[As the Spring
2017 semester comes to a conclusion, this week I’ve offered semester
reflections focused on new things I tried in my courses. Leading up to this
special post previewing my Summer and Fall courses!]
My Fall 2017
semester will feature only one course (the Honors
Lit Seminar on America in the Gilded Age that I’ll be teaching for the third
consecutive Fall) that’s likely to stay very similar to its
prior iterations. The others, which are either entirely new or will be
significantly revised, are:
1)
American Historical Fiction (Graduate): For the
third straight summer, I’ll be teaching
a hybrid course in our Graduate
English Program. But while the prior two such courses were entirely new,
and thus created as hybrid classes, this time I’ll be turning a class I’ve
taught a few prior times, American
Historical Fiction, into a new, hybrid version. To be honest, my initial
impulse was just to use the same syllabus and have half of our discussions (those
focused on literary excerpts and scholarly essays, rather than novels) online;
but that’s not a truly hybrid class, nor would it take advantage of the form’s
possibilities. I’m still figuring out how to best use digital materials for
those online meetings and discussions (and as always I’m open to suggestions!),
but am determined to make this class hybrid in meaningful as well as practical
ways.
2)
First-year Writing I: My Fall section of Writing
I isn’t hybrid, but I’d say somewhat the same thing. That is, I’ve ordered the
same two anthologies (the Seagull Reader:
Essays and Short Stories
collections), and am planning the same main units and writing categories
(personal essays and analysis, short stories and argument, songs and close
reading, and a combination of personal and academic writing on a topic of their
choice), as has been the case for my last few Writing
I sections. But I’m nonetheless determined to revise the course, and especially
to find ways to include digital and multimedia texts, materials, and writing
possibilities alongside those more traditional print forms. I’ll keep you
posted, and again I welcome any and all suggestions and ideas!
3)
Major Author: Mark Twain: Here’s where it gets
really new and exciting. For my third section of our departmental Major Author course
(previously I’ve featured Henry
James and W.E.B.
Du Bois), I decided to get seriously
filial, focusing on Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain. As I did for the Du Bois course,
I’m hoping to have the students produce their own work in (and as a way to
analyze) many of the genres in which Twain worked: humorous sketches and
satire, travel writing and autobiographies, stage performance, and more. I’m
also thinking hard about following up my NeMLA
roundtable on re-reading by having students begin and end the course by
reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,
to see how our readings of and conversations about that complex and important
book develop and shift after working with all the semester’s materials. But
those are just starting points, and again I welcome any and all suggestions for
content, strategies, or anything else!
4)
ALFA: Great New Short Stories: To reiterate what
I said in my earlier post this week on my adult learning courses, my goal of balance
requires that this fall’s new ALFA course be a literature-focused one, and it
will be: we’ll be reading and discussing nine short stories (one together on
the first day, two each for the remaining four meetings) from the Best
American Short Stories 2016 anthology. But while that’s a relatively
set plan, there are twenty total stories in that anthology (you can see
the Table of Contents here), so if you have strong preferences or
recommendations among them or their authors, you know what to do!
Next series
starts Monday,
Ben
PS. Summer or
Fall plans you’d share? Responses to these classes? Lemme know!
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