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After the carefully controlled, intimate perfection of Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin undertook his most ambitious and perhaps greatest novel, Another Country (1960). A portrait of a group of bohemian friends, a profound exploration of race and sexuality, a brutal indictment of American reality and a pained, not-quite-despairful prayer to American hope, Baldwin’s third novel is a marvel, one of the great achievements of mid-century American fiction. In this seminar, we’ll read the book as writers, considering Baldwin’s stylistic achievements and his very brilliant sex writing (more than in almost any other book I know, sex in Another Country is a tool for grappling with historical and political questions), but also the book’s dramatic (even theatrical) structure, its use of POV, its organization of time. Above all, I want to think about ambition: what it means for a mature but still young writer to set himself an impossible task, sacrificing perfection to urgency.
Reading schedule:
It will be helpful if you can acquire the current Vintage edition, so that we all have the same page numbers.
Session 1: Book 1, Chapter 1 (to p. 88)
Session 2: Book 1, Chapters 2 and 3 (to p. 179)
Session 3: Book 2, Chapters 1 – 3 (to p. 315)
Session 4: Book 2, Chapter 4, Book 3 (to end)
After the carefully controlled, intimate perfection of Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin undertook his most ambitious and perhaps greatest novel, Another Country (1960). A portrait of a group of bohemian friends, a profound exploration of race and sexuality, a brutal indictment of American reality and a pained, not-quite-despairful prayer to American hope, Baldwin’s third novel is a marvel, one of the great achievements of mid-century American fiction. In this seminar, we’ll read the book as writers, considering Baldwin’s stylistic achievements and his very brilliant sex writing (more than in almost any other book I know, sex in Another Country is a tool for grappling with historical and political questions), but also the book’s dramatic (even theatrical) structure, its use of POV, its organization of time. Above all, I want to think about ambition: what it means for a mature but still young writer to set himself an impossible task, sacrificing perfection to urgency.
Reading schedule:
It will be helpful if you can acquire the current Vintage edition, so that we all have the same page numbers.
Session 1: Book 1, Chapter 1 (to p. 88)
Session 2: Book 1, Chapters 2 and 3 (to p. 179)
Session 3: Book 2, Chapters 1 – 3 (to p. 315)
Session 4: Book 2, Chapter 4, Book 3 (to end)