[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 literary pairings
for which I’m particularly excited in a new adult learning class.
I wrote earlier
this year about
my unfolding connection to the Osher
Lifelong Learning Institute at Brandeis University (BOLLI). BOLLI does many
things, including the kinds of lecture series for which I was able to talk
about the Harlem Renaissance in July. But first and foremost, BOLLI is an
adult learning program, one that offers Study Groups (a concept about which I
wrote in that hyperlinked post) for senior learners on a wide variety of topics
and themes. For my first such Study Group, which will run for ten Thursday
mornings this fall, I decided to focus on Literary Conversations: Pairing Past
and Present Ethnic American Writers. As that title suggests, we’ll read pieces
by two writers at a time, one from the 19th or early 20th
century, one from our own moment, each pair linked by a particular, if
certainly broad, cultural or ethnic community (Asian Americans, Native
Americans, Caribbean Americans, etc.). My main goals are simply to share these
writers (many of whom, especially the earlier ones but also many of the
contemporary folks, I believe to be largely unread) and to see what we can make
of the pairings, what they might open up on topics like identity, community,
history, and story.
I am of course
excited for all of my pairings (I’d better be!), but I wanted here to highlight
two in particular. Most of our pairings will last only one week/class and focus
on short readings or excerpts, but at the semester’s center will be two weeks
with two African American historical novels: Charles Chesnutt’s The
Marrow of Tradition (1901) and David Bradley’s The
Chaneysville Incident (1981). As even casual readers of this blog
likely know, Chesnutt’s book is my favorite American novel, and I’ve taught it
even more than I’ve blogged
about it here. So while of course I’m very excited to share it with a new
community (I’ll be shocked if any of the BOLLI folks have encountered Chesnutt’s
novel previously), I’m even more thrilled for the chance to teach Bradley’s
novel for the first time. I’ve loved Chaneysville
since I first read it as a teenager, featured it prominently in my college
senior thesis, and wrote about it in my latest
book (alongside Marrow, natch). But,
in part because it’s a long and extremely challenging novel and in part just
because, I haven’t yet found an opportunity to teach it in a college class. To
say that I can’t wait to talk about it (alongside Chesnutt’s book) with this
group of BOLLI students would be not to come close to expressing how much I’m
looking forward to these two weeks.
The rest should
be pretty great too, though, and one pairing that I think could lead to really interesting
conversations links 19th century Mexican American novelist María
Ampáro Ruiz de Burton to the contemporary Mexican American writer Sandra
Cisneros. Cisneros is relatively well known (perhaps the most well known of
my featured writers), and so too, of course, is the 21st century
Mexican American community. Whereas I think we hardly ever remember, much less
read and discuss, 19th century Mexican American voices like Ruiz de
Burton’s, which is one main reason why we generally don’t think about that
community (or the Hispanic American one more generally) as extending back to
our collective origin points (considering them instead, when we do at all, as a
foreign alternative or adversary—Spanish explorers, Mexican foes in the Mexican
American War). So I can’t help but think that reading Ruiz de Burton alongside
Cisneros will open up new ways of thinking—not only about those forgotten histories,
but also and just as importantly about Cisneros, 21st century
Mexican American and American communities, our own moment and world. I can’t
wait to find out, and of course will keep you posted!
Next preview
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Fall courses or plans you’d highlight?
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