Canonicity and an American Literature Survey Course

This term, I taught an American literature survey for the first time since I was a high school teacher, and since the demands of a college curriculum and schedule are quite different from those of a high school curriculum and schedule, it was a very new course for me. Indeed, I've never even taken such a course, as I was successful at avoiding all general surveys when I was an undergrad.

As someone who dislikes the nationalism endemic to the academic discipline of literature, I had a difficult time figuring out exactly what sort of approach to take to this course — American Literature 1865-present — when it was assigned to me. I wanted the course to be useful for students as they work their way toward other courses, but I didn't want to promote and strengthen the assumptions that separate literatures by national borders and promote it through nationalistic ideologies.

I decided that the best approach I could take would be to highlight the forces of canonicity and nationalism, to put the question of "American literature" at the forefront of the course. This would help with another problem endemic to surveys: that there is far more material available than can be covered in 15 weeks. The question of what we should read would become the substance of the course.

A Decade of Archives 5: 2008

This is the fifth in a series of posts leading up to this blog's tenth anniversary on August 18. In each post, I look back on one year, sometimes specifically and sometimes generally. All the posts can be found here.

Posting in 2008 began late because in December 2007, my father died, leaving me not only with the emotional and psychological challenge of a dead parent, but also with the challenge of now being the heir to a house, property, and gun shop 300+ miles away from where I was then living. By the end of the year, I had quit my job, moved back to New Hampshire, gained a Federal Firearms License to sell off the inventory, and started work as an adjunct professor at Plymouth State University in the English Department and the Women's Studies Program. The year ended with a post noting that George W. Bush had done a wonderful thing for New Hampshire, making our sole contribution to the U.S. Presidency, Franklin Pierce, look better.

It was a relatively thin year for The Mumpsimus — understandably, given how much my life changed over the course of that time. The whole period from summer 2007 (quit my job of 9 years, moved to New Jersey for a job that turned out to be an exhaustingly bad fit for me) to my father's death in December to getting my feet back under me in 2008 is the most difficult period of my life, a life that I now habitually think of as breaking into two periods: before-that-time and after-that-time. The struggles and shocks of that year and a half or so pretty deeply changed what it feels like to be me. It changed my writing (I simply stopped writing for a while), it changed a lot of my desires and perspectives, it changed just about everything I think of as myself. The person I was before that time seems very remote from me, someone I am connected to but do not really know anymore.

What I want to focus on here are a few posts from that year that I think are worth preserving, and then offer some thoughts on my first experiences of teaching college.

Worth preserving: A post on a Coetzee novel that could have been the title for my life: Diary of a Bad Year; a post about Lydia Millet's How the Dead Dream; a note mentioning my long Quarterly Conversation review of Paolo Bacigalupi's Pump Six [some of the only long-form reviewing I did that year, and probably the best]; a post on the great novel Stoner by John Williams; a reflection on five years of blogging; a post about the abortion documentary Lake of Fire; a consideration of the extended cut of one of my favorite movies, The New World; some thoughts on Coetzee's Life & Times of Michael K; and an obituary for John Leonard, whose work had a profound influence on my reading and writing.

Spring Classes

Some readers seem interested in my (Machiavellian) thought process when creating classes, so here is another in an occasional series about what I'll be teaching in the upcoming term.

First off, I owe thanks to all the folks who offered ideas and experiences when I asked for opinions about gender and science fiction. Your responses not only helped me clarify my goals, but also helped at least one other teacher who, it turns out, is proposing a similar class at his university.

The Gender & SF class looks like it will have about 10 students, a few of whom I've had before and who were among the best students I've taught, so, naturally, I'm excited. Selecting the final list of books was painful because as I plotted things out day by day, there just wasn't enough time to do all I'd thought I should even minimally do. I'm compensating for this a little bit by having the students each read a book of their own (I may do this in pairs, maybe singles -- I'm going to wait to meet the students and talk with them before deciding. Our library now has a strong enough collection of SF that we can accommodate either without the students needing to buy more books.)

When students go to buy their books at the bookstore, these are the ones they will find waiting for them on the shelf:

Looking Back on an Intro to Film Class

Back in December, I wrote a couple posts about designing an Introduction to Film class for the first time, and now that we've come to the end of the term, I thought I'd procrastinate grading look back on the things I wrote in those early posts to bring it all up to date.

