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Waterland novel6/22/2023 ![]() ![]() "You ask," the narrator tells his students, "as all history classes ask, as all history classes should ask, What is the point of history" (92). ![]() This novel, which begins with a history teacher who is about to be fired, ruminating upon history and his story in terms of the events of his own life, and he quickly runs up against the young, those without interest in the past, those who quite properly want to know why, why pay attention to what's over and done with. Waterland leads off our survey of English literature, and it teaches us to ask questions. ![]() It is also the story of two families, of an entire region in England, of England from the industrial revolution to the present, and it is, finally, a meditation on stories and story-telling - a fictional inquiry into fiction, a book that winds back upon itself and asks why we tell stories. As the bookjacket asserts, " Waterland is a moving meditation on history, on procreation, on destruction, and on our struggles to shore up our small worlds against the onrushing forces of time and nature." Like Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, a book that obviously had major influence upon it, and like Dickens's Great Expectations, Waterland meditates on these matters by pursuing a mystery so the book, like these others, is in part a detective story. ![]() Waterland: An Introduction Waterland well begins our course because it concerns itself with so many literary and non-literary issues that appear throughout our reading list. ![]()
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