Adequate Safety Lighting, Moderately-Sized Suburb

For this, your final reaction paper, you have two options. You can select the "serious" prompt that you know your teacher felt she should probably provide--the one that connects the novel Bright Lights, Big City to the course essential questions, or the Big Ideas on language and the post-post modern experience. That one's listed below marked with a number 1...which causes you to wonder if she doesn't secretly place more value on that particular option, since you dimly recall a discussion at some point about binary opposition and subtext, or maybe that was all just a stress dream you had when you realized how many books you'd have to read in third quarter.

At any rate, that quarter's a distant memory, and the tantalizing thought of reading whatever you want now (or maybe never reading again, at least until college) is teasing at the corners of your brain, so you're hoping this assignment goes fast.

But wait, there's a second option: one you find intriguing, despite the subjective (and possibly doomed) nature of sharing one's attempts at fiction with the world. There's something about this challenge that draws you in. Perhaps its something like nostalgia, even though the course isn't over yet. Perhaps it's hubris. Maybe you just need some caffeine.

Whatever you decide, others will make judgements based on your decision. That's inevitable. That's life. (Is anyone else struggling with this decision, or are they just jumping in and getting it over with?)

At any rate, you have a choice before you. 

Option 1: Consider the way McInerney tells this story, rather than the actual plot--how might this book be considered a product of its time? Why might it have caused a sensation upon its publication in 1984? You will want to be sure to provide some specific examples in your post.

Or, there's always Option 2: You could write some fiction in a way that specifically mirrors this work in terms of not only point of view, but also style (you know: style--that elusive yet vitally important quality of writing that's so difficult to pin down). Of course you'll need to keep your fiction piece school appropriate. That's just the way it goes.

But even given those parameters, you could come up with something rather brilliant. Don't you think?

Bringing Persons of Obscure Birth Into Undue Distinction

Here's my post! See the post below for assignment details :)

People like to feel superior—that’s nothing new. In 1814, when critics think the events of Persuasion begin, feeling superior was very often tied to one’s birth. Of course, wealth and beauty—two blessings which are still cause for feeling superior to others today—were also valued at that time. But birth trumped almost everything. At the time Austen lived, many marriages were forged in which one party brought all the wealth (or youth and beauty—or youth and beauty AND wealth) to the table, the other brought simply his or her name. Dissolute young men who’d gambled away their fortunes were able to trade on their family name to marry into a whole new fortune.

Class is important in all of Austen’s books. In early works such as Pride and Prejudice, class is an issue. Part of Mr. Darcy’s issue with the Bennets is Mrs. Bennet’s obscure birth. The character of Miss Caroline Bingley has one memorable line in the 1995 miniseries. When her sister claims that Sir William Lucas is a “very good sort of man,” Caroline responds with the snarky, “And I am sure he kept a very good sort of shop before his elevation to the knighthood" (Pride and Prejudice). This line perfectly illustrates the prevailing attitude of the time. Money was great and all, but it still mattered how you earned it. Revenue from land was the only truly acceptable means. The nobility and the landed gentry were holding on tightly to the last vestiges of Medieval England.

In Pride and Prejudice, we get the sense that Darcy was more concerned about the Bennets' lack of propriety than their status. Persuasion tackles these issues in an even more direct way. Austen uses the naval men, all of whom are portrayed in a positive light, to contrast the preening, shallow Sir Walter, who is practically a cartoon.

Sir Walter’s perusal of his favorite (only) book, the Baronetage, opens the novel, so we know class is on Austen’s mind. She very quickly tells us, through direct characterization, exactly what to think of Sir Walter, “Vanity was the beginning and the end of Sir Walter Elliot's character; vanity of person and of situation” (Austen chapter 1). The man was also handsome in his youth, and still a better-than-average looking older man, and indeed he is preoccupied with pointing out average or ugly people throughout the story. One of his objections to the naval man, Admiral Croft, who will lease Kellynch Hall, seems to be that serving in the navy causes men to look older faster. As opposed to his life of sitting around being waited on and reading one book.

Sir Walter tells his lawyer that he objects to the navy: “Yes; it is in two points offensive to me; I have two strong grounds of objection to it. First, as being the means of bringing persons of obscure birth into undue distinction, and raising men to honours which their fathers and grandfathers never dreamt of” (Austen chapter 3). He goes on here to discuss the aging affects of the wind, as mentioned above, but the central issue in the novel overall is this clash between old and new ways of attaining distinction. The old way—birth—was out of one’s control—and a boon bestowed as often on the unworthy as the worthy. The new way is to earn one’s place in society—a role which Captain Wentworth embodies perfectly in the novel. He rises through the ranks through his own bravery and effort.

I do think it’s worth noting that in this novel, Sir Walter and Mr. Elliot are both pretty terrible, but all the navy men are aces. The worst flaw betrayed by any of them is probably Bennick falling for the formerly flighty Miss Musgrove.

Perhaps Austen had grown even more annoyed with the Vicountess Dalyrimples of the world in her older age (Persuasion is one of her three mature works, versus Pride, which she wrote at a much younger age). Perhaps staying with her naval brother Frank, as she did after the death of her father, brought her into contact with some Wentworth-type fellows.

