[For my annual Fall semester reflections series, I wanted to share some of the new texts and ideas I encountered this semester. Leading up to this preview post featuring a few of the things I’m excited for in Spring 2024!]
On three
Spring 2024 courses for which I’m particularly excited (even if I’m really not
ready yet for it to be 2024).
1)
Intro
to Sci Fi and Fantasy: Usually I get to teach this course every few years,
but as that Spring 2023 reflections poet indicates, this will be the second
straight Spring semester in which I’ve taught Sci Fi/Fantasy. As a result I
wanted to make sure to keep it fresh by including at least one book I haven’t
taught before (alongside the one I added in Spring 2023 and wrote about in that
post, Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch),
and so chose a new work for the contemporary sci fi novel: Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small, Angry
Planet (2014). Chambers’ novel should make for a really interesting
pairing with our foundational sci fi text, Ray Bradbury’s The
Martian Chronicles, but is also just a quirky and funny and thoughtful
example of where sci fi storytelling has gone in recent years. Can’t wait to
share it with students!
2)
The
Short Story Online: As that post illustrates, I first taught an accelerated
online course in the Spring 2019 semester, and this Spring will do so for the fifth
time with another section of the same class, The Short Story. It would be very
easy to simply teach the same syllabus and readings I’ve done in those prior
sections, and I’m not going to pretend I’m entirely reinventing the wheel (and
it does still roll quite smoothly, I’d say). But this time around I did want to
find ways to bring in even more stories that feel relevant to our current
moment, and so I’ll be slotting in one of my couple favorite American short
stories, Sui Sin Far’s “In
the Land of the Free” (1912). I don’t know of any literary work that better
captures the human stakes of things like elections and laws
than does Far’s, and as ever I know it will draw out thoughtful and
impressive student responses.
3)
Grad
Historical Fiction: As you can see from that Fall 2023 preview post, I
originally thought I’d be teaching my Graduate American Historical Fiction
course this semester; it got pushed back to Spring 2024, and so everything I
said in that post still applies to this preview! But to reiterate what I said
in number 2, I’m now particularly excited to be reading and discussing these
works in an election year, where the stakes of these histories and issues and
American ideas have never been clearer. That’s especially true for my favorite American
novel, Charles Chesnutt’s The
Marrow of Tradition (1901); but every book we read in this class has a
great deal to tell us about not only historical fiction and history, but about
collective memory and contemporary debates and more. Can’t wait to see how our awesome
grad students respond to them!
Holiday
series starts Monday,
Ben
PS. What
are you looking forward to in 2024?
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