Wednesday, January 18, 2023

January 18, 2023: Spring 2023 Previews: Grad Class on Multi-Ethnic American Lit

[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!]

As I wrote in my initial preview of this new (to me) Grad class, I decided at any early point that I wanted to take the course name as literally as possible: to include not just a range of ethnicities or cultures across our authors and texts, but to focus on works that explore the experiences and lives of multi-ethnic American characters and people (fictional and real). I’m really excited for the chance to work with all sorts of texts that I’ve taught many times before through this particular lens, from Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona to Gish Jen’s “Who’s Irish?” among many others. But I’m most excited that thinking about this course in this way offered me the opportunity to teach for the first time one of the most unique, complicated, and compelling American novels, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). Johnson’s sole novel makes for a really interesting pairing with Nella Larsen’s Passing (which we’ll also be reading in this class), but it’s also just a phenomenal and under-read book in its own right—and that under-reading apparently includes me, as I haven’t taught it any time in my prior 22 years of college teaching. Glad to have the chance to remedy that this Spring!

Next Spring preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring semester authors, texts, classes, or other work to share?

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