Tom Wolfe's "The Right Stuff" — Reading and Discussion Questions

Brown University Students in English 171, Sages, Satirists, and New Journalists

Victorian Web Home —> Victorian Authors —> Some Post-Victorian Writers of Nonfiction]

Questions by Students in English 171, Sages, Satirists, and New Journalists, 2011

• Foolhardy Heroes
• Wolfe's Space Language: Creating An Astronaut Lexicon For Himself
• “The Right Stuff” vs. “The Life”: The Nature of the Indefinable
• Personal Agenda, Flight Agenda
• Tom Wolfe Gets Inside Your Head
• The role of Pete Conrad's role-play
• Ego Loss
• Drinking & Driving & Driving & . . . : The Right Stuff in Public and the Right Stuff in Private
• The Right Details in The Right Stuff
• The Supersonic Stuff: Chuck Yeager in Wolfe's The Right Stuff
• Hypothesis and Hypocrisy in The Right Stuff
• The Right Stuff (With the Cookies and the Goodies)
• American Heroes or Drunk Superstars
• The Age of Technology: Tentative Heroes and a Definite Sage
• The Astronaut as Single-Combat Warrior
• Military Pilots: A Flight Risk?
• Wolfe as an Omniscient Narrator

Questions by Students in English 171, Sages, Satirists, and New Journalists, 2007

• Life Underneath the Glossy Pages
• Are Their Days Numbered?
• What it means to be a True Brother
• The grotesque and the beautiful in Wolfe's The Right Stuff
• Telling Themselves Stories of the Right Stuff in Order to Live
• "Life Magazine Presents The College-Trained Chimpanzees.
• On the Nature of Celebrity
• The Flying Brothers of Epsilon Alpha Beta
• Wolfe's Voices in The Right Stuff

Questions by Students in English 171, Sages, Satirists, and New Journalists, 2005

• Write the Stuff: Authorship in Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff
• Tom Wolfe Versus the Great Colonial Animal
• Tom Wolfe's exclaiming personalities
• Wolfe the Respectful Joker
• Repeat Repeat in Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff
• Wolfe's Machine-Gun Prose
• Heroes Exposed in The Right Stuff
• Which sucks more? The press or the networks?
• Tom Wolfe Repeats Himself
• Making Heroes in The Right Stuff

Questions by Students in English 156, Victorians and Moderns, 2004

• A Row of Little Indians
• The Press: Marking Differences in Wolfe's The Right Stuff
• The Dual Lives of Heroes in The Right Stuff
• John Glenn: Prophet, Poet, or Astronaut?
• Heroes, Speech, and the Media
• Hero Creation in The Right Stuff
• Right Stuff, according to whom?
• The Hero as Pilot in The Right Stuff
• Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff and the idea of the Hero
• "A Good Presbyterian:" Religion and Heroism in Wolfe
• John Glenn and The Hero as Prophet
• The Makings of a Hero within the Media's Gaze
• Single Combat as Sacrifice: Modern Heroism in Tom Wolfe's The Right Stuff
• Novel Non-Fiction

Questions by Students in English 171, Sages and Satirists, Brown University, 2003

• Yeager's Drawl: Contagious Language in The Right Stuff
• Meet the Press
• Pilots are bigger than Jesus
• Of One Nation?
• Wolfe vs. the Victorian Gent
• There's No "I" in Wolfe (But There is a "We")
• Wolfe's Truth Behind the Hardy Boys in Outer Space
• Authenticity and The Right Stuff
• Performance in The Right Stuff
• An Outsider on the Inside in "The Thrones"
• Describing Wolfe's Descriptions: Does he have the right stuff?
• Monkeys Included
• New Journalism Lifts Off: Non-Fiction at 0 G's

Related Materials

• New Journalism Lifts Off: Non-Fiction at 0 G's -- Mailer and Wolfe
• Lending Thoughts and Imitating Voices: Narrative Distance and Characterization in the Nonfiction of Wolfe and Lawrence
• Reading and Discussion Questions about "The Pumphouse Gang"

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Last modified 22 November 2007