- The Dark Descent
edited by David G. Hartwell
- Blasted
by Sarah Kane
- Dying City
by Christopher Shinn
- Mother Night
by Kurt Vonnegut
- S.
by Slavenka Drakulic
- Daughters of the North
by Sarah Hall
- Liberation: Being the Adventures of the Slick Six After the Collapse of the United States of America
by Brian Francis Slattery
The only text that I've been settled on using since the moment I learned I'd be teaching a section of the class is The Dark Descent, an anthology I admire enormously for its generous selection of stories from all sorts of different traditions (contents listed here), and getting to explore it with students will be great fun.
The other books I chose bit by bit as I developed some focus for the course -- the course description I was given is pretty general, and the course goals are mostly just that the students will learn to write and read better, will develop some critical thinking skills, and will have some sort of interdisciplinary experience (the class is, like my current Outsider course, mostly for first-year students).
As with any class, my first step was to decide what to give up. For a while, I was thinking of including both Titus Andronicus and King Lear, but then I realized that, much as I might find the comparison scintillating, it was likely to be quite difficult to drag the students through two Shakespeare plays in one term -- I taught Shakespeare every year for 10 years in high school, sometimes with success and sometimes not, but it seemed like too much of a risk for this particular class, partly because I just don't know how to teach Shakespeare when the class doesn't meet every day, and the time and effort it would eat up could be used more productively, I thought, with other texts.
Next, I gave up on trying to represent the world. For a while, I kept things like Bolaño's By Night in Chile
Finally, I decided to let the course be about the intersections of murder, madness, and mayhem, and to take a particularly socio-political approach, one that might make it a bit less of a struggle for students who aren't English majors (few, if any of them, will be). Thus, a certain focus on war -- all of the texts other than The Dark Descent explore some aspect of war or combat.
Sarah Kane's Blasted, which is currently playing in New York (I'll be seeing it with Rick Bowes in a couple days, in fact), presents a brutal and hallucinatory version of war and its effects on people, while Chris Shinn's play Dying City offers a rich and subtle exploration of the Iraq war and the homefront. I thought that Blasted would make a bit more sense to students if they read a realistic account of the Bosnian war, and I thought about including a book of nonfiction (even Joe Sacco's Safe Area Gorazde
In amidst all this, I'll toss some essays and, I hope, a bunch of poems. We'll see. It's a tight schedule just with these books, and I could change my mind about a lot of things between now and the end of January...