[As another
semester begins, so too does my annual Spring previews series, this time
focused on individual texts I’ll be teaching in spring courses. I’d love to
hear what your spring looks like and holds!]
On substituting
shorter works for novels in an online literature course.
In the brief
Spring preview post with which I concluded December’s Fall semester recaps,
I wrote about one of the challenges I’ve faced in planning my first online
literature survey, the section of American Literature II I’m teaching online
this Spring: how to present historical information and contexts in a manner
that will allow students to engage with, digest, and make use of those
materials. That remains a work in progress as of this writing, but I’m
generally planning to create brief informational sheets, distribute them at the
start of each course unit/time period, and ask students to engage with them in
quick and focused ways; I’ll be sure to let you know how it goes in my May
semester recaps series (ah, the dream of May in January in Massachusetts). Here
I wanted to engage with another challenge that this online survey has
presented, especially compared with my first online
literature course on The Short Story: the presence of novels on my existing
Am Lit II syllabus.
Those seven novels—Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Marrow of Tradition, Quicksand & Passing, The Great Gatsby, Ceremony, and The Namesake—form
the core of my American Lit II syllabus, not only because of their own complexity
and importance (although alert blog readers might note that they include some
of my very favorite books and authors) but also as pairings that help guide us
through our class units/time periods: Twain and Chesnutt in the late 19th
century, Larsen and Fitzgerald in the early 20th century, and Silko
and Lahiri in the late 20th/early 21st century. Yet from
a pretty early moment in thinking about this online version of the course, I
knew that it I didn’t want to ask students to read novels or longer works, and
decided to substitute multiple shorter ones in place of those books (to which
we dedicate two weeks each in my standard syllabus). That includes short works
by these authors themselves, sometimes excerpted from the novels (we’re reading
the opening
few chapters of Huck Finn, for
example) and sometimes distinct from them (we’re reading Charles Chesnutt’s
1898 short story “The
Wife of His Youth” in place of Marrow).
I’m certainly
not wedded to the need for long works in a literature survey—we only read
shorter works in my American Literature I class, and likewise will only be
reading shorter ones in my 19th Century African American Literature
survey this semester. So part of the challenge here is simply about adjusting
my perspective and expectations for this particular course, in every prior
version of which I have used longer works in that anchoring role. But at the
same time, I used them in that role because I believed that otherwise the
incredible breadth and range of American literature from 1865 to 2018 could be
simply overwhelming, not only on its own terms but also as a way to think about
American culture and history across that century and a half (which is to my
mind an important goal for a literature survey). So without them, and multi-day
conversations about them, to help in that structuring way, I will have to
figure out how to use the aforementioned information sheets, as well as
unit-opening emails to the students, to help provide some frames that can help
guide us through our units and the many authors and texts that now populate
them. You know I’ll keep you posted on how it goes!
Last preview tomorrow,
Ben
PS. Thoughts on
this post? Spring previews of your own to share?
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