Zeitoun
Dave Eggers (2009)
I read Zeitoun cover-to-cover last night.
It was obviously enjoyable, particularly strong and suspenseful leading up to Katrina. I think it would be interesting to teach next semester. If I think about the theme that’s emerged from what I’d taught so far, it’s that texts that look like they’re about “nature” are often about other things - race, religion, politics… (Think of Thoreau’s “Wild Apples”) Well, this looks like a book about a natural disaster (especially if you don’t read the reviews before reading it)… and turns out to be also very much about who gets to be American. The early parts of the book are what I might most enjoy teaching, where Eggers makes a number of fairly obvious moves to connect the Zeitoun family to ‘traditional American values.’ The combination of salience and skill strikes me as a nice one for a freshman comp class, where students are sometimes still half-skeptical that subtexts and connotative meaning exist in literary texts.
I’m also aware (and would bring to the classroom) the issue of such a text about personal and national tragedy being ‘pleasurable.’ I’d probably spend a day with images of Detroit and the issue of ‘ruin porn’ before teaching Zeitoun, just to help make the reading experience that much more self-conscious.
I’m a little fretful of course book costs, but I have a few more days to mull it over before I have to tell the bookstores in town what I’m using. $17 for Zeitoun, $10 for Ceremony, $15 for They Say/I Say (our writing text)… plus a huge markup if bought on campus, plus I’m contemplating a coursepak, which involves purchasing readings upfront instead of hiding the costs at the end of the semester when students often run out of their printing alotment and wind up paying painfully for every page. (I really wish that the students were charged per page instead of per side. They could all use the duplex printers and be okay!)
