[With this
week’s final papers and exams comes the end of another semester at Fitchburg
State University, and with it a series of semester recap posts this time
focused on inspiring student work and ideas! Please share your own semester
reflections in comments, and/or your spring plans and goals leading up to a
predictive weekend post!]
My Honors
Lit seminar on the Gilded Age featured lots of very strong individual
student presentations, papers, and perspectives. But because it was such a
strong group, our collective conversations also led to numerous interesting
insights on our focal works and topics. Here are three of those impressive
collective questions and perspectives:
1)
Native American Agency, Stereotypes, and the
Wild West Shows: Two of the supplemental online texts in our first unit (on the
West) focused on
histories and images/advertisements
of the era’s Wild West Shows. The students had a lot to say about such complex
topics as visual culture and the role of popular entertainments in culture, but
I was particularly impressed with their nuanced conversation about the shows’
Native American performers. We moved through a number of issues of agency and
power, stereotypes and alternative narratives, and the possibilities and
limitations that these shows offered for their performers as well as their
audiences. Really strong models of visual, popular, and material culture
analyses in this inspiring conversation.
2)
Romance, Realism, and Literary Marriages: Our
first two main texts, Helen
Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and Elizabeth
Stuart Phelps’ The Story of Avis,
feature central marriages that it’d be easy to read as entirely contrasted: Jackson’s
idealized and romanticized union of Ramona and Alessandro contrasted with
Phelps’ flawed and realistic marriage between Avis and Philip. But in our
concluding discussions of Avis (the
second of the two we’d read), the students acknowledged but pushed beyond that
contrast, considering how both novels use both genres: Jackson keeping the
marriage idealized and romantic in order to contrast it with her deeply
realistic portrayal of histories of cultural oppression and dispossession; and
Phelps starting with a romanticized portrait of love in order to develop her portrayal
of how both genders are affected and limited by such romantic ideals and
conventions. Conversations that helped me see both novels in new ways!
3)
Assimilation and Resistance across Cultural and
Historical Boundaries: In our last unit, I asked the students to read two
complex texts at once: Charles
Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition
and Sui
Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance. They
were entirely up to the challenge, and responded with a number of interesting
ways to link these two very distinct works. Some of the most nuanced
conversations had to do with how Chesnutt and Far’s ethnic characters (that is,
Chesnutt’s African American characters and Far’s Chinese American ones) respond
to the pressures to assimilate into the mainstream (European American) culture
that surrounds and oppresses them. Both authors create a range of responses to those
pressures, and the students’ analyses of these distinct characters and themes
helped us develop multi-layered readings of both works and of what they can
help us see about culture and identity in the Gilded Age and in our own
contemporary moment as well.
Last recap
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other reflections or predictions you’d share?
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