[I tried to wait to write this Fall semester series until I felt certain about what the Fall would hold—but I don’t know if I ever will, not even as it unfolds. So I decided to share one thing I’m cautiously but definitely excited for with each of my Fall courses, because what can we do but hope—and work—for the best?]
On two reasons
why I keep going back to one of my earliest scholarly subjects.
If the First
Year Experience seminar about which I wrote yesterday represents a brand-new
course in my rotation, my Honors Lit Seminar on America in the Gilded Age is by
contrast one of my most familiar classes. Not only because I’ve taught this
particular course four prior times over the last half-dozen years, but also
because (as I wrote in that hyperlinked post) the very first new class I ever
created at FSU was an English Studies Senior Seminar on the same subject. That
original Gilded Age seminar was based closely on my dissertation/first
book on the time period, and while the class has of course evolved a bit
over the 15 years since, it nonetheless remains in some central ways quite
similar to where I began these investigations as a grad student and young
teacher (including the four thematic units, on the West, women, work, and
race/ethnicity, that parallel chapters in that project).
There are many
reasons why I keep returning to the Gilded Age as a subject for these in-depth,
literature seminar explorations, but there are two in particular that I’m especially
excited about as I gear up for the next such exploration. One is the
contemporary connections about which I wrote
in this post, and which have only become more and more pronounced the last
couple times I’ve taught this course. Indeed, while I called those contemporary
contexts “unspoken” in that Fall 2017 reflection, it’s become impossible not to
speak of them, and I’m okay with that—doesn’t mean I’m telling the students
what to make of such echoes or parallels (no more than I ever tell them what to
make of anything we read or discuss in a class of mine), but rather that I’m
very open to us engaging and exploring together what we can learn from links
between the Gilded Age and our own moment (as well as distinctions or changes
between the periods, of course). Such connections help us recognize the true
stakes of why we learn about our histories, and teaching this class offers so
many potent cases in point.
At the same
time, there’s equal value in discovering and engaging with voices and texts,
figures and stories from our past that are unique, distinctive, and surprising,
and another reason why I keep coming back to the Gilded Age is that so many of
my favorite American authors and texts (nearly all of them profoundly under-read
and –remembered) are from this period. From Sarah
Piatt to Sarah Winnemucca, Maria
Amparo Ruiz de Burton to Sui
Sin Far, Elizabeth Stuart
Phelps to Charles
Chesnutt, and so many more, this syllabus is just littered with voices and
works that embody the best of American literature, culture, and identity at any
moment and in any context. Getting to share these folks and readings with
students, and then to talk about them together, is one of the best parts of
what I do, and even in the toughest of times and semesters—indeed, especially
in those moments—I’m so excited for another chance to do so.
Next Fall
preview tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Fall courses or work you’re (cautiously) excited for?
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