Take a look at this one-pager to get ready for next week’s conference:

Pairs Conferences Tipsheet

• the “too much” problem: too many cites, too much material to assimilate
• the “not enough” problem: difficulty finding a “conversation” among critics that deals with the question you want to ask
• the synthesis problem: how to efficiently cluster texts and figure out how they relate to each other and to what you want to argue

• 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. Lerner’s novel is deeply concerned with scale in ways that connect it to the cli-fi genre, albeit in eccentric ways. What are some moments when the novel thematizes scale, the idea of bigness, smallness, and how the individual subject perceives or tries to comprehend the relative size and importance of the world around them? What does the novel have to offer us readers in facing a world that often seems too large, complex, and interconnected to be grasped and made meaningful?
2. Among the various subgenres one might use to categorize the novel, like cli-fi or autofiction, metafiction stands out. Metafictional works are about, in some sense, the process of creating fiction. What are some metafictional moment in the novel so far? What is the effect on us readers of calling attention to the scaffolding, so to speak, around the text, the process that made it, the decisions that led to the text that we hold in our hands, rather than other directions it could have taken or shapes it could have taken on?
3. What changes as the novel shifts its setting from New York City to Marfa, Texas? What are some of the contrasts between the two settings, and how do they affect our protagonist?
4. The central dramas of Part Four are, on the one hand, the protagonist’s interactions with a new social group, especially at the opulent house party and, on the other, the friction between the novel our protagonist is refusing to write (although we are reading it!) and the poem he writes instead (which Lerner did actually write in Marfa and publish!). Choose one of these dramas and unpack it, explaining what it adds to the novel and how it relates to the novel more broadly. If you want to really get crazy, you might explore what these “inner” and “outer” dramas have to do with one another.

• what databases you used, what was useful or problematic about them, what tricks you used to get the most of them.
• what keywords and search strategies you used.
• how your research question has changed, if at all, in light of what you’ve found so far (or haven’t)

• 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?