The movies that we watched in their entirety during a weekly screening period were:

1. Citizen Kane
2. Manhunter
3. Vertigo
4. Zodiac
5. 400 Blows
6. Badlands
7. Cabaret
8. The Haunting
9. The Shining
10. Do the Right Thing
11. The Living End
12. Orlando
13. Synecdoche, NY

Plus one optional film on the very first day of classes, Sullivan's Travels, and two films short enough to fit into our 75-minute class period: I Walked with a Zombie and Le Noir De... (Black Girl). If you're curious for even more detail of what we did, the course schedule is here.

The Outsider and the Idea of Africa

[This is part of a continuing series of posts on a class I teach at Plymouth State University, "The Outsider".  I am one of many people who teach the course, and each instructor fits their own ideas and interests into a fairly general catalogue description.  All the posts related to this one can be found via the Outsider label.  Eventually, I'll even update the course's website, since it's now completely out of date.]

The last time I blathered on about my ideas for The Outsider, I was still a few weeks away from having to order the books for the class, and so the syllabus was still very much in flux. I hadn't even plotted it out day by day, so I didn't know if I could fit in all the various books I was thinking about fitting in.

After reading my post, the great and glorious Aaron Bady sent me a note, since much of what I was thinking about -- representations of the idea of "Africa" in colonial and then post-colonial fiction -- was stuff he's spent a lot of time studying. I felt a little embarrassed, because he actually knows what he's talking about, and I'm just following yet another of my many obsessions (really, I should rename this blog The Dilettante). But this obsession has been with me for at least a decade, and though there have been years in that time when I've not indulged it, it always comes back, and whenever it does it comes back stronger than before. (Actually, no. The strongest moment was a period of about three days when I was determined to visit and analyze the entire inventory of every bookstore in Nairobi. That was a period of temporary insanity. It began innocently and miraculously, but then...)

Anyway, Aaron made a marvelous suggestion: "What about Tarzan?" Tarzan is something Aaron knows a bit about, and more importantly, he's thought about Tarzan using just the sorts of templates and questions I want to use to think about that iconic guy. Aaron kindly sent me a paper he's working on about the Tarzan image and phenomenon, and I promptly plundered it for references and started burrowing (and Burroughsing ... ugh, sorry) around in the Plymouth State library, the Dartmouth library, Google Books, and, when desperate or particularly intrigued, various used book dealers.

My basic concept of the course is one I soon discovered is discussed in detail in a wonderful book, Artificial Africas: Colonial Images in the Times of Globalization by Ruth Mayer. Or, rather, Mayer writes about some of the ideas I'll be using during the first half of the course: How, for instance, do people who come into the place they (or their authors) think of as Africa then represent that idea of Africa to their audiences? Or, to make it more obvious how the course material and course title go together: What happens when outsiders come in and start telling stories about the place they've come into? Do the stories they tell work to assuage their feelings of outsiderness, or even to reconfigure them as the insiders and the people who are natives as the outsiders? (With a colonialist mentality, is everything outside Europe or the USA? And so no matter where they are, will a European or American always be, or at least assume themselves to be, an insider?) And then, in the second half of the course, we'll turn things around a bit and look at other perspectives -- the empire writing back, to use the familiar postcolonial phrase. Finding ways for the silenced to speak, the erased to be recovered. For the insiders who have been represented as outsiders by colonialism to reclaim their insider status. (Or, I will ask the students eventually, is the binary itself too limiting? What does it hide from us?)

Here and Back Again

I went twenty days without posting here, and it's been an eventful time, pretty much all to the good.  I took care of some giant final tasks for my father's estate, taught some classes, made progress with planning classes for the summer and fall, volunteered on a movie shoot, wrote a screenplay for a web series a friend hopes to make in Minnesota (more on that as it develops), started another screenplay I hope to browbeat another friend into filming, wrote a very difficult review of a book I'd hoped to be able to say more good things about than I was able to (more on that later), and submitted a couple of short stories to places that might be friendly toward them, since though I haven't written any new stories in quite some time, I do have a couple that have proved difficult to place with publishers because I stubbornly insist that their weirdnesses, lacunae, contradictions, and nonsense are not flaws, but charming and essential features.

In amidst it all, there was some reading.  Here are a few highlights...

• I picked up a copy of Robert B. Parker's Looking for Rachel Wallace after reading Ron Silliman's praise of it. And it does, indeed, provide plenty of interesting fodder for anybody interested in such things as gender and machismo. It's also pretty darn entertaining.
  
