Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 147

February 5, 2021: Sports in 2021: Banning Football?

[There’s a lot happening in and around the world of sports these days. So for my annual Super Bowl series, I wanted to AmericanStudy a handful of such issues. Leading up to a special weekend post on the genuinely revolutionary possibilities of sports!]

[This is a repeat post from my Super Bowl series a few years back, but to say it’s at least as relevant in 2021 is to understate the case!]

Two of the many complex and compelling layers to a campus and nation-wide conversation.

Throughout the Spring 2015 semester, Fitchburg State’s Center for Conflict Studies hosted a series of presentations, panels, and conversations focused on football, and more exactly on issues of violence and other controversies linked to that hugely popular sport. I’ve blogged about football in many of my Super Bowl series over the years, and have engaged briefly in those series with many of the issues that became part of these campus-wide conversations: concussionsand brain trauma; rapeand sexual violence; racism; and the exploitation of college athletes as I discussed in yesterday’s post on the NCAA. As much as I hope for this space to be conversational and communal, though, the truth is that it’s always framed and driven at least initially by my own interests, ideas, and perspectives, and so these semester-long Fitchburg State conversations about football and its debates added a great deal to my own perspective in multiple ways.

One way was through those conversations that were planned, such as a late April roundtable discussion of the highly controversial question, “Should football be banned?” The roundtable featured the kinds of interdisciplinary voices and connections that represent the best of Fitchburg State as a scholarly community, with presentations by philosopher David Svolba, Director of Athletics Sue Lauder, sociologist G.L. Mazard Wallace, exercise physiologist Monica Maldari, and my English Studies colleague Kisha Tracy. But besides the value of putting these voices and frames in conversation, the roundtable also allowed each presenter to develop a particular part of his or her identity at compelling length: Monica, for example, talked about how her discipline and her knowledge impacted her family’s decision not to let their young son play football; while G.L. highlighted how we can’t discuss football without addressing the issues of ethics, race, work and labor, and social obligations that form key parts of his teaching and scholarship.

Alongside those planned conversations, however, and offering an importantly complementary window into attitudes about and perceptions of these issues, were more impromptu debates that sprung up online. The most interesting such debate came in the wake of the aforementioned roundtable, in emails to the entire university community, and featured three voices: a Fitchburg State assistant football coach, who had attended the roundtable and offered his impassioned defense of the sport and its value; a Fitchburg State hockey coach, who had likewise attended and argued for the value of the roundtable itself as a layered scholarly conversation; and one of the event’s organizers, who followed up both emails in hopes of keeping the conversation going beyond that event and this spring’s series. These messages reminded us all that there are individuals, in our community and in every one, directly impacted by such debates and their potential outcomes and effects—the players most especially, in every sense, but lots of others as well. But they also made clear that in our 21st century moment, important public conversations don’t have to and can’t happen simply in individual places and times; they have to continue online, and I’d love for you to share any responses to help this one continue here!

Special post this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Aspects of sports in 2021 you’d emphasize?

February 4, 2021: Sports in 2021: The NCAA

[There’s a lot happening in and around the world of sports these days. So for my annual Super Bowl series, I wanted to AmericanStudy a handful of such issues. Leading up to a special weekend post on the genuinely revolutionary possibilities of sports!]

On what this year has helped reveal about college athletics, and what might still be possible.

Much of what I’d say about college sports over the last year, and specifically about what this fraught moment has revealed (or rather reinforced) about the NCAA, echoes the prior three posts in this series. Like yesterday’s subject the Olympics, the NCAA reflects a longstanding tradition that we tend to take for granted without sufficiently interrogating whether it should continue to function in these ways (or even exist at all, given that the NCAA, while not as corrupt as the IOC, certainly seems dictated far more by money than by the amateur athletes it represents). The questions I raised in Monday’s post about watching professional sports during a pandemic have only been amplified when it comes to watching college sports, given that these athletes are taking the same risks with no compensation at all. And the kinds of athletic activisms I highlighted on Tuesday have likewise been impressively undertaken by college athletes, for many years now and even more so over the last year.

