Non-Western Literature Student Learning Analyses: On Naipaul's A Way in the World

I'm experimenting this year with adding blogging into the mix of things students do in my courses. So this semester I'll be posting post-group research/teaching project learning analyses from students in my Non-Western Literature course. The students' task in this assignment, one dimension of many they're being assessed on in this project, is simply to identify the one or two most interesting things they learned about the text and or writer on which they presented as a result of the planning, research, teaching, and reflection/assessment process they went through in doing the project. These are not meant to be full-blown analytical/interpretive/argumentative critical essays, but instead little personal, subjective pieces on what the text they taught meant to them.

Here's the third batch, from a team who named themselves Wiggityx4 Wack and lead a great discussion on V.S. Naipaul's A Way in the World, despite their struggles with the text (and views on the author!).

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Kate writes:

This project was an interesting one. The book my team presented on was Naipaul’s A Way in the World. This book, when I read it, was very confusing to me and I really had a hard time putting it together, just as the rest of the class did. The reason it was so hard for me to connect to and understand was because of how he set up each story. He introduced us to a character, got us slightly emotionally attached, and created the potential for the reader to become more attached. When this would happen he would change from the story of that author to the next story about another author, starting the pattern all over again. To try and thread these stories together, and figure out their commonalities was the most difficult part of the reading. Because of the lack of understanding it made it hard to see how he even ended the story. I wasn’t sure what his overall message was, or what journey Naipaul was supposed to be taking his reader on.

While working with my group, and discussing how this book could possibly be strung together these life stories of these men made it a little clearer as to where Naipaul may have been trying to head. While our group was discussing it I realized that maybe he was writing this story to not only point fingers at these people for everything they have done wrong, but to himself as well. He could have been trying to find his way in the world.

Another thing, more factual, that I learned while doing this presentation about his literature was that it was marketed as an autobiography in England. This helped me to see the pattern within the book and how he may have been trying to structure an individual’s life and ideals within this alleged book that appears to be built of short stories.

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Danielle White writes:

In all honesty, I really hated Naipaul’s A Way in the World. It was the most difficult book for me to get through in this class, aside from Texaco which was also a tedious read. When I started the book it seemed like it would be fun to read, because I liked the stories Naipaul tells in the text. However, my joy in reading Naipaul was short-lived--it dwindled before I reached chapter 3. When he started talking about LeBrun I got really bored, and the chapter consisting only of dialogue between two people later on was probably the worst part in the book. Naipaul really doesn’t know how to keep his readers engaged in the text.

I expected Naipaul to develop on the individual stories within the text a lot more, especially the story about the man visiting the village and being led by the two boys--that was interesting. I thought Naipaul was going to go somewhere with that, and tell a story about how his homeland used to be through those people. Instead, he attempted to write about how his homeland had changed in an incredibly abstract way. He didn’t explain how any of the people in the stories were really connected--there was no connection between any of them at all, as far as I’m concerned. If I had more background knowledge on the matter, I might have found a connection, but it was Naipaul’s mistake to assume that his readers would have that much information prior to reading his book. I only read this book because I had to for my presentation; If I picked up this book to read for fun over the summer or something, I would have put it down shortly after beginning it.

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Lindsay:

My group for the presentations presented on A Way In The World by V.S Naipaul. This novel was a challenge to read as well as a challenge to present. My group and myself were all in agreement that the novel was hard to follow due to the short stories throughout the novel that did not really connect to one an other. The novel itself started out great in my opinion and my group members thought the same. Then the more I read the more I become confused at parts. Even though I was confused by parts of the novel I did however find certain parts interesting. An example is when Naipaul met Lucas and Mateo as well as when he talked about Lebrun. We had a lot of interesting information about the author and his life that I believe helped explain what type of a person and writer he is.

