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“Look at him,” said one of the grandmothers, the more glamorous one with the big scarves and fewer moles, “he take everything, capisce? He take-a her mind, he take-a the blender, he take-a the old stereo — he take-a everything except the floorboards. It make-a you sick…” (9)

Zadie Smith’s White Teeth

Class Plan:

1)      Initial Reaction to the reading: (Suggested 5-10 Minutes)

2)      Journal Exercise: (Suggested: 10 Minutes)

“The way Archie saw it, country people should die in the country and city people should die in the city. Only proper.” (4)

1. When you think of urban spaces, cities, what do you think of? What are the characteristics of cities? Do they occupy a specific or general space in your imagination/experience? Begin with a definition for a city, and work out from there.

(You may be interested in knowing that Pigeons are a breed of finch — the kind of bird that lead Darwin to his insights in Origin of Species)

3)      Group Work: (Suggested: 5-7 minutes)

Share findings. Next, come up with a collective listing of your experiences with cities. Why have you gone to them? What did you find or do there? What was the point of your visit?

Mini-Lecture: (Suggested: 10 Minutes)

1)      A lot of the work we have considered this semester has been about the country: for, by, or about experiencing a rural landscape in some way or another.

2)      This work has been important, but we need to think about urban spaces as well, because they are A) related and B) central to  contemporary life – even in rural Maine.

3)      One of the things we may notice in our early reading of White Teeth, is that the Urban space, in this case London, has characters from all over the world:

Here are just a few notes towards that:

• Alfred Archibald Jones, married to an Italian woman, Ophelia

• Mo Hussein-Ishmael (runs a kosher deli)

• Varin (Indian)

• Samad (Indian)

• Alsana Begum (Indian)

• O’Connell’s Poolroom (Irish name, but owned by an Iraqi family)

• Horst Idelgaufts (Sweedish)

• Daria the Whore (Londoner)

• Clara Bowden, Jamaican

• Irish and Roman Catholics at St. Jude’s school.

• Jehovah’s Witnesses.

4)      We might notice how different this is from anything else we’ve read, which has been specific to particular places and people.

There’s no diversity on the Mariner’s crew, for example.

There’s nothing particularly diverse about Wordsworth’s country people.

Freud’s dreams are all very local.

In fact, the only real example we have had so far of interracial interaction has been Darwin’s intense racism in The Descent of man.

5)      So, what has changed?

Well, this book is commonly read as an example of “post-colonial” literature. We might begin thinking about post-colonial literature as literature about what happens to empires after they are empires. (You may be noticed the reference to England as a “small island” in today’s reading – an unthinkable though during the Romantic and Victorian periods).

We’ll get into more developed discussions of post-colonial literature in a few weeks. But, for now, I think it makes more sense to think about the shift between the Modern Period, as we see it in To The Lighthouse, and the Postmodern Period, as we see it in White Teeth.

What is the postmodern period?

We can begin thinking about postmodernism as a state of mind, which has three basic characteristics to it:

1) A willingness to entertain contradictions as being equally true.

2) The ability to be serious and funny at the same time.

3) An attraction to the false, or fake.

(Black Friday Stampede at Walmart)

There are many, many social changes during the 20th century that lead to Postmodernism. For our purposes, today, however, I just want to think about whether or not you associate any of these qualities to your own culture. Where do we see this? Do we?

Mini-Lecture in Action

Class Discussion

What Archie liked about track cycling as the way you went round and round. Round and round. Giving you a chance after chance to get a bit better at it, to do it right. Except the thing about Archie was he never did get any better. 62.8 seconds. (13)

“Go home, get some rest. Marnin’ de the world new, every time. Man…dis life no easy!” (21)

Those who were alive in 1914 would live to see Armageddon. It had been promised. Born in 1907, Hortense was getting old now, she was getting tired and her peers were dying off like flies. 1975 looked like the last chance. (28)

HOMEWORK:

Read THROUGH Page 120, annotate