5th year A and B - New Assignment on City of Glass. July 14th

Dear all

I am contacting you to give you all your second Literature assignment. Below you will find a number of quotations on City of Glass. I would like you to choose TWO of them and try to establish connections between the material you have read so far and the quotes. To what extent the quotes you choose are relevant for a discussion of City of Glass? You should write around 200 words on EACH quote you choose. This assignment is to be submitted by Friday, July 17th.
Here are the quotes:


a) “Chance is a part of reality: we are continually shaped by the forces of coincidence . . . Truth is stranger than fiction. What I am after is to write fiction as strange as the world we live in . . . From one moment to the next anything can happen. Our life-long certainties about the world can be demolished in a single second. In philosophical terms I am talking about the powers of contingency. Our lives don’t really belong to us . . . they belong to the world, and in spite of our efforts to make sense of it, the world is a place beyond our understanding.” Paul Auster, The Red Notebook.

b)“All writers draw on their own lives to write their books; to a greater or lesser degree, every novel is autobiographical. What is interesting . . . is how the work of the imagination intersects with reality . . . Hidden memories, traumas, childhood scars – there is no question that novels emerge from those inaccessible parts of ourselves. (However) I do not feel that I (am) telling the story of my life so much as using myself to explore certain questions that are common to us all.”

Paul Auster, The Art of Hunger.

c) “I think (the idea of placing a detective called Paul Auster in City of Glass) stemmed from a desire to implicate myself in the machinery of the book. I don’t mean my autobiographical self, I mean my author self, that mysterious other who lives inside me and puts my name on the covers of books. What I was hoping to do, in effect, was to take my name off the cover and put it inside the story. I wanted to open up the process, to break down walls, to expose the plumbing . . . The author of a novel can never be sure where any of it comes from. The self that exists in the world – the self whose name appears on the cover of books – is finally not the same self who writes the book.”

Paul Auster, The Art of Hunger.

d) “If a true follower of detective fiction ever tried to read one of these books (in The New York Trilogy), I’m sure he would be bitterly disappointed. Mystery novels always give answers; my work is about asking questions.”

Paul Auster, The Red Notebook.

e) “Postmodernist fiction seems to reflect that the writer has become tired of trying to explain a disjointed and Godless universe. The classic narrative . . . becomes a necessary means of organizing and interpreting the world . . . The task that Paul Auster tries to face is neither concerned with ordering nor explanation; it is rather a question of incorporating the chaos of the world “beyond understanding” into his fiction.”

Dragana Nikolic, “Paul Auster’s Postmodernist fiction: Deconstructing Aristotle’s Poetics”

All the best.

Daniel Ferreyra