  
• Speaking of machismo, I picked up Richard Sellers's Hellraisers: The Life and Inebriated Times of Richard Burton, Richard Harris, Peter O'Toole, and Oliver Reed from the library because it looked like a light read and I realized I knew nothing about the actual lives of the four actors it discusses. It is, indeed, a light read, but also a depressing one -- it is nothing but stories of four immensely talented people being drunk, boorish, irresponsible, and destructive. I couldn't help thinking of a much better book, Tom Dardis's The Thirsty Muse: Alcohol and the American Writer, where the destructive effect of alcohol on the later work of Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway is contrasted with the blossoming of Eugene O'Neill's writing once he quit drinking. Sellers makes a point of noting that Burton, Harris, O'Toole, and Reed all said they had no regrets about the effect of alcohol on their lives, but it's obvious from the book that their lives were deeply hurt by their drinking.
  
  
• I finally got around to reading Troll: A Love Story by Johanna Sinisalo (aka Not Before Sundown), which won the Tiptree Award for 2004, and which I've been meaning to read at least from the time it won the award. I should have read it then. Actually, I wish I had read it before it garnered any accolades, because I think my expectations for it pretty much ruined it for me. I expected a truly great book, and got a merely good one.  And sometimes a bit less than merely good.  I found the insertion of various excerpts from fictional texts tedious and obvious, the story itself at times rather silly, and the final images more goofy than affecting. I certainly would not have disliked it all as fully as I did had I come to it blind, and I expect I would have found it more surprising and more compelling if I'd had no expectations of it being of a particular quality when I began. Alas. My loss.
  
  
• James Naremore's More Than Night: Film Noir in Its Contexts was a great joy to read. Naremore wrote one of my favorite books on Orson Welles, as well as an early and perceptive little book on Psycho and, most recently, a pretty good study of Kubrick. But More Than Night may be his masterpiece -- full of insights that help make even some films I've seen many times seem almost new.
  
  
• Truffaut: A Biography by Antoine de Baecque and Serge Toubiana was illuminating about certain moments in the life of one of my favorite filmmakers, but it was on the whole disappointing because it spends comparatively little time on each film he made, so it ultimate felt to me quite thin. I'll have to give Truffaut at Work at try, since the Dartmouth Library has a copy, and Bill Krohn's Hitchcock at Work is marvelous, marvelous, marvelous.
  
  
• Perhaps my favorite book read in the last month, if not during all of 2010 so far, is Helen Merrick's The Secret Feminist Cabal: A Cultural History of Science Fiction Feminisms. It's full of insights, provocations, information. I'll be writing more specifically about it in the future, but for now, just know that if you have any interest in feminism, cultural history, and/or genre fiction, you'll get a lot out of this book.

Meanwhile, just a few days ago I discovered that over a year ago Norton released a Critical Edition of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, edited by Francis Abiola Irele. I love the Norton Critical Editions, but the NCE of Things Fall Apart may be the best one I've seen. The novel itself takes up just over 100 pages, and the whole book is nearly 600 pages long -- rich with background material, interviews with Achebe and other people, reviews, analyses, various material related to Achebe's critique of Heart of Darkness, etc. It's a thing of wonder and beauty.

I immediately wanted to use it in a course. But what course? I don't get to teach an African literature course, and would be hesitant to teach one at the college level, anyway, at least beyond the introductory level -- my interest in African lit is the interest of a passionate hobbyist, and my knowledge is full of gaps, ignorance, and, I'm sure, inaccuracies.

But I've been struggling to come up with a new syllabus for a course I'm teaching for the second time in the fall, The Outsider. My previous syllabus wasn't a disaster, but I'm more experienced with the sorts of students who take this course now, and I wanted to change a few things (not so much the texts, most of which actually worked pretty well, as my approach and writing assignments). The thing that I kept coming back to was the experience of teaching Nervous Conditions, a book I had had great luck with in a high school course on African novels. My Plymouth State students almost unanimously hated it -- mostly, I discovered, because they had trouble understanding it. Not the language, which is perfectly straightforward, but the cultural background. In the high school class I used the book in, by the time we got to it we had spent a few weeks learning about themes of certain similar types of African literature and the cultural situations of some of the writers. We'd had a bit of that in my first try with The Outsider, but not to an extent where it sunk in enough. College students in central New Hampshire in general education courses need to spend real time on learning about the world from which writers write if those writers are not writing from worlds that appear frequently in the students' experience of life and of media representations. Indeed, when it comes to an African country, the students need even more time to work through their knowledge, perceptions, and assumptions because so much of what they know, perceive, and assume is reductive or, often as not, flat-out wrong. Thus, Kafka made more sense to them than Dangarembga. I had not been prepared for that.

