Landfill by Joyce Carol Oates

Landfill by Joyce Carol Oates comes from the Ecco Anthology of Contemporary American Short Fiction, which she also edited. Being in graduate school for Higher Education and Student Affairs and reading case studies, along with using a identifying your values training exercise (about a bridge and a mistress and death and whose fault it was) that we gave our Resident Assistants during training, prepared me for when I read this story, I thought this story would work perfectly for these exercises and that I should start a book club on short stories about college students for professional development and fun! So this story indirectly inspired this whole summer.

Discussion Questions for Landfill by Joyce Carol Oates

1. How did the style affect your reading of the story? (shifting POV, syntax, achronological revelations, etc.)

2. Mrs. Campos blames Mr. Campos for coercing Hector into engineering, such difficult courses, who could excel at such difficult courses, it’s no wonder that Hector has been so lonely, away from home for the first time in his life. None of his Southfield High friends were at Grand Rapids. His classes were too large, his professors scarcely knew him. Twelve thousand undergraduates at Grand Rapids. Three hundred residents in ugly high-rise Brest Hall where poor Hector shared a room with two other guys – “Reb” and “Steve” – who in Hector’s words “didn’t go out of their way” to be friendly to him.

In this story, Hector, Jr. dies, but there are several moments where the author allows the reader to see that outcome was not necessarily necessary. Take a moment to rank the following characters in order of who was most responsible for Hector’s death, with 1 being most responsible. You can add more names.

Your Rankings                                                                                   

Hector, Jr. Campos
Mom Campos
Dad Campos
Roommates
Fraternity Brothers
Fraternity Brother who pushed him / let go of him down chute
College Recruitment Officers
Admissions Officers
ResLife Placement Office
Campus Police
Local liquor stores
Girls who spurned Hector

 

Then, can we come to a consensus on the order of who was most responsible?

3. Away at college Hector, Jr. was called “Hector” by his teachers, “Scoot” by his friends, “Campos” by the older Phi Epsilons he so admired and wished to emulate.

How do names identify us? How do our students use their different names to relate to different groups? Hector had several intersecting identities – how did they affect his tragic end?

4. More money, always more money, more than you’ve computed, Mr. Campos! – more than the sum quoted by the university admissions office for tuition/room-and-board/textbooks, “fees” for fraternity rush, for fraternity pledging, a starling high fee (payable in advance, Hector. Jr. has said) for fraternity initiation upcoming in May. How does the cost of college affect our students? What other unexpected costs do our students face that may not have been computed before arrival on campus?

5. Yet the police investigation will continue. And the university administration will convene an investigating committee.

There’s research that suggest a university’s public statements concerning a student death vary – possibly depending on the cause of death, the liability of the university, etc. How does our school respond to student death? Have you seen different responses? What’s the variable?

6. In Hector’s class, the professor says, “No purpose only just chance, the pattern of scout-ants seeking food would look to a viewer like “intelligent design” but is really the result of the random haphazard trails of ants blindly seeking food.”

Does this story support or undermine the lecturer’s point?

7. A few beers, tequila, Scoot isn’t tongue-tied and sweating but witty, and wired.

Scoot’s idea of himself when drunk is very different from the reality. As it is for most of our students. What’s keeping this recognition of dissonance of the idea of self when drinking and the reality of self when drinking from being recognized? Is it only connected to alcohol? Or just aggravated by alcohol?

“Je est un autre” - [the] I is another.

8. They left me here, to puke on my back and choke and die, the fuckers. His friends! His fraternity brothers-to-be! Had to think Never again! Not ever! Meaning he’d depledge Phi-Ep, and he’d stop drinking. But somehow, next weekend he’d come trailing back, couldn’t stay away.  

WHY???? 

The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (excerpt) by Junot Diaz

Our selection for Sips and Stories this Thursday will be the fourth chapter of the first section of the acclaimed Junot Diaz novel, The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Sentimental Education. The novel has gotten numerous accolades* and great reviews; there's a good chance you already have it on your bookshelf! The selection we'll be reading is set on Rutger's University and deals with a variety of issues including: Assignments, Roommate Conflict, Masculinity, Suicidal Ideation, Family, Immigrant Experience, Alcohol use, etc.

The wine will be any Sauvignon Blanc, which is typically dry, (so I'll also have a bottle of sweeter stuff if you don't like it!)

*Awards: Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Anisfield-Wolf Book Awards, National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction, John Sargent Sr. First Novel Prize

Possible Discussion Questions

1. How does the style of writing affect the telling of the story? (conversational tone, untranslated Spanish, allusions, etc.)

2. How does reading what happened through Junior’s point of view affect the telling/receiving of the story?

3. Junior has a strong sense of who he is. He frequently identifies being a Dominican male with having a lot of sex with different women. When discussing why he chose to “fix” Oscar he says, “What I should have done was check myself into Bootie Rehab. But if you thought I was going to do that, then you don’t know Dominican men. Instead of focusing on something hard and useful like, say, my own shit, I focused on something easy and redemptive.” Junior calls himself a “playboy,” and “the biggest player of them all.” In the excerpt, in what ways does Junior identify himself with his idea of masculinity? How does he exclude others that don’t fit this ideal? On our campus, how do our male students identify themselves as “manly?”

4. Junior discusses how after his fight with Oscar, “they acted like roommates act when they’re beefing.” How does their experience compare with other roommate conflicts you’ve dealt with?

5. What unique aspects of residence hall living (in this case, a living-learning program experience) did Junior mention in telling this story? What were positive, what were negative?

6. Junior speaks disparagingly of his residence hall and its reputation. How does Demarest’ identity affect Junior and Oscar? What reputations / identities do our buildings have? How does that affect the students we work with?

7. Oscar attempts suicide because he cannot “get a girl.” He worries that being a virgin means he is a failure. In the news recently, a young man shot and murdered several campus sorority members in California for what appears to be the same reason. Are these isolated incidents or is the idea that to be a man (or to be fulfilled/happy/whole/etc), a young man must be successful in “getting girls?” Is this a realm of identity that we, as student affairs professionals, have any influence? How can we help the students we work with, both male and female, navigate this time in their lives when not being able to get sex seems to equate to being a failure?  

8. What student development theories help to explain the development of the characters in this story?