Post-War American Literature, Part 2: More Short Fiction

In this course, we read three novellas. We begin with Donald Barthelme’s experimental Snow White (1967), a countercultural reconstruction of the Disney version of the traditional fairytale, where the seductive woman, Snow White, waits for her princes (her “dwarves”) to return to New York. Snow White amusingly explores themes of desire, identity, and emotional turmoil, wrestling with conflicting feelings of intimacy and societal expectations. In Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), a disgruntled Californian housewife, Oedipa Maas, begins to embrace conspiracy theories when she becomes the co-executor of the vast estate of her wealthy ex-lover, Pierce Inverarity. As she sorts through his tangled affairs, she stumbles upon clues leading to an enigmatic, centuries-old underground postal system called Tristero and is drawn into a confusing world of paranoia, secret symbols, and a web of cryptic information.  In James Baldwin’s Sonny’s Blues (1957), an unnamed narrator discovers that his younger brother, Sonny, has been arrested for selling and using heroin. As he prepares to teach his class, the narrator remembers Sonny as a young boy, realizing that his students could someday end up like Sonny, given the obstacles and hardships they face growing up in Harlem. Sonny's Blues is not a true story, but it draws heavily on Baldwin’s own life, particularly his relationship with his brother David. The novella explores themes of suffering and forgiveness, which speak to Baldwin's own struggles and reflections on the Black experience.