September 16, 2024: Summer Reads: The Good Lord Bird

[I didn’t get to share my usual Beach Reads series earlier this summer, so I wanted to make up for it by highlighting a handful of the many amazing novels I read as I worked to return to pleasure reading over the last few months. I’d love to hear what you’ve been reading, from any genre, for a crowd-sourced weekend post!]

I know James McBride’s masterpiece of a revisionist historical novel The Good Lord Bird (2013) is far from a new release (and indeed that his newest release has been even more acclaimed still, and I promise to check that out one sooner than a decade down the road). What I can say, I had really slacked on my pleasure reading for far too long (and hadn’t had a chance to teach McBride’s book, so didn’t have that reason to check it out). But McBride’s hilarious, pointed, and ultimately profoundly moving depiction of John Brown through the eyes of fictional escape enslaved person Henry “Onion” Shackleford was more than worth the wait, and might well have even edged out Russell Banks’ Cloudsplitter (1998), itself one of my very favorite novels, as the best book about Brown I’ve ever read. No matter what, this is quite simply a unique and amazing book, and of all the great ones I read this summer was the one that most fully reminded me of the unabashed and to my mind unequaled pleasures of pleasure reading (and, not unrelatedly, convinced me to get off of Twitter, but that’s a story for another time).

Next summer read tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What have you been reading?

September 14-15, 2024: TV Studying: Bridgerton and The Bear

[This week marked the anniversaries of the premieres of two classic TV shows: the 50^th anniversary of Little House on the Prairie and the 70^th of Lassie. So I’ve AmericanStudied those and other classic TV shows and contexts, leading up to this special post on what we can learn from a couple current hits I finally got around to checking out this summer!]

On three contexts for a pair of the year’s (and decade’s) biggest shows.

1)      Bingeing: I’ve analyzed the relatively new form of cultural consumption that is binge-watching a few times in this space, most especially in this post on streaming sitcoms. I still have mixed feelings on the trend, and would in fact go further: when it comes to shows that were originally created to air once a week (ie, pretty much every TV show prior to the rise of Netflix original content in the early 2010s), bingeing them is as best a less ideal way to experience what the creators intended, and at worst actively ruins the experience. But for shows being created in this new era of streaming, the opposite is, if not a given, at least always possible: that the creators intend them to be binged, and have worked to create shows which reward viewers for such extended immersion. I’d say that’s the case for both Bridgerton and The Bear, particularly because both are so good at…

2)      …(World)Building: When I’ve used this storytelling term previously in this space, it’s largely been in the context of my Intro to Sci Fi/Fantasy course, as worldbuilding has been without a doubt the most-discussed concept in every section of that class I’ve taught. But of course any genre and any cultural medium can build a world, and I don’t think any recent TV shows have done it more intentionally nor more successfully than do these two. But in two very distinct ways: Bridgerton in the vein of the best historical fiction in both senses of that genre as I’ve defined it in the past (such as in that hyperlinked post), immersing the audience in a prior historical period and yet creating compelling fictional stories that are not bound by historical facts; while The Bear builds its restaurant industry world through incredibly potent use of narrative tension and emotion, making the audience feel every detail of that setting and community. Or at least it hopes to do so, but the recent season three did meet with a great deal of…

3)      …Backlash: After a pair of relatively universally acclaimed seasons, The Bear’s season three has been quite a bit more divisive. I haven’t had a chance to watch it yet (like I said, I’m late to these games), but my wife, who has, has offered a very thoughtful take: that the show is working to become more cinematic in its storytelling and imagery, while still using those devices to capture emotion and character as it always has. If that is the case, it would mean that The Bear has evolved but not fundamentally changed, and I’d say that’s very much the case for Bridgerton (on which I am fully caught up), which makes the rising backlash to that show’s various forms of diverse casting and storytelling particularly frustrating. That is, I get that Bridgerton differs from the original novels in a variety of ways, including its diversity; but that’s been a central element of the show from day one, and by this point fans should either go along for the very enjoyable ride or find something else to binge.  

Next series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other classic or current TV you’d analyze?

September 13, 2024: Classic TV Studying: I Love Lucy

[This week marks the anniversaries of the premieres of two classic TV shows: the 50^th anniversary of Little House on the Prairie and the 70^th of Lassie. So I’ll AmericanStudy those and other classic TV shows and contexts, leading up to a special post on what we can learn from a couple current hits I finally got around to checking out this summer!]