Thinking about this and about the wonderful Norton edition of Things Fall Apart , I had a eureka moment -- why not devote the entire course to African literature and perceptions of Africa in non-African writing? Surely, I could do this while also sticking to the basic idea of the Outsider course.  The general course description requires only that the course look at literature and film, include discussions of the individual in relationship to society, and emphasize differences in cultures, and include such topics as "gender, sexuality, race, class, wealth, behavior, and socialization."  No problem.  And with a course of this level -- the most basic and general offered by the University -- I wouldn't need more than my own hugely-incomplete-but-adequate-enough-for-this-purpose knowledge.

What would happen, I thought, if we read not just Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart, but also The Story of an African Farm and King Solomon's Mines? And then move from there to books by post-Independence African writers? (That would also let me use another great Norton book, Modern African Drama). I immediately started making a list of possible texts -- and then realized I should probably limit myself to books currently in print, since that would make things a bit easier when it comes to making books available to 25-30 students...

Lo and behold, lots of things I wanted to use are currently unavailable. I was particularly annoyed to discover that Ngugi's Devil on the Cross is out of print. Grrr. One of the most important novels by one of the most important African novelists. Not available. And so many others, too. Not available.

But many great books are available, and I've ordered copies of some I haven't yet had an excuse to get hold of. Now I've got the excuse. I expect at least some of my posts here over the next few months will be about the books I'm either revisiting or encountering for the first time as I prepare for the course. I'm looking forward, too, to rereading Things Fall Apart, which I last read no more recently than nine years ago.  First up, though, will be The Story of an African Farm, which, I'm sad to say, I've never read before.

An Introduction to Film Class

Because a colleague is going on sabbatical next term, I've been recruited to teach an Intro to Film class at Plymouth State. I suppose they thought of me because I spent three years as a playwrighting and screenwriting major at NYU, so my CV has more film-related stuff on it than most other folks' in the English Department, which oversees this particular class (though it's also a class that's a requirement for the Communications department ... I'm staying happily ignorant of the politics and regulations that, in the absence of a specific Film Studies department, make particular film classes part of one department or another...). I've spent time on film sets of various sizes, know a few writers and producers and such, and even have a couple of friends who were real, live film majors in college ... but academic film study is a world I know only at a superficial level, so it's good this is just an intro class.

And so I've spent more time preparing for this class than I have for any class since I decided to add an African lit section to one of the high school AP English classes I taught nearly ten years ago. I've done this only partially out of fear of not knowing what the heck to do once I'm standing in front of the class -- that fear, I've learned, never goes away, no matter how well prepared I am; it's the same fear I have before setting foot on stage as an actor, and it's essential to being able to perform well. (Indeed, the few times I've lacked the fear have been disastrous.) The primary reason I've spent so much time preparing is that the material is engrossing and the possibilities for the class are about as close to limitless as it's possible to get and still provide a general course description. One of the two regular teachers of the class told me he loves teaching it because it allows him to show some movies he likes and talk about them with students, and who wouldn't like that? (His syllabus reveals there's a bit more to it than that!)

Murder Madness Mayhem

I'm teaching a section of a course next semester called "Murder, Madness, and Mayhem" at Plymouth State, and since a passionate minority of the readership here seems interested in my syllabi and the (so-called) thinking behind them, here are the texts I've settled on using:

• 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

I don't entirely know what I'm doing with all these texts yet (the order was due at the bookstore last week, but the class won't begin till the end of January), but I chose them because I think they will illuminate different things about each other.

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, Tanizaki's Seven Japanese Tales, and Zoe Wicomb's Playing in the Light on the possibles list, but they came off one by one for different reasons (Tanizaki because I wanted novels rather than more stories, Wicomb because I find the shifting viewpoints of the novel annoying and didn't really look forward to rereading it [and though I adore her You Can't Get Lost in Cape Town, I once included it in a class and it was just too subtle for the students to appreciate], the Bolaño because it requires a certain kind of readerly sophistication that I just don't know how to teach to kids who've just come from high school and, more often than not, don't like reading). I also wanted to include some plays by Euripedes and maybe John Webster, but then had to remind myself that it's not a course in dramatic lit.

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 or The Fixer: A Story from Sarajevo), but settled on Drakulic's S. because though it has a certain documentary feel, it will still allow us to continue thinking and talking about how people respond to real horrors through fictional writing. Mother Night is a favorite of mine, a wonderful book to teach because its accessible surface lures students into thinking it is less complex than it is, and when they discover its complexities they tend to get excited by and passionate about the book. Daughters of the North and Liberation will be the final books, ones that get us talking about, I expect, how and why writers extrapolate from present trends, and if murder, madness, and mayhem must always be aligned during times of political crisis.

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...