Whatever the cause, Anne Elliot comes to regret her youthful decision (strongly influenced by Lady Russell) to say no to someone of a lower rank, and finds happiness with a man who made his own way in the world. Jane Austen seems moldy and old-fashioned now, but this was still a revolutionary idea for her era.

Austen, Jane. Persuasion. e-text. The Replubic of Pemberley. 2015. 

Pride and Prejudice. Dir. Simon Langton. BBC, 1995. Miniseries.

Persuasion Post

 Please submit on Haiku AND post to your AP Lang blog

Select ONE of the following topic options. Use MLA format for your Haiku submission-version. 

Option 1: 

Consider the ways Austen explores the subject of class in the novel. The work is set at a time of change in English society, in which merit and wealth have begun to take the place of birth as the indicator of high class or importance. Which characters and situations embody these issues in the novel? Provide at least one in-depth example from the text, and as always include direct text support. 

Option 2:

Consider the novel as a work of satire. Keeping in mind the purposes, methods, and techniques of satire, how does Austen's work function as a satire? Consider which characters and situations earn satirical treatment in her book. What foibles of her society does Austen poke fun at? What techniques does she employ? Be sure to prove at least one specific example from the novel (and don't forget your text evidence!) to support your argument. 

The Holograms are Symbolic

The other night I went to see Jem and the Holograms (starring a very talented former student—which created its own strange yet cool form of cognitive dissonance). There is something rather postmodern in the premise of the film itself, as it’s a revisionist remake of an eighties cartoon produced by several companies, one of them Hasbro, a toy company. Rushkoff discusses the revisionist impulse in his section on narrative collapse—in particular he identifies Pulp Fiction as a film which compresses imagery from various decades into a retro pastiche, and forces the audience to “give up its attachment to linear history and accept instead a vision of American culture as a compression of a multitude of eras, and those eras themselves being reducible to iconography as simple as a leather jacket or a dance step” (Rushkoff 33). Of course Pulp Fiction also subverts the traditional linear narrative by presenting events out of order. In this way, Pulp Fiction is a post-narrative story on several levels.

Jem, in contrast, is presented in a linear fashion: the only departures are the framing device that bookends the film, and flashbacks presented as home movies. However, like Pulp Fiction, Jem conflates two eras: the late eighties and right now. Like all reboots, Jem is charged with preserving some of the source material—enough so that the original fan base will recognize the story they remember. In this case the filmmakers borrowed from the Tarantino playbook and used eighties signifiers in the form of clothes—now costumes for the band members.


Some critics took issue with how little of the original was preserved, which is a common issue with revision stories. Like so many modern revisions—this is not just a remake it’s a reboot—a notion that in and of itself is quite modern. The word itself is bound up with the digital age, of course, but more than that, the concept of a reboot means that characters and situations from the past are brought into the now. What was once then is now part of the present: Star Trek is now, Batman is now—we have a new origin story of an old hero, one that often wipes out many elements of the original or previous incarnation. In the case of Star Trek, director J.J. Abrams quite literally overwrote more than forty years of franchise history with a time travel device. He kept what worked for him, now, and jettisoned the rest.



     In the case of Jem, the now aspect of the reboot phenomenon is particularly interesting as the film is essentially about the presentist generation’s mania for documenting their lives online. The aforementioned flashbacks are presented as found footage from a video camera. The framing device is the main character filming an online confession that is later (spoiler alert) overwritten by a choice to delete the footage and pursue a different course of action—one that presumably, in the world of this film, will be documented by someone’s phone camera. 

Complicating the narrative further, the film is also intercut with YouTube videos. For example, as main character Jerrica engages in an online contract negotiation with her future producer, a clip of two dueling drummers is shown. As a refugee from the days before narrative collapse, I found myself attempting to make connections between the situations and people in the video and the situations and people in the story I was watching. I tried to make the drummers into characters, but on some level I realized that they were not, they were signifiers, like the icons mashed up by Tarantino in Pulp Fiction. The young Youtubers who showed up throughout the film were in a way the avatars for the audience. In this version, Jerrica is discovered via viral home video. The writers even make this claim concrete near the end of the film when Jerrica tells a crowd of fans that everyone is Jem, when they have something to say and they use a disguise and a camera to say it. Of course, recorded reality is not real life; the camera itself is a distancing device, and we can be anyone at all online. The issue of online identity versus “real life” is not a simple one. 




Overall, the film is in many ways a postmodern, prenstist narrative. As Rushkoff states, in our modern stories, “Characters must learn how their universes work. Narrativity is replaced by something more like putting together a puzzle…” (37). Like many modern films and shows in the post narrative-collapse era, the hero’s world is complicated—in the case of reboots by the layering of previous incarnations and versions, built-in audience expectations. In the case of all postmodern fiction, by the writer’s penchant to experiment with form (in Jem’s case, the interstitial interruptions by online videos). Underneath all of these layers, this film, and many others, still follows a very familiar narrative arc, the main character leaving home and figuring out her identity.  Just as the question of “is the online me the real me?” is a complex one, so is the question of traditional narrative vs. post narrative. This will all likely be complicated further when our devices become a literal part of us (à la The Matrix…or Feed!)

Rushkoff, Douglass. Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now. New York: Penguin, 2013. Nook.