Adventures in Teaching: Trauma and Realism in (Some) Weird Novels
Today was the last day of teaching for my survey course in American Literature. As with all my literature courses, I included quite a few works of SF/F on the reading list, from “classic” SF like Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War to contemporary weirdness like Flight by Sherman Alexie. This year, I realized there were a few unintentional trends in the works I’d selected. First, almost every text I had my students read directly or indirectly addressed sex. I’m not going to talk about that today, except to say that my students and I were quite amused that our small representation of American Literature seemed to suggest that all American Literature will talk about sex at some point. That’s probably not true, but it’s amusing nonetheless. The more interesting unintentional theme is that of trauma and its representation through weirdness / magical realism / anti-realism. This became apparent only recently, when we finished reading Flight by Sherman Alexie, a definitively non-realist novel about a time traveling / body-switching Native American foster kid who must discover himself through a myriad of other people’s experiences. As the last novel for the course, it resonated quite well with several of the other recent texts, something I hadn’t expected at the time. The angst and blunt honesty of the main character, Zits, on
