[As of next week
my
sabbatical is officially done and I’m back to full-time teaching. So this
week I’ll share some previews for my Spring 2020 classes, focusing on new
readings I’m adding this semester and leading up to some updates on book talks
and projects. I’d love to hear what you’re up to as well!]
On the first
novel I’ll ever teach in hardcover, and why I’m doing so.
In my English
Studies Capstone course, we read one text for each of our department’s four
“tracks” (the concentrations that our English Studies Majors can choose). For
the Literature track text, I’ve moved over the years through Junot Díaz’s
The
Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah,
and, last
spring, Celeste Ng’s Everything
I Never Told You, our 2018-2019 Fitchburg State University Community
Read book. I really love Ng’s novel and would have been more than happy to
teach it again this time around, but wanted to challenge myself to use
something new, both literally (ie, released recently) and pedagogically (ie,
something I have never taught before, in a class that I’ve had the chance to
teach nearly once a year for many years now). I debated between many
possibilities, including all those highlighted in this October blog series
on Recent Reads, before eventually settling on Monique
Truong’s The Sweetest Fruits—a
book that is not just new, it was published so recently that it is still only
available in hardcover, which makes this the first time I’ve ever taught a book
for which there was not yet a paperback edition.
I didn’t make
that decision lightly, as I am fully aware of the financial
challenges facing our
students (and all college students these days); that was one reason why I
decided not to require any texts for my Writing II class, as I discussed in
Tuesday’s post. But a Capstone course is different from First Year Writing in
many ways, and many of those differences could be boiled down to this: Capstone
represents one of the last times when these students will be able to be college
students and English Majors in the most idealized ways. That doesn’t mean that
such practical challenges and realities are absent, of course (and indeed I
dedicate a significant percentage of my Capstone class to focusing
on practical topics like resumes and cover letters, grad school
applications and options, professional paths, and so on). But at the same time,
it means this is a class—again, likely one of the last classes they’ll take as
undergrads, and perhaps in their lives—where we can read a wonderful
contemporary author and novel, share together in the experience of encountering
literature and culture that’s both part of our world yet occupies and creates
its own world as well. Truong’s novel is and does all those things beautifully,
and I’m excited to share it with my Capstone students.
Last preview tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What’s on
your Spring 2020 horizon?
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