On why the groundbreaking sitcom’s comfortable familiarity actually reflects its most radical elements.

While I Love Lucy (1951-57) was one of the first prominent sitcoms, there are a few reasons why its domestic and marital dynamics seem to fit comfortably within existing, familiar tropes, and most of them center directly about star Lucille Ball and her prior professional work. For the years leading up to the sitcom’s debut she had been starring in a CBS Radio program entitled My Favorite Husband, where she played a wacky housewife. When CBS initially balked at her request that a TV adaptation co-star her husband, Cuban bandleader Desi Arnaz, Lucille and Desi toured as a vaudeville act, performing the same kinds of marital hijinks that they would feature on the sitcom. So by the time Lucille and Desi were given the chance to perform those exaggerated versions of their real-life roles on TV, they—and Lucille especially—had extensive personal and professional experience with such characters and dynamics, helping give the show that impressively lived-in feel from its pilot episode on.

At the same time, I think it’s just as accurate to say that I Love Lucy itself established many of those sitcom domestic and marital tropes that have since come to feel so familiar, and that’s an important reframing because it allows us to see the show for just how radical it really was, in two distinct ways. For one thing, there’s the apparent reason why CBS initially balked at casting Desi are Lucille’s husband in the TV adaptation: their concerns that TV viewers wouldn’t accept a redheaded white woman and a Cuban man as a married couple (even though, again, the two had been married in real life for a decade by that time). What Ball understood, far better it seems than these network executives, was that mass media genres like sitcoms don’t have to simply reflect existing images or narratives (although they far too often settle for doing so); they can also, and perhaps especially, shape such cultural and social conversations. Am I suggesting that I Love Lucy helped create the shifts in attitudes toward cross-cultural marriages that would contribute to the Supreme Court’s groundbreaking decision in Loving v. Virginia (1967) a decade later? Well yeah, I guess I am.

Through and because of the show, and more exactly because of how much it brought her star power to wider audiences, Ball was also able to achieve significant professional milestones of her own. Most strikingly, she and Desi founded a TV production company, Desilu, of which she became the first female studio head; when the two divorced in 1960, she bought out his share and cemented her role as the full business and creative director of that successful and influential studio. Lest you think those are hyperbolic adjectives to make my point, here are just four of the TV shows that Desilu produced, all of them during Lucille’s reign as solo studio head post-divorce: the original Star Trek (launched in 1966); the original Mission: Impossible (also 1966); The Andy Griffith Show (launched in 1960); and The Dick Van Dyke Show (launched in 1961). All of those in their own ways became and remain familiar presences within, and contributed enduring tropes to, their respective genres—one more way that I Love Lucy has left its radical imprint on our cultural landscape.

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other classic TV you’d analyze?

September 12, 2024: Classic TV Studying: Lassie

[This week marks the anniversaries of the premieres of two classic TV shows: the 50^th anniversary of Little House on the Prairie and the 70^th of Lassie. So I’ll AmericanStudy those and other classic TV shows and contexts, leading up to a special post on what we can learn from a couple current hits I finally got around to checking out this summer!]

On AmericanStudies takeaways from three iterations of the iconic canine hero.

1)      Family: After its September 12^th, 1954 debut, Lassie ran for 19 total seasons, making it the 7^th longest-running American primetime TV show to date. The first ten of those seasons are the ones most audiences likely associate with the show, as they were set on a family farm (or rather two families’ farms, as the original Miller family transitioned to the Martins during the fourth season, if ostensibly at the same farm). That farm setting was somewhat distinct from most of the era’s family sitcoms, if in keeping with later rural-themed 1960s shows like The Andy Griffith Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Green Acres among others. But nonetheless, I would argue that the first ten seasons of Lassie exist squarely in the TV metaverse inhabited by the sitcom dads I wrote about in Tuesday’s post, along with their wives, children, neighbors, etc. Family was the name of the game in early TV, and Lassie did it so well that it outlasted almost all of those other programs.

