make sure to answer the correct question for your group!
• Designate one person as spokesperson and take good notes.
• Provide at least a couple of bits of textual evidence: quotes or paraphrase of particular moments in the text.

1. What was most difficult about these two articles? What does each author seem to assume that we readers already know in order to process the argument?
2. What’s something “weird” about Ghosh’s novel that each piece shows us, something that we may have missed in our initial reading of the text?
3. What did each author need to know in order to write this piece? What kinds of sources did they consult/quote/argue with? What seems to be the “methodology” at work in each piece? 
4. What were the weaknesses, if you note any, in either or both of the essays? Which piece did you find more convincing in terms of giving a satisfying reading of Ghosh’s novel?

We’ll be kicking off our final project for the course on Monday. Here are some details:

• We’ll meet with Prof. Jennifer Newman, a Hunter librarian, remotely over Zoom (here’s the link): she thinks that format works better for this kind of exercise.
• To prepare, Prof. Newman asks that we answer a couple of prompts on Padlet prior to meeting:
  • Section 4: https://huntercollege68.padlet.org/jn1314/ne40012z0w35qr42
  • Section 6: https://huntercollege68.padlet.org/jn1314/tc5lsoukpbl7do1w
• You’ll also come to class with a “research question” already posted to the blog. Guidelines are here.

In order to contextualize Ben Lerner’s very strange and challenging novel, I thought you might appreciate the following:

• reviews:
  • in the Manchester Guardian; NYT); and Slate
  • As you can see, reception was pretty enthusiastic, but reviewers’ tolerance for the extremely close first-person, irony-saturated narrative differs, as I’m sure it does for students.
• autofiction:
  • we’ll talk about this in class, but this novel is not “cli-fi” in the usual sense.
  • It’s neither speculative and oriented towards “critical utopias” nor realist in the grand tradition exemplified and defended by Ghosh.
  • In terms of genre, it’s much more an example of the “autofiction” of contemporary writers like Teju Cole, Rachel Cusk, Karl Ove Knausgard, who themselves point back to twentieth-century writers like W. G. Sebald and, above all, Marcel Proust.
  • I included it in the course despite all this, since I think it represents a radically different strategy for thinking about deep time than the other two examples and represents a different strategy than either Ghosh’s or Butler’s in awakening our imagination to try to comprehend the “hyperobjects” of the Anthropocene.

We’ll go over the midterm a bit for the first 20 minutes of class tomorrow, so make sure to review your work and my comments on it. Here’s a key of sorts, with real answers from peers. Who wrote what is sort of besides the point, but I did include initials and section info for all authors by way of “citation”: congrats to all who wrote such good responses.

Midterm Key

I know y’all can Google, but here’s a map of the Sundarbans to get a sense of where this novel is unfolding in space:

Sundarbans

Find local businesses, view maps and get driving directions in Google Maps.