[This week I
start my 14th year at Fitchburg State. For that momentous occasion,
I decided to focus in this fall preview on one thing that has evolved for each
class I’m teaching, and one that’s a bit more longstanding. Leading up to a
special weekend update on my next book project!]
On the difficult
decision to replace a long-time favorite text, and the opportunity it has
opened up.
Despite the
class’s title (one created in the late 20th century, of course),
every time I’ve had the chance to teach the upper-level literature seminar Major
American Authors of the 20th Century I’ve made sure to bring
us up to the present, ending with a 21st century text. I’m not
positive whether I initially used a different one, but for at least the last
few sections it’s been the same novel in that slot, Junot
Díaz’s
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
(2008). I’m a huge fan of Oscar in
any case and setting, but it also works very well as a representation of many
ways in which American literature and culture have evolved as we’ve moved into
the 21st century (or, more exactly, in which our cultural works have
begun to reflect longstanding aspects of our community and identity more fully
over this period): the bilingualism, the pop culture allusions, the multivocal
and nonchronological structure, the ongoing effects of the 20th
century past on our society and identity (best captured by Díaz’s
invented but profoundly representative concept
of the fukú),
and so much more. I’m not sure any 21st century American novel would
work better in the culminating spot for a course like this.
Which is to say,
it wasn’t the slightest bit easy for me to remove Oscar from the syllabus for this Fall’s section of Major American
Authors. I had already placed my book orders by the time the #metoo
movement accusations against Díaz surfaced in the spring, and it
would have been simple enough to keep the novel on the syllabus at that point (and,
for example, to address the accusations as part of our class conversations when
we got to the book). I’m also not under any illusions that a fair number of the
authors I feature in any particular course didn’t have various personal issues
of their own, problems that might well in many cases even compare unfavorably
to the accusations against Díaz. But at the same time, these particular
accusations and their responses and effects are continuing to unfold in our own
moment, in front of us, uncertainly and painfully, and so it felt appropriate
to me to take a break from assigning (and thus asking students to purchase) Díaz’s
novel—not to ban it and him from my classes in any long-term or permanent way,
necessarily, but not to use one of my very few current syllabus spots on an
author who at the very least represents some of the more troubling and ugly
sides to dynamics of gender, sexuality, and power in our current moment.
If the decision
to remove Díaz
from the Major American Authors syllabus was a tough one, the choice of a 21st
century novel with which to replace Oscar
was far simpler for me. Our Fitchburg
State Community Read text for the 2018-19 academic year is Celeste Ng’s wonderful debut
novel Everything
I Never Told You (2014), and I jumped at the opportunity to put her
book on a syllabus of mine for the first time. Ng’s novel is a gripping
mystery, a moving family drama, and a potent examination of multi-generational
immigrant and ethnic American identities and stories, a combination of genres
and themes that makes it another exemplary 21st century American
book to be sure. But this will also be the first time I’ve had the chance to
teach our university’s Community Read text, and I’m really excited to do so, to
connect the students and class to the multi-part conversations and events that
constitute our Community Read efforts each year (including this time a
September talk by me on immigration in American history and identity, for more
on which watch this space!). I continue to have mixed feelings about removing Díaz
from the syllabus, and plan to revisit that question moving forward—but I have
nothing but excitement when it comes to the chance to teach Ng’s novel, overall
but this semester in particular.
Last preview
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
all have going on this Fall?
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