2)      Forestry: No show exists for nearly twenty years without evolving, though, and after those ten family-focused seasons, Lassie shifted dramatically beginning in season 11 (1964-65), when Lassie became the canine companion of U.S. Forestry Service Ranger Corey Stuart (Robert Bray). Not coincidentally, the show transitioned to more full color filming in this era, and that technology was used to showcase a variety of spectacular Western locations, including Sequoia National Forest and Monument Valley. Those locales would seem to parallel this new iteration of Lassie with another of the era’s most prominent TV trends, the ubiquitous Westerns. But I would argue that they also represented a potential counterpoint to that genre’s mythologized and frequently nostalgic American West, offering viewers glimpses of a contemporary West to which they, like the heroic pooch, could travel.

3)      Fucking What?: As is the case with so many successful and long-running shows, when Lassie came to a close its creators sought to continue the success with a spin-off, in this case the animated show Lassie’s Rescue Rangers (1973). Yet that spin-off lasted only one season, with the main factor in its demise undoubtedly being a couple prominent responses: Lassie’s original trainer Rudd Weatherwax claiming “That’s not Lassie. That’s trash”; and the National Association of Broadcasters adding “The manufacturers of this rubbish have incorporated violence, crime, and stupidity into what is probably the worst show for children of the season.” I can’t lie, if you read some of the episode descriptions, they do sound, well, batshit insane (seriously, read them and thank me later). But I also have to believe that another factor in these extreme responses was that the new Lassie was even more overtly tied to early 1970s environmental themes and advocacy, and not everybody was ready or willing to accept that emphasis for the beloved pooch.

Last TV Studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other classic TV you’d analyze?

September 11, 2024: Classic TV Studying: Little House on the Prairie

[This week marks the anniversaries of the premieres of two classic TV shows: the 50^th anniversary of Little House on the Prairie and the 70^th of Lassie. So I’ll AmericanStudy those and other classic TV shows and contexts, leading up to a special post on what we can learn from a couple current hits I finally got around to checking out this summer!]

On a key difference between the TV show and the books, and why it matters.

I watched a good bit of the TV adaptation of Little House on the Prairie (1974-1982, but I mostly watched it in subsequent reruns on TBS) growing up, but only one episode stands out in my memory: “Gambini the Great,” an episode early in the show’s 8^th season (the penultimate season, and the final one featuring Michael Landon before the show changed its title to Little House: A New Beginning for the 9^th and final season) in which the Wilder family’s adopted son Albert (Matthew Laborteaux) becomes enamored of the titular aging circus escape artist/daredevil. Albert’s father Charles Wilder (Landon) tries in vain to convince Albert that the openly and proudly non-religious Gambini (Jack Kruschen) is not someone to idolize or emulate, and is proven tragically yet righteously accurate when Gambini dies in a stunt gone wrong. As I remember it, the show and Charles (pretty much always the show’s voice of unquestioned authority) present this tragedy as, if not explicitly deserved due to Gambini’s lack of religious faith, at the very least a clear moral and spiritual lesson for Albert, and one that he takes to heart as he returns fully to the fold of the family’s religious beliefs.

Albert was a character not present in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s series of books (in which Little House on the Prairie was the third of eight published novels, with a ninth published posthumously), and thus represents one of many elements that were added, tweaked, or significantly changed in adapting the books into the show. But I would go further, and argue that the overt and pedantic religious themes and lessons exemplified by an episode like “Gambini the Great” were also far more central to the TV adaptation than the novels. That’s not to suggest that religion and spirituality weren’t elements of the novels and their portrayal of the Wilder family and its world, but I believe they were just that: elements, details of the family’s identity and community and experiences that could be paralleled by many other such elements and themes. Perhaps it’s the nature of episodic television (particular in its pre-serialized era) to need more of a moral, a sense of what an audience can and should take away from the hour-long, at least somewhat self-contained story they have just watched. Likely the show’s producers also learned quickly just how compelling and charismatic a voice they had in Michael Landon’s, and wanted to use him to convey such overt morals and messages. But in any case, I believe (and as always, correct me if you disagree!) that the show tended toward such overtly pedantic (and often, although certainly not exclusively, religious) moral lessons far more than did the novels.

