Mining Literature for Deeper Meaning

Before you start discussing your summer reading selections, please view this video, and reflect on what you have learned about deeper meaning in literature. Discuss your experiences with thinking and talking about literature - in school, and out of school. I will start the conversation:


Ok. so, I don't remember when it started, this thinking deeper, probably not until college. I took a short story course, a 400 level - grad school level, when I was a sophomore at URI, and it was HARD! But, I loved it! And I remember being asked to analyze the text for deeper meaning. I was clueless. My English teachers in high school were out to lunch - taught like Edgar Allen Poe for four years - and what deeper meaning is there besides his twisted mind?  Well, maybe there is, but, anyway - there I was, a reader and I had no clue as to how to delve deeper into a text and then write about it. So what did I do? I looked at how other people did it. I went into the stacks of literary criticism (yes people, stacks of books in the library), and one by one, I took down books that analyzed all different texts, sat on the floor and read. It didn't even matter if I had read the primary texts, I was looking for HOW it was done. I discovered that there were things like patterns, and intertextuality, symbols and motifs, allusions to other texts, and with these things, if I could notice them in a text, I could interpret them myself. I fell in love with the puzzles of a story. It was like problem solving in math, but I got to do it with words, my own preferred genre. I was in love.

Poetry was harder. I didn't get there until I was a grad student, but more about that in September. 

• Jhumpa Lahiri has said of The Namesake, "America is a real presence in the book; the characters must struggle and come to terms with what it means to live here, to be brought up here, to belong and not belong here."

1. How are America and India a real presence in the book?

2.  How The Namesake allows the reader to think of America in a new way.

3. What are the specific struggles of the characters?

4. How does Lahiri use the portrayal of America and the struggles to lend greater meaning of the novel as a whole?

• The marriage of Ashima and Ashoke is arranged by their families. The closest intimacy they share before their wedding is when Ashima steps briefly, secretly, into Ashoke's shoes.

1. What is the symbolism of this gesture?
2. How does it play out in the novel?
3. Gogol's romantic encounters are very different from what his parents experienced or expected for their son. What draws Gogol to his many lovers, especially to Ruth, Maxine, and eventually Moushumi? What draws them to him?
4. What does this contrast mean to the meaning of the novel as a whole?

• References are made to all of the following at the beginning of the book: student life in the United States in 1968; the 1968 Democratic National Convention; Dr. Benjamin Spock; the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.; Do internet research on these historical topics and explain what effect they have on the meaning of the novel.

• Jhumpa Lahiri has said, "The question of identity is always a difficult one, but especially for those who are culturally displaced, as immigrants are . . . who grow up in two worlds simultaneously."

1.What does Gogol want most from his life?

2. How is it different from what his family wants for him, and what they wanted when they first came to America to start a family?

3. How does Gogol’s internal battle help present the meaning of the novel as a whole?