Sem: The Search for Identity in Modern Fiction

  • UH 300
  • Teacher: Dwight Eddins
  • Term: spring 2020
  • Credits: 3

The notion of “identity” in everyday life is notoriously complex and elusive. The student who graduates from college after four years is, in a sense, the same person who entered, but also differs dramatically from that person. Other complications are offered by the facts that we can behave quite differently in certain situations than we do in others, and that we present psychological profiles to those who know us really well that might be unrecognizable to those with whom we have had only a casual acquaintance. These, and countless other complexities, have made questions of identity one of the richest areas that fiction writers can mine. In James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, for instance, the protagonist moves from his earliest memory of his mother reading him a children’s story in infantile language to a university graduate who has become a sophisticated shaper of language, his chosen medium as an artist. Along the way, he rejects what would have been, for him, an inauthentic identity as a Catholic priest. In most of the short stories and novels we will read, a surprise turn of events that often amounts to a trauma comes to undermine an earlier sense of self. The soldier of Hemingway’s story “Soldier’s Home” returns from the horrendous battlefields of World War I only to find that he can no longer accept the values and expectations of his hometown. John Marcher, in Henry James’s story “The Beast in the Jungle,” lives most of his life awaiting some overwhelming event that will render him unique among humankind, only to discover that he has literally wasted his life waiting and is, indeed, in that terrible sense, unique. We will trace life-altering episodes that are also identity-altering in these works, and also in fictions by Joseph Conrad, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, John Cheever, John Updike, and Ian McEwan.