[The final
papers are coming in and the blue books have entered the building, so it must
be the end of another semester. This week I’ll recap some inspiring moments
from my
Fall 2018 semester, and I’d love to hear some of yours in comments!]
On one expected
and two unexpected inspirations from my American lit survey class.
Two of the six
books at the heart of my American Lit II survey class are among my very
favorite American novels (Charles Chesnutt’s The
Marrow of Tradition and Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony),
and a third is very high on the list as well (Jhumpa Lahiri’s The
Namesake), so I knew there would be plenty of inspiration in the course
of our semester. And I wasn’t the slightest bit disappointed—I find each of those
books more moving and more important each time I read them, and certainly doing
so amidst the Trump era and the 2018 midterms and other contemporary contexts
only amplified those effects and meanings. To be honest, I think much of the
last few years (if not much of American history and identity overall) can be
summed up entirely with two quotes from the first two of those novels: Chesnutt’s
“our boasted civilization is but a thin veneer, which cracks and scales off at
the first impact of primal passions”; and Silko’s “The only thing is: it has
never been easy.”
Perhaps inspired
by the particularly resonant lessons of those works and authors, I was also
unexpectedly inspired to rethink my syllabus for the next time I teach this
class. In particular, I need more multi-cultural and immigrant texts on the
syllabus earlier than the late 20th/early 21st century
unit; while my scholarly work has focused a great deal on such texts and
histories from the 19th and early 20th centuries, my
American Lit II syllabus hasn’t quite caught up. It won’t be easy to take any
of my current authors and texts out, but that’s how it goes when you’re making
a syllabus, and I need to make room for (for example) Abraham Cahan’s “A
Sweatshop Romance” (1898) and Sui
Sin Far’s “In the Land of the Free” (1909). Right now the histories of both
labor and immigration are largely absent from my late 19th century
unit in this class, and while a literature survey is not the same as a history
one, you can’t really engage with literature from that period either without those
threads as part of the pattern. So I look forward to finding room for them on
my next iteration of American Lit II!
I don’t want to
suggest that it is only particular works that can offer inspiration, however—and
I was also struck this time around by the unexpected inspiration I found in one
of the class’s most familiar texts, F.
Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby
(1925). As I argued in that post, Fitzgerald’s book can and should be
complemented by other 1920s works, and sometimes
is over-emphasized as either a 1920s text or a representation of the American
Dream. But besides its own aesthetic and storytelling pleasures, the novel
still has a great deal to tell us about both its world and our own, and this
time I was struck in particular by the character of Tom
Buchanan. Tom feels very, very familiar: the spoiled son of a wealthy family
who abuses and mistreats women, tries to bully and intimidate all those around
him, buys into white supremacist conspiracy theories and xenophobia, and is
quick to call out the criminal and unethical behavior in others that he’s so
desperate to mask in his own life. He’s unquestionably the novel’s chief
villain, and while he emerges victorious (as villains too often do), reading
about such a character and perspective just might help us encounter and respond
to the Trumps—I mean, Toms—in our own world.
Next recap tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Semester reflections you’d share?
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