I am the type of reader that is kept intrigued by what’s going on when there are short story formats in the books I read. I thought that this novel was going to be interesting because the format in which the author decided to write was like short story format. However I was disappointed because all of these ”short stories” he had in this “novel” had no real ending or even ties to one another. The author chooses to write his “novel” with lots of unanswered questions. Teaching this book I believe came as a challenge. I am an education major and I feel like even reading this as an undergraduate college student I was lost and confused about certain parts of the “novel,” so how could other reader’s fully grasp what Naipaul is trying to say in this writing? This book to me seems more of a biography of what he did through out his life not really a novel.

The author uses his own format of writing which I do respect as a future educator with a minor in English. He is using a technique of writing that is maybe a little iffy. This may spark some people’s interest in the novel itself. Naipaul writing of the novel can generate interest in others because it is not written like other typical novels. Teaching this to the class was not all that easy. I knew that we were dealing with a difficult novel. This is one of the reasons we had our peers getting up out of their seats. This gave them the opportunity to see what others had written. In the classroom when this type of round-robin writing and answering questions written goes on, there is a chance for the students to learn from each other. The students can walk around and see what other groups or individuals had written; this may spark a questions or comment of their own. That is why we choose to do the posters with groups getting up and answering the questions.

Teaching to just the students can cause them to lose their interest however if you have the students teaching each other by round-robin answering of questions, new questions can be sparked and new topic on a piece of literature be formed as well as implemented in the classroom discussion.

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Here's anonymous student #3:

Before I read A Way in the World by V.S. Naipaul, I really thought I would like it. I heard many good reviews of the book, so my expectations were very high. I thought it was going to flow like a typical novel would. I did not have a clear idea of what it would be about, but I did start reading the book with an open mind.

Just a couple chapters into the book I knew it was not what I anticipated it would be. I was surprised to find out how disjointed the book was. The chapters did not seem to connect. Though his writing style is very beautiful, it was very hard to follow. Even after class discussions and my group discussions the book still did not seem to come together well for me.

I thought maybe our group research on Naipaul might shed some light upon the book and his writing style. Unfortunately, I discovered many interesting things that may have tainted my outlook of the author and the book more than they already were. My group’s research revealed Naipaul to be a pompous, egotistical, self-indulgent man. We were able to uncover many of his dark secrets. He was unfaithful to his wife and quite a womanizer. He had a woman on the side for many years. He also expressed no care when his wife passed away. Worse yet, he seemed to be happy his wife was out of the picture.

Another unbecoming quality Naipaul possessed was his harsh criticism of other writers. Someone in our class discussion brought up the point that he seemed to be a hypocrite in his critiques. This is a major reason his criticism was not well received. His inflated ego was undeniable. He seemed to think he was not given the credit he deserved.

Though I hate to have Naipaul’s personal life interfere with how I read his story, I have to admit it did not help my already unfavorable view of the novel. If anything the negative “dirt” that we discovered about Naipaul seemed to give me a little more perspective on the novel and his writing.

One question I considered after reading this book was what genre I would classify it with. I believe that it should have been marketed as a collection of short stories. The chapters seemed to be very independent of each other. I think if I had anticipated a collection of short stories I would have a greater appreciation for the book.

I find it very interesting that this book was marketed as an autobiography in England. I think readers would be very disappointed reading this book if they had a preconceived notion that it was an autobiography. It would seem to be a very roundabout way to write an autobiography.

I believe that my high expectations of this book were somewhat shattered when I discovered the disjointed structure it encompassed. Though he had a beautiful way with words, his chapters drove me crazy. Its choppiness made it hard to follow and I was constantly hoping to find the missing link.

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OK, on deck is Team Aoraki on Patricia Grace's Potiki.

To the Barricades!

Just when you thought New York State couldn't treat SUNY worse, the Division of Budget comes up with a new trick. First, do the raise expectations/make cuts two-step. Then, undermine the Legislature's restoration of some of the funds cut by Governor Paterson from SUNY by freezing $110M of SUNY's overall budget: tuition and fees dollars can be collected, but not spent.

