[As another
semester comes to a close, I’ll reflect on some of my fall courses and
conversations, focusing this time on moments and ways that they were relevant
to our own moment. I’d love to hear your Fall 2016 reflections as well!]
Three takeaways
from a class overtly focused on our current moment.
1)
Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric: I
already knew precisely how much we would get out of three of the course’s four
main texts: Ta-Nehisi
Coates’s Between the World and Me,
Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow,
and Chimamanda
Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah. But
Rankine’s poem was more of a wild card, for lots of reasons including its
complexity of style and structure, its multimedia elements, and its extended
sections on very specific moments such as a 2006 World Cup incident involving French
soccer star Zinedine Zidane. Suffice it to say that my concerns were
unnecessary, and that I found Citizen
to be both one of the most compelling and most teachable works I’ve brought
into any class. Moroever, the second-person
sections that open and close the poem bring readers into an intimate
engagement with racism and identity as effectively as any literary or cultural
work I know. Citizen should be on the
short list of books all 21st century Americans need to read.
2)
The Potential of Short Stories: Along with those
four long readings, across the semester we read 12 short stories from the 2013
Best American Short Stories
anthology. That gave us a chance to engage with many of our best contemporary
writers, from Junot Díaz to Gish Jen, Karl Taro Greenfield to Daniel Alarcón,
Kirstin Valdez Quade to Sheila Kohler, and many more. It also helped us bring
in a number of vital 21st century themes, from addiction to shifting
gender and parenting roles, globalization to the mortgage crisis. But what
struck me most in this course thread was the unique and vital power of the
short story as a genre, the way a great story can achieve what Edgar Allan Poe
called the “unity of effect” so potently. Perhaps it’s too ambitious to
think that most Americans would have the time and patience necessary to read a
book like Rankine’s Citizen; but all
of us could read a short story a week (let’s say), and doing so would both
remind us of literature and art’s power and connect us to so many voices and
themes.
3)
The Limits and Benefits of What We Do: Obviously
the election happened right in the middle of this semester and course, and to
be honest it partly made me feel (on this score as on far too many others)
somewhat hopeless. Here we all were, reading and critically thinking and
talking about interesting and complex texts and issues; and there was America
(or at least too many Americans), voting in a man who embodies the exact opposite
of all those skills and goals. Indeed, one of the immediate aftermaths of his
election has been a ramping up of overt
attacks on higher education. Despite the claims of a list like that, I don’t
in any way seek to brainwash students to any particular political perspective
or ideology; but I do hope to lead them to a particular viewpoint, which is
that the more we read and think and talk, the more we listen and learn, the
stronger and more meaningful our individual ideas and collective conversations
will be. In the course of the semester, we did that for a wide variety of
issues that have only become more crucial in the election’s aftermath: from
#BlackLivesMatter to climate change, education to rape culture, law and justice
to immigration, and many more. And as always, the work, voices, and futures of
my students gave me hope even—especially—in the darkest of times.
Next reflection
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Reflections you’d share?
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