[As the Fall
semester of my 13th year at Fitchburg State commences, a series previewing
some of my courses and other plans for the fall. I’d love to hear about your
fall classes and plans in comments!]
On two goals for
a Special Authors course I’m beyond excited to be teaching.
For my third
version of our departmental Special Authors course—after classes focused on Henry
James and W.E.B.
Du Bois—I decided to go with perhaps the most well-known American author, Mark Twain (the pen name and
persona of Sam Clemens). I’m particularly excited for this class for a couple
of contextual reasons. For one thing, Twain has been one of my Dad’s lifelong
subjects, and I can’t wait to use resources like his Mark Twain in His
Times website and edited edition of Huck Finn as part of our classwork. For
another thing, as I’ll discuss more in tomorrow’s post on my Gilded Age Honors
Seminar, both the late 19th century period of Twain’s principal publishing
career and many of his most common topics and themes across that career could not
feel more timely and salient than they do in the fall of 2017. Which is to say,
for both personal and political/public reasons this is likely to be one of the
most complex and compelling classes I’ve had the chance to teach—and that’s a
great way to keep things fresh as I start year thirteen at FSU.
In constructing
the syllabus and assignments for the course, I’ve tried to achieve a couple of
goals. For one thing, I wanted to balance the rightly famous sides to Twain
with genres and works of his that are less well known. For the former, the
exact middle of the class schedule will be two weeks with Huck Finn (and the many resources my Dad has assembled in that Broadview
edition), and around it we’ll also read excerpts from other famous novels
like Tom Sawyer, The Prince and the Pauper, and A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (among others). But we’ll both
begin and end the semester with less well-known genres and texts, many of them
contained in these
two great Library of America
collections: beginning with weeks on humorous and satirical sketches, local
color, and travel writing; and ending with weeks on political writing,
allegorical and philosophical texts, and the very complex works with which
Twain concluded his career in the early 20th century. My hope is
that this dual approach will both deepen our understanding of Twain’s claims to
fame and broaden our take on his life and career overall.
My other goal
has to go with the student assignments across the semester. For the Du Bois
class, I used three creative assignments, asking the students to write their
own texts within a few key genres and then use them to help analyze how Du Bois
worked within those forms. That creative assignment sequence went really well,
and so I’m going to do the same this time around: having the students write a
local color/travel sketch (whether humorous or serious) for Short Paper 1,
rewrite a scene from one of our works of fiction from a different character’s perspective
for Short Paper 2, and write a political or allegorical piece dealing with a
current issue or topic for Short Paper 3. Our Special Authors class is a
4000-level literature seminar, meaning that it will largely be full of junior
and senior English Majors, folks whose writing and voices are already
well-honed and who should have lots to say as they navigate these creative
assignments. As always, I’ll make sure to let you know how it all goes in the
end of semester reflection series. And oh yeah, one more thing: if we don’t
have a higher quota of laughs per class period than any prior course I’ve
taught, I’ll eat my white suit!
Next preview
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Fall courses or plans you’d highlight?
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