Tuesday, January 17, 2023

January 17, 2023: Spring 2023 Previews: The American Novel to 1950

[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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