Week 15.2: Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

Reading:
Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

Study Question:
1. Eunice makes a moral calculation at the end of the novel. Does she make the right decision? Make her case as well as the counterargument.   

Week 15.1: Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

Reading:
Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story, 249-303

Study Question:
1. Write a paragraph that responds to today's section and the themes that we have already discussed. It should have a topic sentence that makes a claim, evidence from the text, and analysis that supports your claim. 

Week 14.1: Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

Reading:
Gary Shtengart, Super Sad True Love Story, 151-200

Study Question:
1. One of the central conflicts within Super Sad True Love Story has to do with fathers, both real (Lenny's father and Eunice's father and even David's father) and ersatz (Joshie). Chart the nature of these relationships? What deeper thematic resonances might these contentious relationships serve? 

Week 14.2: Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

Reading:
Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story, 200-48

Preparatory Activity:

1. Make a photocopy of three passages from today's reading that you think are significant. You should have a passage from roughly the beginning, middle, and end of today's reading. Staple these passages together and write your name on it. Although I am not asking you to write anything for today, you should be prepared to discuss your passages for today. You can make copies for free at the ASG computer lab.  

Week 13.2: Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

Reading:
Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story, 99-150

Study Questions:
1. One of the ways that literary critics interpret literature is to read it in the context in which it was written. The novel was first published in 2010, but was written over a period years before that. What contexts seem to be important in shaping the novel? Since dystopia is a genre that at its best extends the failures of the present into the future as a form of critique, what is Shytengart critiquing?

2. Another way literary critics interpret literature is to see its contemporary relevance. In a recent essay in The New Yorker, Shtenygart writes, "I grew up in a dystopia—will I have to die in one, too?" How might Super Sad True Love Story be useful to understand the present moment.

Week 13.1: Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

Reading:
Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story, 50-98


Study Questions:
1. What do you think the significance is that Lenny's employer, Post-Human Services is headquartered is an old and abandoned (at least by a congregation) synagogue (if you don't know this word, look it up.)? What does that suggest about the character's religious values or about what he and his employer Josh value?

2. This is a novel that employs dialect, the futuristic text speak of Eunice and her friends, Eunice's mothers broken English, as well as the broken English of Lenny's parents (we'll meet them later). Why does Shytengart use dialect in this book? What are the consequences of this choice? 

Week 12.2: Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story

 

Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972 and came to the United States seven years later. He is the author of the novels Super Sad True Love Story, which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize and was selected as one of the best books of the year by more than forty news journals and magazines around the world; Absurdistan, which was chosen as one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times Book Review and Time magazine; and The Russian Debutante’s Handbook, winner of the Stephen Crane Award for First Fiction and the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, Travel + Leisure, Esquire, GQ, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications and has been translated into twenty-six languages. Shteyngart lives in New York City and upstate New York. (From the author's website).

Reading: Gary Shteyngart, Super Sad True Love Story, 3-49

Study Questions:
1. How would you describe the world of Super Sad True Love Story? What conflicts seem to be embedded in this world?

2. What is the äppärät? What does it remind you of? What does this word--minus umlauts--mean? Do a Google search by typing "apparat definition." Why might Shteyngart use this word do describe this device?