6. The American Novel Since 1945 ♫

Amy Hungerford: Last time I finished up my lectures on Wise Blood by trying to draw together three different ways of reading the novel into one interpretative framework, and what I ultimately argued was that the New Critical formal unity of the novel that is epitomized, I think (in a somewhat, perhaps, heavy-handed way), in Chapter 7 of the novel – that’s book-ended by the symbol of the blinding white cloud – that it’s that unity, in a sense, that replaces the bodily unities that are always blown apart in O’Connor’s fiction. And, in a certain way, what you see is a fiction that is personified in that way, that it takes on the qualities and the values of the person, and for O'Connor that means the person understood in a religious framework as something with transcendent meaning and transcendent value and, indeed, a transcendent life.

There is a very different image of the personified word in Lolita, and I’m going to refer now to an essay, a 1992 essay, by the British novelist Martin Amis. He compares the prose style in Lolita with a muscle-bound man, a man whose body is bulked up purely for aesthetic reasons, for only the purpose of looking a certain way, that the bodybuilder is not that person who's going to go out and use their muscles to do some job. It is simply there to be looked at, to be oiled up and presented and displayed. That’s how Amos describes the prose style of Lolita.

So, I want you to keep that image in your mind. The question of the relationship between the person and the aesthetic in Lolita is going to be at the heart of my overarching argument about the novel.

Today, you’re not going to see much of that. What I want to do today – since we have three lectures on Lolita – what I want to do today is simply to begin to open the text for you: to give you some ways of reading it; to alert you to certain kinds of questions; to ask you some overarching questions; and also to just get you thinking and into the texture of the novel. First, I want to ask you though, what do you think of this so far? I just want to hear from you. What are you responses? Who really hates this novel so far? Anybody? Yes. Okay. Why do you hate this novel?

Student: I guess it’s because of the fact that he’s doing something that’s really not good, and it almost seems like he’s trivializing it.

Amy Hungerford: Uh huh. What about it trivializes that crime?

Student: I guess it’s just that there’s no moral lens that we’re looking at it through. It’s just his view of the world.

Amy Hungerford: Uh huh. Okay. So, Humbert’s lack of a moral vocabulary to understand what he’s doing makes it seems like it’s trivialized. Okay. Other thoughts on this? Who else is really put off by this subject matter? Even if you like the novel, who else is really put off by this? Yes…

7. American Educators Consider Later High School Start Times ♫

This is Shep O’Neal with the VOA Special English Education Report. Medical research is leading American education officials to consider having high school classes start later in the morning.  The research says teenagers are more awake later at night than adults are.  When teenagers stay up late at night they have problems learning early in the morning.

Researchers in the state of Rhode Island measured the presence of the hormone melatonin in peoples’ mouths at different times of the day.  Melatonin causes people to feel sleepy. They found that melatonin levels rise later at night in teenagers than they do in children and adults. And they remain at a higher level in teenagers later in the morning.  They say this shows that teenagers have difficulty learning early in the morning.  Yet most school systems in the United States begin high school classes at about seven o’clock.

A few school districts have made some changes.  In nineteen ninety-six, school officials in Edina, Minnesota changed high school opening from about seven thirty until eight thirty.  Two years later, the nearby city of Minneapolis did the same.  Teachers there reported that students were no longer sleepy in class and were happier.  And staying in school later in the day did not seem to be a problem for students who had jobs after school.

Health experts say teenagers need between eight and nine hours of sleep a night.  Students who do not get enough sleep are likely to be late for school, fail to do their homework, fall asleep in class and have trouble taking part in class discussions. Yet some adults oppose changing school start times.  School district officials say it is not possible to carry high school and elementary students on buses at the same time.  And parents of young children do not support having elementary schools start earlier in the morning.  They say it would require young children to wait for school buses in the dark.

Others do not support a later start time because they say it would limit the time for practicing sports after school. However, the Minnesota schools found that this did not hurt school sports competitions. More American school districts are discussing the possibility of changing high school start times. Researchers and teenagers say they cannot make the change quickly enough. This VOA Special English Education Report was written by Nancy Steinbach. Internet users can read and listen to our reports at voaspecialenglish.com.  This is Shep O’Neal.