The Outsider and the Syllabus

One of the courses I'm teaching at Plymouth State University in the fall is called "The Outsider", and I've been struggling with the syllabus for the past few weeks. There are lots of reasons for this struggle, and as struggles go, it's been a fun and productive one. But every time I think I'm almost done with the syllabus, I decide to make a few changes...

One of the challenges is the breadth of possibilities -- the course is supposed to do a few different things, including introduce first- and second-year students to basics of literary study and critical thinking. It's also supposed to be interdisciplinary (which for this course has traditionally meant a mix of literature and film). And it should have some sort of historical component. But it shouldn't be backbreaking because it is, after all, a general education course for first- and second-year students, many of whom have no desire to become English majors.

Oh, and then there's the fact that outsiderdom and otherness are such common elements of literature that you could almost pick a bunch of books randomly and they'd fit the topic.

Naturally, my first attempt at a syllabus had the students reading something in the vicinity of 5,000 pages per month. I began to narrow it down by giving myself permission to exclude things that I know in my heart are essential -- for instance, I stopped trying to fit in something from every era of the last 3,000 years of the world's history. That wasn't enough of a restriction, though, so I allowed myself only a few works from the 19th century (Woyzeck and "Bartleby" were the two pieces that appeared most frequently on my various lists). Then I gave myself permission not to cover all regions of the globe, though I did promise myself that I would include at least one text that did not originate in North America or Europe.

For a little while, I had what I thought was a finished draft of the syllabus. It began with Octavian Nothing (paired with the movie If...), continued with Woyzeck, moved on to some stories by Kafka paired with a documentary about Henry Darger (In the Realms of the Unreal), transitioned to Coetzee's Life and Times of Michael K (and the documentary Amandla!), then Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Conditions (and Ousmane Sembene's film Black Girl), then Suzan-Lori Parks's play Venus (with The Elephant Man), and finally finished up with Delany's Trouble on Triton and a bunch of movies about crossing and transing gender which, I thought, students would choose 2 of to see (Breakfast on Pluto, Transamerica, Orlando, Beautiful Boxer, Boys Don't Cry, maybe even Some Like It Hot, who knows!).

When I reread this syllabus, I decided it was not only too ambitious, but verging on the insane. First- and second-year students, I kept saying to myself. Not all English majors... I reread some of Trouble on Triton. Oh no. No no no. It would take an entire term to get them through it. I started plotting things day by day. There weren't nearly enough days.

I scaled back. I rearranged. I rethought. What if we started with a month of short stories by Kafka, Camus, and Paul Bowles? Then move on to Coetzee and Dangarembga, which I thought I might pair with something by Kenzaburo Oe, either A Personal Matter or one of the stories in Teach Us to Outgrow Our Madness. Then pair Woyzeck and Venus and finish with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Parable of the Sower, adding Blade Runner as a movie to go along with them and keeping most of the other movies except In the Realms of the Unreal.

This was better, but again when I plotted it out day by day, there just weren't enough days. Too many of the discussions would be rushed, too much would feel crammed in. I loved the idea of doing Kafka, Camus, and Bowles together, but I couldn't entirely justify the amount of time it would take to do it right. (Those three writers together deserve a course unto themselves, maybe with the addition of some native, post-colonial North African writers, depending on the focus.) Do Androids Dream and Blade Runner also felt like they belonged somewhere else, much as I adore them. So I adjusted again.

For a little while, I tried everything I could do to fit in both Woolf's Orlando and Charlie Anders's Choir Boy, but I would need at least another month of classes, and I couldn't bear to cut anything more to fit these two in, alas. Someday...

As of tonight, then, here's the list of texts. It may change a bit, but probably not drastically, unless I suddenly awake with a brilliant idea for how to better meet all the various needs of the course and also teach some stuff I'm qualified and excited to teach.....

• Kafka short stories
  
• Coetzee, Life & Times of Michael K.
  
• Dangarembga, Nervous Conditions
  
• Büchner, Woyzeck
  
• Parks, Venus
  
• Maureen McHugh, China Mountain Zhang
  
• Butler, Parable of the Sower
  
• Films: Amandla!, Black Girl, Herzog's Woyzeck (and maybe János Szász's, but I haven't had a chance yet to see it), and The Elephant Man

The McHugh and Butler are probably the most likely to be changed, if anything changes, partly because the timing is still tight -- I may look for a shorter Butler novel, and I need to reread China Mountain Zhang, since it's been quite a few years since I first read it. But the list feels right, book orders are due very soon, and I need to convince the library to buy the films they don't own. We shall see.

Clearly, though, I am having fun with the opportunity to design classes after a year of teaching a curriculum that I had no hand in designing...