Zawacki, Andrew
TR 2 :20 PM
MLC 0245
MISS MACINTOSH, MY DARLING
This seminar will be devoted to Marguerite Young’s 1965 novel Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, which she described as “an exploration of the illusions, hallucinations, [and] errors of judgment in individual lives.” Among the longest novels ever written, the book took two decades to write. A critic for the Nashville Banner praised it as “The most important work in American literature since Moby-Dick,” while Nona Balakian heralded it as “the most significant innovative novel since Ulysses and The Waves.” The New Yorker claimed that, “Young’s sentences, which marry the breadth of Whitman to the opulence of Nabokov, are among the most virtuosic ever produced by an American novelist.” And Kurt Vonnegut called its author (who was friends with Anaïs Nin, Richard Wright and Gertrude Stein, Truman Capote and Carson McCullers) “unquestionably a genius.”
Dalkey Archive Press, who have reissued the book, describe it this way:
This novel is one of the most ambitious and remarkable literary achievements of our time. It is a picaresque, psychological novel—a novel of the road, a journey or voyage of the human spirit in its search for reality in a world of illusion and nightmare. It is an epic of what might be called the Arabian Nights of American life. Marguerite Young’s method is poetic, imagistic, incantatory; in prose of extraordinary richness, she tests the nature of her characters—and the nature of reality.
We will read a hundred pages a week, in order to make our way all the way through. Only students ready to sprint a marathon should enroll. The only text we’ll need for the seminar, the novel is available for $30 in paperback, as an e-book for $10.