[This week marks the beginning of a new semester, and so as always I wanted to preview classes I’m teaching, this time through individual authors and texts I’m excited to be including on this syllabi. Leading up to a special weekend update on my own newest book project!]
Like
yesterday’s Sci Fi/Fantasy class, this upper-level lit seminar, which I taught
for the first time as part of my first year at Fitchburg State back in Spring
2006, is another I only get to teach every few years (at best). So I’m always
excited to return to it and to the many old friends that have remained on every
one of its syllabi since that first iteration, from Hawthorne’s
House of the Seven Gables to Faulkner’s
The Sound and the Fury (perhaps
the most challenging text I teach in any FSU course, but one to which we build throughout
our semester together). But I think my favorite two weeks of the semester are
the two we spend with Willa
Cather’s My Ántonia, one of the
most beautiful and moving American novels and yet a deceptively simple text
from which I draw new and compelling layers every time I teach to read and
teach it. If I could offer advice to anyone teaching a literature course, high
on the list would be “Make sure at least one of the things you read just makes
you happy to think about,” and Cather’s novel most definitely fits that bill
for me.
Next
Spring preview tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Spring semester authors, texts, classes, or other work to share?
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