Wednesday, May 15, 2024

May 15, 2024: Spring 2024 Stand-Outs: Gold in Grad Historical Fiction

[Another semester comes to a close this week, and this time for my usual end-of-semester reflections series I wanted to highlight stand-out days from my classes. Leading up to a weekend off for a very stand-out reason!]

My American Historical Fiction Grad class was the first course I got to teach for our MA program (back in Summer 2006, at the end of my first year at FSU), and is the one I’ve returned to the most often by far. Certain aspects have stayed the same across those nearly twenty years and half-dozen sections, but one thing that keeps it fresh is that I always end with a 21st century text, and have chosen a different one each time. They’ve consistently been great and led to excellent class conversations, but I was especially happy with my choice this time, C. Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold (2020). Zhang’s novel is one of my favorites in recent years, but (as I discussed in that hyperlinked post) it’s also an incredibly complex vision not just of American history, but of historical fiction as a genre. All those layers made it a particularly phenomenal text with which to close out this class, and one to which the students (most of them fellow educators, and all of them awesome as our MA students always are) responded with thoughtful and impassioned takes that made this conversation a truly stand-out one.

Next stand-out tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Semester reflections or other work you’d share?

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