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Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping

By Amy Hungerford - Yale
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Lecture Description

Professor Hungerford situates Marilynne Robinson's novel Housekeeping (1980) in a tradition of American writing about the individual's relationship to nature that includes the powerful influences of the Bible, Herman Melville, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. The loss of identity that Emerson describes as becoming a "transparent eyeball" in the woods, Robinson brings into the realm of the home, the built environment. The individual voice and its guiding consciousness are all mixed up in the material substance of the world, giving them a concurrent fixity and fragility that it is Robinson's talent, and our challenge, to explore.

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Lecture Transcript and Reading Assignment

Course Index

  1. The American Novel Since 1945
  2. Richard Wright, Black Boy
  3. Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood
  4. Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood (cont)
  5. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
  6. Nabokov and Modernism
  7. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita (cont)
  8. Jack Kerouac, On the Road
  9. Jack Kerouac, On the Road (cont)
  10. J D Salinger, Franny and Zooey
  11. John Barth, Lost in the Funhouse
  12. Thomas Pynchon, The Crying of Lot 49
  13. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye
  14. Maxine Hong Kingston, The Woman Warrior
  15. Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping
  16. Marilynne Robinson, Housekeeping (cont)
  17. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian
  18. Cormac McCarthy, Blood Meridian (cont)
  19. Philip Roth, The Human Stain
  20. Philip Roth, The Human Stain (cont)
  21. Philip Roth, The Human Stain (cont)
  22. Edward P Jones, The Known World
  23. Edward P Jones, The Known World (cont)
  24. Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated
  25. Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated (cont)
  26. Review for Final Exam