City of God 外国文学导读指南系列丛书.pdfVIP

A T E A C H E R ’ S G U I D E T O T H E P L U M E E D I T I O N O F E.L. DOCTOROW’S CITY OF GOD By DANIEL ESHOM, M.A. A Teacher’s Guide to E.L. Doctorow’s City of God 2 N O T E T O T H E T E A C H E R “ACADEMIC ICEBREAKERS”: ASSORTED COMMENTARIES The following are not A-to-Z overviews or straightforward synopses of Doctorow’s work. Some fascinating threads in the novel go unremarked, and many interpretations are open to expansion and amplification. Each commentary provides teachers with possible perspectives for approaching the novel with students, each invites further thematic unpacking as well as dissension in the classroom, and each aims chiefly to create a springboard for generating engaging ideas, discussions, and activities. I. ONE CREATOR, MULTIPLE VOICES: “THIS IS MY LABORATORY, HERE, IN MY SKULL.” As diversely populated and wide-ranging as it seems, E. L. Doctorow’s novel can nonetheless be viewed as a singular, intricately rendered portrait of one man’s peripatetic imagination and streaming consciousness. Everything we read about in City of God—from the Episcopal priest in the throes of a crisis of faith and the bereaved rabbi endeavoring to redirect the destiny of the entire Jewish tradition, to a Holocaust survivor’s harrowing ghetto narrative and the pair of lushly imagistic verse poems about the World Wars—presumably flows from a single, blinking computer cursor that is manipulated by a middle-aged New York novelist named Everett. With Everett as his protagonist and millennially harried Everyman, Doctorow takes readers o