Although the word “pedantic” does tend to have negative connotations, I mean it more literally, in terms of trying to teach the audience a particular lesson; that is, I’m not trying to argue through using that word that the novels were necessarily better or more successful as works of art than the show because of this difference. At the same time, however, I do believe that the difference produces a significant effect, one not so much aesthetic as thematic, related in particular to how each text portrays history. To me, the novels seek to chronicle the pioneer/frontier experience for their focal family and community, describing a wide range of issues and concerns that were specific to that communal experience (if, of course, very different from the concurrent experiences of other Western communities, such as Native Americans, with whom Wilder engages to a degree but certainly far less, and at times more problematically, than would be ideal for a more accurate portrait of the American West). Whereas the TV show consistently seeks to make use of its historical setting to convey broader and more universal messages (about religion and morality, but also about family, relationships, communal obligations, and more). Which is to say, I would argue that, to use the terms I deployed in this post, while Wilder’s novels certainly qualify as historical fiction (as well as autobiographical fiction), the show seems more to be period fiction, with somewhat less to teach its young audiences about the history itself.

Next TV Studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other classic TV you’d analyze?

September 10, 2024: Classic TV Studying: Sitcom Dads

[This week marks the anniversaries of the premieres of two classic TV shows: the 50^th anniversary of Little House on the Prairie and the 70^th of Lassie. So I’ll AmericanStudy those and other classic TV shows and contexts, leading up to a special post on what we can learn from a couple current hits I finally got around to checking out this summer!]

AmericanStudying the clichéd extremes of sitcom dads, and the men in the middle.

1)      The Wise Men: It’s no coincidence that one of the first popular TV sitcoms was entitled Father Knows Best (1954-60, based on the 1949-54 radio show). A central thread throughout the genre’s history has been the trope of the wise father responding to his family’s problems and issues, from Father’s Jim Warren (Robert Young) and Leave It to Beaver’s Ward Cleaver (Hugh Beaumont, proving in that clip that father most definitely did not always know best) to The Cosby Show’s Cliff Huxtable (Bill Cosby, now ironically but nevertheless) and Growing Pains’ Jason Seaver (Alan Thicke), among countless others. It’s difficult to separate this trope from 50s stereotypes of gender and family roles (especially after seeing that hyperlinked Leave It to Beaver moment), but at the same time the trope’s endurance long after that decade reflects its continued cultural resonance. If sitcoms often reflect exaggerated versions of our idealized social structures, then there’s something about that paternalistic wise man that has remained a powerful American idea.

2)      The Fools: Yet at the same time that the TV version of Father Knows Best was taking off, Jackie Gleason’s The Honeymooners (1955-56, based on a recurring comedy sketch) was experiencing its own brief but striking success. I’m not sure whether Gleason’s foolish, angry husband (not yet a father in Gleason’s case) character was a direct response to wise characters or just the natural yang to that yin; but in any case such foolish fathers have likewise continued to be a sitcom staple in the decades since, with Married with Children’s Al Bundy (Ed O’Neill) and The Simpsons’ Homer Simpson (voiced by Dan Castellaneta) representing two particularly exaggerated end of the century versions of the type. Yet also two significantly distinct versions—Al Bundy consistently desires to escape from his wife and family (putting him in the American tradition of characters like Rip Van Winkle), while Homer is a macho stereotype who loves his beer and donuts but also mostly loves his family. To paraphrase Tolstoy’s famous quote, each foolish sitcom father is foolish in his own way.

3)      The Middle Men: Because these two extremes have been so prevalent in sitcom history, it’s easy to put each and every sitcom father into one or the other of these categories. But I think doing so would be a disservice to (among others) those sitcom dads who might superficially seem like caricatured fools, but whose characters included complexities and depths beyond that stereotype. I’d say that’s especially the case for a few 1970s dads: All in the Family’s Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor), The Jeffersons’ George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley, who first appeared as the character on All), and Sanford and Son’s Fred Sanford (Redd Foxx). Each of those fathers could be as foolish and angry as any, but to stop there would be to miss much of what made them and their sitcoms memorable: partly the willingness to engage with social and political issues such as race and class; but also and just as importantly the messy, dynamic humanity each character and actor captured, all without losing an ounce of their comic timing and success. Few fathers are purely wise or foolish, after all, and these dads in the middle help remind us of the full spectrum of paternal possibilities.

Next TV Studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other classic TV you’d analyze?

September 9, 2024: Classic TV Studying: Amos ‘n’ Andy

[This week marks the anniversaries of the premieres of two classic TV shows: the 50^th anniversary of Little House on the Prairie and the 70^th of Lassie. So I’ll AmericanStudy those and other classic TV shows and contexts, leading up to a special post on what we can learn from a couple current hits I finally got around to checking out this summer!]

