[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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