📚 ALA 2023 Presentation: Thoughts

In May, my paper called ““Anything more I’d have to make up”: Assumption versus Detection in American Pastoral" was presented on the Roth Studies panel. Below is the abstract for that paper:

     Zuckerman writes that we all have a desire “to forestall death, to resist it, to resort to whatever means are necessary to see death with … anything but clarity” (47). Zuckerman struggles with this; he lies about his own cancer diagnosis and surgery, for example. But this mantra to see “with anything but clarity” is the opposite of what Zuckerman aims to do with the Swede: rather than forestall, he wishes to probe, rather than resist the urge to help when he asks, he goes without question, and the one thing Zuckerman undoubtedly searches for is clarity; and, in a cruel twist of fate, his greatest obstacle to clarity is the Swede’s death. Now that this source is gone, Zuckerman struggles to detect the truth rather than assume it—something he failed to do when the Swede was alive. In this presentation I will explore the way Zuckerman presents his urge to assume and his desire to detect and argue for the push and pull between them as central to Zuckerman’s own journey through aging, and ultimately, towards dying.