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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 purchasing, you will have 60 days to access the course videos.
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 purchasing, you will have 60 days to access the course videos.