[Another semester comes to a close this week, and this time for my usual end-of-semester reflections series I wanted to highlight stand-out days from my classes. Leading up to a weekend off for a very stand-out reason!]
My American
Historical Fiction Grad class was the first course I got to teach for our
MA program (back in Summer 2006, at the end of my first year at FSU), and is
the one I’ve returned to the most often by far. Certain aspects have stayed the
same across those nearly twenty years and half-dozen sections, but one thing
that keeps it fresh is that I always end with a 21st century text,
and have chosen a different one each time. They’ve consistently been great and
led to excellent class conversations, but I was especially happy with my choice
this time, C. Pam Zhang’s How
Much of These Hills is Gold (2020). Zhang’s novel is one of my
favorites in recent years, but (as I discussed in that hyperlinked post) it’s
also an incredibly complex vision not just of American history, but of
historical fiction as a genre. All those layers made it a particularly
phenomenal text with which to close out this class, and one to which the
students (most of them fellow educators, and all of them awesome as our MA
students always are) responded with thoughtful and impassioned takes that made
this conversation a truly stand-out one.
Next
stand-out tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Semester reflections or other work you’d share?
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