NYSUT responded last week to this latest move. Here's what UUP President Phil Smith is distributing to chapter leaders:

What does all of this mean to the University and, more importantly, to its constituencies who have had no warning that their contributions will be withheld?

It means that a portion of the tuition collected from students and their families will not be available to support their education ($34.4 million withheld). The result, when added to the impact of a $38 million State funding cutback in the enacted Budget, means that courses will be cancelled, class sizes will once again be increased and the overall quality of the University’s academic programming will certainly be diminished.

It means that a portion of the dormitory fees paid by students will be held back and not permitted to be expended on dormitory maintenance, security and student safety ($9.7 million).

It means that funds received by the hospitals from patients and third party insurance payments will be locked up ($43.0 million)--and the hospitals will be unable to use these revenues for the care of those who paid for health care. Coupled with the continued absence of State funding for mandatory costs, the quality and content of patient health care will surely suffer.

It means that almost $17 million in revenues from food services, bookstores and other user-based sources will be unavailable to maintain current operations.

Even the Long Island Veterans Home will be required to hold back on over $1.2 million.

The irony is that the year began with the promise of enhanced State support in line with the recommendations of the Commission on Higher Education, but could end with one of the most disastrous fiscal impacts in University history.

The key question for all of us to ask is why do this? There is no logical purpose. There is no apparent benefit to the State. There is no positive result for State taxpayers. There is, however, a very clear impact--on students and their families and on the citizens of this State who rely on the University for quality health care and services.

OK, let's tally this up. The Legislature controls tuition policy, but will never raise tuition or taxes in an election year. The Governor controls the DOB, which is looking to cut government spending in New York. There's plenty of money for construction projects, because the Legislature can issue bonds for them. So of course fees have gone up across the SUNY system. What's to stop the state from raiding them?

SUNY is going from state-supported to state-located to state-dismantled in a generation. Whee!

[Update: Somehow this IHE op ed and this Lumpenprofessoriat post seem apropos today.]

Now That's More Like It!

I'm a little late at spreading the word about this bill to secure collective bargaining rights for graduate student employees, but better late than never, eh? Get on the horn and ask Obama and Clinton (they're co-sponsors) to pledge to put some real weight behind this when he or she is elected President. And get your representatives to sign on. Here's who's in so far:

Senators Kennedy, Brown, Clinton, Feingold, Obama, and Schumer
Representatives Miller, Andrews, Grijalva, and Tierney

The Times on the Costs of Higher Ed: Pollyanna, Meet Chicken Little

Pollyanna, meet Chicken Little!

To the latter, I say ignore prestige entirely and ask yourself which school offers you the best opportunities to learn and grow: which professors did you have better interactions with? which offers the best combination of general education and specialized majors/programs? which offers the best advising/mentoring systems? which offers the most relevant mix of extracurricular activities to your interests and goals?

To the former, I say don't wait for Congress to increase Pell Grants: start spreading your wealth to the "deserving poor"(ly endowed schools that could do an even better job educating larger numbers of the nation's working class undergraduates than you could even if you raised your percentage of students with Pell Grants to 15%). Oh, and let your graduate students and adjuncts unionize while you're at it. They're the ones who will be the strongest advocates for quality in higher education. It's for your own good.

Cell Phone Novels: Medium, Genre, Movement, or Fad?

Enquiring minds want to know! (That's "all the news that's fit to text" for you Grey Lady fans.)

Have mobile phone novels become a phenomenon in the English-speaking world yet, or are they still popular only among innovators in Japan, South Korea, and China? Looks like India may be the leading edge for the Anglophones of the world.

I think Hawthorne would approve. Even his sketches tended to be long, though, with complex sentences. Maybe not.

Sisyphus for President Education Czar!