On a strikingly different way the early sitcom could have gone, and why the difference matters.

By the time the television adaptation of Amos ‘n’ Andy premiered on CBS in June 1951, it had been a popular radio program for nearly a quarter-century. Freeman Gosden and Charles Correll, the two white Vaudeville actors and radio hosts who had met in North Carolina in 1920, transitioned to work at Chicago’s WQJ radio station in 1925, and then created Amos ‘n’ Andy and its main characters in the late 1920s and been central to the program ever since, had been working since the mid-1940s on whether and how to transition the show to the emerging medium of TV. Apparently their working goal throughout those early years, and indeed per a December 1950 Pittsburgh Press article their plan when the show was in its initial production phase, was for the two of them to continue providing the voices of the characters (as they had throughout its radio run, and not just Amos and Andy; they provided as many as 170 different character voices), and for Black actors to be seen on screen but only to lip sync the parts.

Supposedly (per Melvin Patrick Ely’s excellent book The Adventures of Amos ‘n’ Andy: A Social History of an American Phenomenon [2001]) Gosden and Correll recognized that they would not work as well as television actors (not least because their one attempt to bring the show to the big screen, the 1930 film Check and Double Check, had been an unmitigated flop that Gosden would later call “just about the worst movie ever”) but wanted to be paid more than the TV show’s Black performers, and since speaking lines make a part more substantive and thus higher-paying they devised this plan. But even without that overtly racist motivation, the lip syncing plan was a truly awful idea. At the very least, it would have made the show’s Black performers into quite literally minstrel show characters, stand-ins for the racist stereotypes created by white artists. It’s even possible to see Black actors in this plan as an inverted but just as gross form of the longstanding cultural tradition, in but also well beyond such minstrel shows, of Blackface performance.

Fortunately, Gosden and Correll’s plan did not come to pass, and when the show premiered in June 1951 it not only featured exclusively Black actors—including Alvin Childress as Amos, Spencer Williams as Andy, and the well-known Vaudeville comedian Tim Moore as their shady friend Kingfish—but they also spoke all the lines. The show only ran for two seasons (totaling 52 episodes), and was unquestionably controversial throughout that time, as illustrated by the NAACP’s 1951 publication “Why the Amos ‘n Andy TV Show Should Be Taken Off the Air.” But it also seems to have represented a positive influence for many African American viewers and communities, at least according to historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. who wrote in his 2012 American Heritage essay “Growing Up Colored” that “everybody loved Amos ‘n’ Andy—I don’t care what people say today. What was special to us was that their world was all colored, just like ours.” That would have technically still been true if the Black actors had only lip synced their lines, I suppose, but hearing their voices was of course part and parcel of their presence, and so I’m very glad that this early TV show went that way.

Next TV Studying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Other classic TV you’d analyze?

September 6, 2024: Fall Semester Previews: Aidan at Vanderbilt!

[As my 20^th (!) year at Fitchburg State University kicks off, I’ll focus my Fall Semester previews on one thing I’m especially excited about for each of my courses. Leading up to a special post on a new scholarly project I’m very excited about as well!]

By the time this post airs, I will be down in Nashville for Family Weekend, visiting my older son Aidan as his first year at Vanderbilt University kicks off in earnest. I don’t want to pretend that I know what his Fall semester will hold, no more than I do any other part of these next four years and beyond (although I’m super excited to find out!). But I know that one of the courses he’ll be taking this Fall, alongside a bunch of Engineering and Engineering-adjacent ones as he starts his major in Civil Engineering, will be Literature and the Environment, taught by English Professor Rachel Teukolsky. I don’t expect Aidan will take many English courses in his time at Vandy, and I hope y’all know me well enough to know I’m more than good with that. But I can’t lie, I’m excited to think about his first year featuring one such course, and to talk about it with him, at Family Weekend and beyond.

Special weekend update tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What are you excited to teach or work on this Fall?

September 5, 2024: Fall Semester Previews: American Lit II Online

[As my 20^th (!) year at Fitchburg State University kicks off, I’ll focus my Fall Semester previews on one thing I’m especially excited about for each of my courses. Leading up to a special post on a new scholarly project I’m very excited about as well!]

