Pushback

As always, I enjoy hearing student feedback on my courses. And, as always, I lament the amount of variables—cost of books, thematic focus, diversity of authors, etc.—that need to be balanced when creating a syllabus for a survey course like ours, one that encompasses 150+ years of American literary history (in fourteen weeks).

However, I was struck yesterday by a few comments that some of you made. Therefore, I’m challenging you to think through some of the criticism that you lobbied at the course. To be clear, your sentiments are fine, and you’re well within your rights to locate structural problems in the course. That said, you should always be able to substantiate any criticism you make of anything with, as you know, well-substantiated arguments. Yesterday, it seemed to me that some of the concerns that many of you had about the (problematic) diversity of the authors in our course emerged from two different locations: 1) a kind of top-down point of view that parrots mainstream, often conservative, critiques of higher education which claim universities (and professors) are too “PC,” whatever that might mean; 2) bottom-up from the perspective of the almighty, all-encompassing AP English classes that students take in high school—often at ages around 16-18—when we all know that our intellects are at their sharpest. (To put that last point in less snarky terms, all the while admitting that I am a very open critic of the AP [and IB] industries: If you study Hemingway pretty thoroughly in high school, why should you be required to read him again in college? Why not skip over him to touch upon some other less canonical authors?)

Finally, the issue of thematic focus is a thorny one, for very practical reasons. In our case, I had you purchase the bulky, but very useful, three-volume Norton. I also asked you to purchase two stand alone paperbacks. The Beats are not covered in any significant detail in The Norton, and I didn’t want to make you purchase too many books for the class because that gets costly. Thus, Kerouac and co. didn’t make the cut. That’s a problem inherent in courses like these that just won’t go away, unfortunately. Still, you can feel free to question the utility of these types of courses that require hard decisions to be made when it comes to selecting content.

So where was I going with all of this? Oh yeah, the syllabus. Below are two purposefully clumsy categories that represent the authors on our syllabus. I have chosen these clumsy categories because they echo the terminology that many of you used in class yesterday—the canonical (frequently white) authors versus the “political” ones. (And again, I’d argue that this terminology is something that we’ve all heard elsewhere, which is why we might use it so uncritically.) What do you think of the syllabus when it is divided up this way? Does it alter your impressions of the thematic content of the course?

Traditional Writers

Mark Twain
Henry James
Sarah Orne Jewett
Kate Chopin
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Stephen Crane
Jack London
Edwin Arlington Robinson
Amy Lowell
Robert Frost
William Carlos Williams
Carl Sandburg
Ezra Pound
T. S. Eliot
H. D.
F. Scott Fitzgerald
John Dos Passos
William Faulkner
Elizabeth Bishop
Randall Jarrell
Flannery O’Connor
Anne Sexton
Sylvia Plath
Ronald Sukenick
Thomas Pynchon
Annie Proulx

“Political” Writers

Booker T. Washington
W. E. B. Du Bois
James Weldon Johnson
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Langston Hughes
Claude McKay
Zora Neale Hurston
Jean Toomer
Countee Cullen
Richard Wright
Audre Lorde
Ishmael Reed
Gloria Anzaldúa
Sherman Alexie
Jhumpa Lahiri
Manuel Muñoz

*A Few Points:

1) I didn’t include any of the 9/11 writers in here because there’s a whole slew of smaller pieces assigned for that day, and I just didn’t have the time to sort through all of them. However, it’s probably safe to say that 9/11 is a political event, even though I’ll argue that it’s a primarily textual one. We’ll see what you think.

2) By my count, there’s 26 writers in the first group, and 16 in the second. Moreover, the first group contains three major, long works of literature—Daisy Miller, As I Lay Dying, Postcards--whereas Zigzagger is the only long work written by a “nontraditional” writer.

3) The point of all of this: How are all of you making the judgment calls that you are making? How can someone like Audre Lorde be more, or less, political than someone like John Dos Passos? Moreover, how do we establish literary categories to begin with? Clearly, the ones above don’t work. Therefore, when some of you claim that there are too many “civil rights” writers in the course, what does that mean? Clearly, there aren’t more civil rights writers in the course than writers who don’t write on civil rights. Why, though, do the CR folks stand out? Why might that seem problematic to you? And why, of course, is it problematic that we are not reading Hemingway?

Okay, have at it. I’ll be curious to see what you come up with.

Curious

I don't mean to detract from Andrew's much more interesting post on Lady Gaga (see below), but I wanted to stir things up a bit.

A brief bit of background: The MLA is currently circulating a resolution to all of its members for commentary. This resolution essentially argues that tenure should be available to all university professors--full and part time. As I'm sure you're all aware, there is a very large mass of part time/"adjunct" professors here at GWU (and elsewhere). In fact, yours truly is one of them.

As I was reading through these comments, I was taken aback by the one that I've quoted, in part, below. The comment is in support of the resolution, but I was struck by some of the reasons why. Here are the reasons that struck me:

"Part-time employees, although not necessarily expected to produce scholarship, are nonetheless an integral part of a department's labor force. They often have more time to devote to students and are fundamental to the development of introductory courses that prepare students for upper-level courses taught by tenured faculty. Furthermore, they are routinely subjected to harsher criticism (and lower scores on evaluative materials) because they teach required courses to non-majors who resent them (for example, non-English majors in a composition course)."

I'm curious--sincerely curious--about your reactions to these statements, particularly the closing ones about non-majors taking courses taught by adjunct professors. I guess what I'm asking is this: What is it like taking a course like ours--an intro level lit course--that is required for English majors but is also available for Gen Ed credit? In cases like these, do you find that being a "non-major" in a particular department is a disadvantage?

Again, I'm not asking you to weigh in on me, our course, or other specific professors (and specific courses). You certainly have plenty of time to reflect on our class--here and elsewhere. I think I'm just interested in hearing about your experiences are as students in the contemporary university. Feel free to weigh in below. And no, none of this will impact your final grades ;-)

Anarchy in the Blogosphere

Regular readers of You Made Me Theorize have probably noticed that our list of contributors is growing. By the end of the week, once GW's add/drop period has ended, all of the regular contributors to this esteemed blog will be locked in place--and our class blogging experiment will begin shortly thereafter.

Full disclosure: I have relinquished control of this blog space. Each member of (this section of) ENG 120 will have administrative status, leaving everyone equally free to modify everything up here in whatever radical ways each one of us likes. I just hope that the students don't relieve me--the professor--of my administrative access!