Did I once call for Sisyphus of Academic Cog to be named President of the University of California system? I was thinking way too small. She needs a Cabinet-level post in the next Presidential administration. This is some serious read-it-and-weep shit. Pass it on.

[Update 4/19/08: LumpenProf seconds my motion, eloquently.]

Non-Western Literature Student Learning Analyses: Team Ghosh! on In an Antique Land

I'm experimenting this year with adding blogging into the mix of things students do in my courses. So this semester I'll be posting post-group research/teaching project learning analyses from students in my Non-Western Literature course. The students' task in this assignment, one dimension of many they're being assessed on in this project, is simply to identify the one or two most interesting things they learned about the text and or writer on which they presented as a result of the planning, research, teaching, and reflection/assessment process they went through in doing the project. These are not meant to be full-blown analytical/interpretive/argumentative critical essays, but instead little personal, subjective pieces on what the text they taught meant to them.

Here's the second batch, from a team who named themselves Team Ghosh! and lead a great discussion on In an Antique Land.

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Allison leads off:

In An Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh is not a book that you browse a bookstore, pick up, and say to yourself, “yes I’m going to enjoy this book.” This is not to say that it is not interesting or that I did not enjoy it; however, I do feel that it is the type of book that if you don’t read it in an academic setting you probably won’t read it. While I can see why many people in the class may have disliked the book, I enjoyed it. Reading this book was a different experience: it presents itself as a traveler’s guide, I read it as if it was a novel, and it was actually an autobiography. I was constantly looking for symbolism and meaning in everything that was written but it wasn’t there and I just had to come to terms with the fact that this was a real life experience and not everything had a calculated purpose, it just was.

Ghosh’s writing and travels show the merging of a lot of major themes; while he is looking for this slave he encounters conversation and challenging of religion, westernization, and orientalization. The town he stays in is this strange mix of old world traditions and longing for modernization. My favorite part of this book is when he is having a conversation and another person makes a comment about how he probably worships cows all day back home. This moment shows the assumptions that people make about entire cultures based on the little information they have. It me think about today and the war our country is fighting; we attack people based on assumptions, the US views itself as the world police, but who are we to say how things should be, as we are looking at things through our own cultural (or lack thereof) perspective and many times we don’t take into account an other’s cultural perspective. It is the things that Ghosh did not go looking for that made this book interesting; we never get a resolution when it comes to the slave, but you lose sight of that during the reading because his interactions bring about these other topics.

I believe that the reason that Ghosh is so fascinated by this slave is because he only discovered him by chance. If the slave had never been mentioned in the things that Ghosh was reading the slave would have been long forgotten about. It shows the power that language and literacy hold. The passing on of stories is what immortalizes events, places and people. It is the entire basis for the study of history. How often do we hear that unless we study history it will inevitably repeat itself? Whether Ghosh knew it at the time or not that is really the point that he was proving.

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Anonymous Student #2 follows up:

After reading In An Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh there are many interesting things that I have learned about this book. First, I found it very interesting that this is a true story. When I first began reading this book I could not seem to put my hand around the idea that in the 1980s life was still very difficult for many Egyptians. Reading this piece of literature opened my eyes to the fact that not everyone lives comfortably and is able to get around in a car. I believe that I knew these things, but in his book Ghosh made me aware of the differences among people; at the same time I was able to see that while there are differences among cultures and religion, people are still the same. I believe that Ghosh uses this book to create a window into a less privileged world, to pull his readers in and make them care about the conditions and lifestyles of third world countries and the history among us.

Another interesting aspect of Ghosh’s book that I was able to pull out of the reading was that religion and trade are what bring people together; they are what lead to globalization. It is interesting to think that although there was such a strained relationship between India and Egypt they both desire the same thing, modernization; both want to increase the technology and want to better their lives. The racial tension and cultural differences throughout the book are some of the themes that I focused on heavily during my reading. I did outside research on the time period and was able to discover that the main reason for the tension between Iraq and Egypt in the 1980s was because the Egyptians were going to Iraq during the Iraq/Iran working and taking all of their jobs. So while, Iraq was at war, Egypt was benefiting from the jobs available.