One of the more unexpected ways my teaching career has evolved over the last few years has been the chance to teach the same course in multiple modalities, and thus to really experiment with variations of the syllabus, readings, assignments, and more in those distinct spaces and time periods. This past year has been a particularly striking case in point: in Fall 2023 I taught an online accelerated section (which met for only the last 8 weeks of the semester); in the Spring semester I taught an in-person section of my American Lit II survey; in the Summer semester I taught a 5-week online version; and this Fall I’ll be teaching it online again, but this time for the whole 15-week semester. For those keeping count, that’s four distinct versions of the same course in about a calendar year—a blend of in-person and online, full-semester and accelerated in different ways. I can’t lie, I still don’t always feel that I’ve mastered online teaching (despite having done it for more than a decade now). But I do know that each way I teach a course challenges me and helps keep it fresh as a result, and for one of the classes I’ve been teaching throughout my 20-year FSU career, that effect is a welcome one indeed.

Next preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What are you excited to teach or work on this Fall?

September 4, 2024: Fall Semester Previews: English Studies Capstone

[As my 20^th (!) year at Fitchburg State University kicks off, I’ll focus my Fall Semester previews on one thing I’m especially excited about for each of my courses. Leading up to a special post on a new scholarly project I’m very excited about as well!]

As I’ve traced here in multiple end of semester reflection posts (hyperlinked below), one of my favorite things over the last few years of teaching has been the opportunity for my English Studies Senior Capstone students to connect with authors we’ve read in that course. That’s included my fellow public scholar Kevin Gannon for his book Radical Hope, but also the authors of our last two 21^st century literary texts: Monique Truong and Eric Nguyen. I try to keep that spot on the syllabus particularly fresh, so for this semester’s Capstone section I’ve slotted in a new, very recent novel: Jesmyn Ward’s bracing and beautiful Let Us Descend (2023). I know the students will get a lot out of Ward’s book no matter what, and I’m excited to have a couple weeks of intense conversations about this intense and important novel. But I’m certainly hoping we can connect with Ward, at the very least to share some questions as I did with Nguyen last year. I’ll keep y’all posted on the results!

Next preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What are you excited to teach or work on this Fall?

September 3, 2024: Fall Semester Previews: First-Year Writing

[As my 20^th (!) year at Fitchburg State University kicks off, I’ll focus my Fall Semester previews on one thing I’m especially excited about for each of my courses. Leading up to a special post on a new scholarly project I’m very excited about as well!]

I’ve taught at least one section of First-Year Writing I in every one of those 20 Fall semesters, so it’s fair to say that most of what happens in this course will not be new to me (even if it’s genuinely the case that each community of students forms its own identity in a way that keeps these courses fresh nonetheless). But I do try to find ways to update the syllabi when possible, and for my two sections this Fall I’ve done so with the culminating assignment, a paper where the students combine personal and academic modes of writing around a complex central topic of their choice. I’m a big believer in this final paper, as it helps me remind students that their personal identities, voices, perspectives, and experiences should always be part of their more formal academic work. But here in 2024, it seems to me that for many students, this assignment might make more sense with digital components (or as an entirely digital product), rather than in writing on paper—so I’m going to include that as a parallel but distinct option for this final paper, and hopefully we’ll work together to figure out how each and every student can make this assignment fully and successfully theirs.

Next preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What are you excited to teach or work on this Fall?

September 2, 2024: Fall Semester Previews: 20C Af Am Lit

[As my 20^th (!) year at Fitchburg State University kicks off, I’ll focus my Fall Semester previews on one thing I’m especially excited about for each of my courses. Leading up to a special post on a new scholarly project I’m very excited about as well!]

Five years after I got to teach it for the first time, I’m very excited for my second opportunity to teach our 20^th Century African American Literature survey (a complement to 19^th Century African American Lit that I got to teach a couple semesters back). By far the best part of that first section was the student presentation component: I asked each of them to pick one cultural figure/text from a list featuring a variety of examples and categories (music, TV, film, theater, art, and more), or to suggest their own if they preferred, and in the final few weeks of the semester they gave short presentations on a few layers to their chosen subject. I still remember the student presentation on Otis Redding, one of the true stand-out moments in my first 19 years at FSU! So while I’m changing various aspects of the syllabus this time around, you best believe I’m keeping this presentation component, and I can’t wait to see what stands out this time around!

Next preview post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What are you excited to teach or work on this Fall?