Pride: A Pride and Prejudice Remix

Zoboi could easily have written a story about gentrification, class, and race without referring to Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. What does this story’s relationship to Austen’s novel add to the reader’s experience and understanding? Use these bulleted points to formulate and discuss your response.

• What is the cultural significance of Pride and Prejudice? How does this influence the reader’s thinking and feelings about Zoboi’s story?
• What elements of the original text does Zoboi use in Pride? Why do you think she chose these elements?
• What elements does Zoboi add that are not present in Pride and Prejudice? How does adding these elements into a work based on a well-known text highlight certain ideas?
• Why does Zoboi use the term “Remix” in the novel’s subtitle? What does her choice of this term, which is associated with contemporary music, communicate to the reader?

Teaching Suggestion: It may be helpful to students to review key elements of Austen’s novel before attempting to answer this prompt. If you suspect that the broader introductory question will be an inaccessible challenge for your students, you might choose one of the bulleted sub-questions on which to focus instead. You might also choose to divide the class into small groups, assign one bullet point to each group, and ask students to reconvene once they have discovered some answers so that they can share their findings and attempt an answer to the larger introductory question.