The most interesting piece of information that I took from the novel is from the slave of MS H.6. I believe that what Ghosh was trying to do by including this character in his novel is show that history lives on through those where able to read and write, through their journals, letters, and records, and if he wouldn’t have found the letter that contained information about him we would never know about him. This sends a message to me that it is important to understand that there are misunderstandings in culture and history. Through Ghosh I have found myself able to look at both sides a situations and realize that we are all the same, fighting for the same things, with essentially the same goal, modernization, for better or for worse.

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Steph bats third:

What I was most surprised to learn from simply reading In An Antique Land by Amitav Ghosh was his desire to get other people's stories on the page. He observes the culture of Egypt with tolerance and openness; he also has an ear open to the ancient Ben Yiju and his slave, and to what their significance may have been. He transcribes his day to day interactions with the Egyptian “fellahs” and in this book gives them a place to be observed by thousands and thousands of readers, making them more real and less of an “other.” This book must be a way of showing the reality of people other than ourselves and attempting peaceful interactions with them.

In the book, Amitav Ghosh reacted peacefully to cultural barriers between himself and the Egyptians. He does not get fired up over symbolic differences, as he knows from his own experiences that these symbols are what start wars. The Egyptians criticize his religion, the fact that Hindus cremate their dead, and the long-standing myth that Hindus worship cows. He takes these differences, and the way the Egyptians distort the information so that the Indians sound like the more barbaric culture, with an attitude of humility and tolerance.

I believe Ghosh's travelogue showed his personal desire to create bonds that are stronger than and reach past perceived cultural barriers (as well as the barrier of history in the case of Ben Yiju). I feel this even more strongly after researching some of Ghosh's other writings, especially from reading an essay entitled “The Anglophone Empire” posted on his website.

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Owen Mayer hits clean-up:

Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land was, I believe, the first text I had read in an English class which was not a novel, poem, or an essay. If forced to describe the genre I may venture something like, “narrative history.” It did not come as a surprise to learn that Ghosh has taught at many universities not as an English professor but as a Sociology professor. When reflecting on this text it seems as though it was written with much more of a sociological leaning than a literary leaning. By comparing an ancient society with a modern society Ghosh questions social and technological progress.

In conducting further research on the book I was shocked when I actually took out a map and traced the paths of the characters in the book. Ben Yiju, the trader of the middle ages, began his life in Tunisia and traveled to the south western Indian coast. His “slave” was trusted with his business affairs and traveled between India and Aden, which is in modern day Yemen. I believe Ghosh purposely chose these two well traveled subjects to serve as a comparison with the modern characters, the Egyptian fellaheen (small-town farmers), most of which never leave Egypt. It is interesting to note the differences in travel, especially in what we often think of as a world which has been recently shrunk by modern transportation.

Much of the criticism on In an Antique Land, such as Anshuman A. Mondal’s “Allegories of Identity: ‘Postmodern’ Anxiety and ‘Postcolonial’ Ambivalence in Amitav Ghosh’s In An Antique Land and The Shadow Lines,” discusses Ghosh’s (who is a Hindu from India) relations with the fellaheen (who are Muslim). Mondal describes how they perceive him as an “other,” a person outside their community, and can find no positive in his differences from them. The reader can compare this experience of Ghosh to the experience of Ben Yiju, a Jewish “other” living in a largely Hindu community in India. Compared to himself, Ghosh describes relatively few cultural barriers that Ben Yiju encountered in India. In an Antique Land frequently provides readers with opportunities to compare life in the Middle East and India across the borders of time; readers can make political, social, religious, and gender based connections.

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Next up: Team Wiggityx4 Wack on V.S. Naipaul's A Way in the World!