Fiction’s Worlds of Disconnection, Connection and Community

Both Barbara Kingsolver in Animal Dreams and James Baldwin in the story Sonny’s Blues piercingly articulate the American chasm between choosing our own way in eschewing the past – amputating the past as Baldwin’s narrator puts it – and the essential longing for community. As Doc Homer puts it in the novel, “I became a man with no history.” These works illuminate our struggle and our triumph. We will spend the first three classes on the novel Animal Dreams.