Nipping at the heels of S Shirazi's review of canvas sneakers, and mine of my new flat-screen television, I offer here another product review for your instruction and delight: books of theory I taught in my undergraduate comparative literature class this quarter. The mode of consumption to which this product review refers is, then, a pedagogical one. I have rated each book in three categories: Difficulty (10 is Heidegger, 1 the Cathy comic strip); Student Excitement (10 total fascination and unquenchable desire, 1 a failure to show up to class); and Teachability (this last rating is personal, and refers to my ability to make the text interesting, to explain it, and to use it to generate class discussion; 10 = Mrs. Dalloway, 1 = Nightwood, though I love both books).

Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Compared to the other books on this list, incredibly clear. Well argued, and it includes, as advertised, graphs, maps and trees, which make the pages fly by. Undergraduates will not necessarily be familiar with the polemic stakes Moretti engages, and so I ended up giving a rough history of close reading and discussing the Annales school for background. The major problem I had with this book is that since students will not have done, in general, any work of the type Moretti proposes, they had a hard time imagining what it would look like. The examples Moretti gives are helpful but perhaps not extensive enough, at least in relation to the literature the students have read, to show why this might be important (except, of course, at the theoretical level). If I taught this again, I might do so within the context of a literary class that gave students the material they needed to evaluate Moretti's claims as pragmatic ones. Perhaps this should have been the function of their literary education prior to arriving in my course, and in some ways it was: one student said she liked Moretti's book the least because it seemed to her to attack the way she had been taught to read. Which is exactly right.

Strengths: Offers very clear examples and presents itself programmatically; writing style charming and easy to follow; forces students to think about the value of their own discipline.

Weaknesses: Will not seem “relevant” to non-literature majors (in my case, one-third of the class); contempt towards close reading is expressed tonally but not argued for; political justification for its claims (Marxism, materiality of form, etc.) never makes itself explicit.

Difficulty: 4; Student Excitement: 6; Teachabilty: 9. Total score: 19.

Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal: Agamben's little historical details give students a good deal to hold on to, but the book's organization is complicated: it's made up of 20 little sections that are, if you pay attention, really organized into three larger units that the text never marks. The small sections give you the impression that you should be understanding some kind of conclusion every few pages, but because the sections are small it makes following the logic of the entire book not easy. Agamben actually does write major thesis sentences, and he tends also to produce summaries of his argument, but he uses almost no metalanguage, so these summaries and theses are hard to find. Students end up feeling like they've read a bunch of different kinds of things but have no idea how to connect them. On the plus side, that gave me something to do in class, since my job became to build a general framing outline of the text.

Strengths: Great, exciting ideas which, once the students get them, give them lots to think about; cool historical details and close readings. Pushes students to think about the nature of the human-animal distinction and its historical roles.

Weaknesses: Lack of metalanguage; tendency to produce as the final solution to all problems a post-Heideggerian, explicitly Benjaminian frozen dialectic.

Difficulty: 8; Student Excitement: 7 (one student said it was his favorite book); Teachability: 7. Total score: 22.

Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: This is a great introduction to Badiou's thought, though difficult. We read Paul's Letter to Romans first, which was absolutely crucial. And since I knew Badiou was coming, I helped guide the discussion of Romans towards the themes I knew would arise there. The first couple chapters are really clear, and Badiou lays out well the major project and frames it in terms of contemporary debates about the future of Europe that translate well also to the American context. The difficulty comes in the book's second half, when in chapters like “The Antidialectic of Death and Resurrection” and “Paul Against the Law,” Badiou does some very hard stuff (not for nothing, however, since the question of the Law in Paul is very very tricky). The book ends with a series of “theorems” which make good tools for discussion, since each of them summarizes aspects of the argument. I regret not giving students a general summary of Badiou's theory of the event before they read the book--had to do this after the first day.

Strengths: A good introduction to Badiou, partly because of its length (111pp). Clearly argued and clearly directed towards a single project. Encourages students to consider in relatively pragmatic terms the possibility of universal truths.

Weaknesses: Needs a lot of background, some on Badiou and some on Paul. Later sections very difficult. Religion is inherently less “cool” than animals.

Difficulty: 6; Student Excitement 6; Teachability 8. Total score: 22

[I hope it is clear by now that the “Total Score” number, which involves adding together all three values, presumes that a high difficulty number is good and that all categories count equally, making its use here largely comic.]

Giorgio Agamben, The State of Exception: This was the favorite book of two students; one suggested we should have read it earlier in the course because it was easier than the other books. Not sure about that, since we read it last, and so its seeming ease may have been the product of student learning. In any case the first half of this book is difficult but quite clear, and the students came in on Tuesday feeling very good about what they'd understood from it. The issues the book raises about governmentality are very exciting for the students, and generate lots of connections to contemporary world affairs; one student referred to the book as “frightening.” But this is good news, after all. The bad news is that the second half of the book is much more difficult than the first (as the chapter title “Gigantomachy Concerning a Void” suggests). Part of this difficulty is structural: though Agamben might disagree, the book has a couple conclusions: the Benjaminian one at the end of the Gigantomachy chapter, which is super philosophical and dificult, and then the one at the end of the last chapter, which is more or less set up by the long discussion of Roman history that falls between them. This was hard to follow, and required me to do lots of work framing the argument.

Strengths: Connection to world affairs very exciting for students, which produced lots of good class discussion; as always with Agamben the historical details also fascinating.

Weaknesses: Structure of conclusionary moves needs re-editing; Benjamin conclusion mirrors the ending of The Open and therefore feels pat.

Difficulty: 7; Student Excitement: 9; Teachability: 9. Total score: 25.

Slavoj Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: Everyone's favorite wet-mouthed Slovenian comes through again in this book, which I paired with Badiou's Saint Paul for the “Religion” section of the course. Three students named it their favorite, which had as much to do with the jokes and the pop culture references as anything else, I suppose, but then there's the exhilirating quality of Zizek's dialectical reversals, which always makes for good fun. In terms of abstraction, the book lies somewhere between the more difficult stuff in a book like Sublime Object of Ideology and the more accessible Desert of the Real, so it was quite tough in places. I taught the introduction, chapters 1-3 and the appendix. The latter is the most accessible portion of the book, and features a lengthy close reading of the chocolate egg with the plastic toy inside sold in Europe as a Kinder Surprise. Hard for the students, but super teachable and easy for them to follow. I skipped chapters 4 and 5 because the degree of abstraction seemed a little high for undergrads; chapter 5 in particular is a long engagement with deconstruction and therefore not suitable for folks who haven't read much Derrida or Levinas. As always, the problem with Zizek is that his references to Hegel are very quick, and his explanations of Lacan not much slower. I ended up doing a whole lecture on the dialectic before we got to the Zizek (and which proved so useful, I wished I had done it before the Agamben and Badiou), and then another whole lecture on the Symbolic/Real distinction and the nature of the objet petit a.

Strengths: Jokes break up the theoretical difficulty; lots of contemporary references exemplify the theory in ways students can understand; dialectical exhilaration.

Weaknesses: Jokes make you think you've understood things, when really you stopped concentrating when you got to the joke and now you don't know what Zizek is doing; requires at least some background in Lacan and Hegel.

Difficulty: 9, despite the jokes; Student Excitement: 9; Teachability: 9. Total score: 27, making this book the winner!!! The prize, a dinner with me at my house, can be claimed by Zizek at his convenience.