In this post, I’d like to expand a bit on both the negative/limiting and positive/inspiring sides to those threads. When it comes to the negative, I want to be clear that I’m not someone who is overtly opposed in any way to college sports, or even someone who sees them as a lesser focus than academics: for one thing, the student athletes I’ve worked with at Fitchburg State have consistently been among the hardest-working and most committed students I’ve taught; and for another, broader thing, athletics has been part of higher education in America for at least a century and a half, and is quite simply a core element of these institutions and communities. Instead, what I would say has really changed over time is precisely the NCAA, and more exactly the way in which college sports have become such a money-making machine for everyone involved other than the vast majority of the athletes without whom they would not exist (of course a handful go on to professional careers, but that’s a tiny fraction) (also, the colleges themselves don’t really benefit from all that money, ironically). That’s been a hypocrisy and a serious problem for a long time, but watching college athletes compete during COVID (and watching schools pack in fans at the pandemic’s height) really drove home what the business has become, and how far it feels from what it is supposed to be about.

I’ve long been an advocate for compensating college athletes for all those reasons (and more besides), and 2020-2021 has only reinforced that perspective. It seems to me that there has never been a clearer moment to take that step than 2021, and I’ll keep making the case for it wherever I can. But to return to the most positive and inspiring college sports stories from 2020-21, I would say that we are already seeing vital illustrations of what happens if the folks who should be (and really are) at the heart of college sports are allowed to be the ones driving its actions and trends. Just as Colin Kaepernick’s individual activisms have become models for so many professional athletes over the last couple years, so too have singular stories like that of the Missouri football team become influences on a much broader and more overarching trend of college sports activisms. Those who criticized and attacked the Missouri players, like all those who argue for the “shut up and dribble” nonsense, have been rightfully drowned out by the voices and actions of the athletes themselves, reminding us that they are first and foremost humans and Americans and part of our social and political worlds, and that their athletic roles and communities offer an opportunity for (rather than an argument against) activism. I can’t wait to see where college athletes take their sports, and our society, next.  

Last SportsStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Aspects of sports in 2021 you’d emphasize?

February 3, 2021: Sports in 2021: The Olympics

[There’s a lot happening in and around the world of sports these days. So for my annual Super Bowl series, I wanted to AmericanStudy a handful of such issues. Leading up to a special weekend post on the genuinely revolutionary possibilities of sports!]

On the limits of traditions, and how one can potentially evolve in the present.

As with any longstanding histories and traditions, there are various moments across nearly a century that could be highlighted as the origin point for the modern Olympics, from Swedish games held in 1834, 1836, and 1843 to Liverpool onesheld between 1862 and 1867 and the Zappas Olympic Games held four times in Greece between 1859 and 1889. Not long after the last of those Zappas Games, an International Olympic Committee (IOC) was created, and that committee hosted an Olympic Congress at the University of Paris in June 1894, at which it was decided that the IOC’s first Olympic Games would be held at the Panathenaic Stadium in Athens in the summer of 1896. While all of these historic events certainly formed part of the origins of (or at least influences on) the Olympics as we know them, those 1896 Athens games are usually cited as the starting point for the modern Olympics that have continued more or less unabated for the subsequent 124 years.

I say “more or less unabated” because of course there have been times when the Olympics have been postponed or cancelled—three of them, in fact, all during the two World Wars. Last year’s COVID-caused postponement of the Tokyo Summer Olympics comprised the fourth such moment, and there is thus precedent for the Olympics carrying on despite such challenges. But precedent isn’t always sufficient to make something happen in the present, and it seems to me that are compelling arguments not just for not holding this particular Olympics (such as the decidedly mixed feelings of the Japanese people), but also for reconsidering the entire concept of the Olympics as we move forward (such as the deep and all too ongoing levels of corruption in the IOC). Just because the Olympics have been a part of our global sports world for 125 years, that is (and, yes, have roots in the ancient world), is not in and of itself a sufficient rationale for continuing to hold them in the present. That isn’t to say that there aren’t other possible such rationales, but they would need to be advanced on their own terms, without recourse to “tradition” as enough of an argument.

Indeed, I would go one step further still: if we’re going to continue holding Olympic Games, it seems clear to me that it will be vital to do away with various elements that have come to feel like “the way things are done.” One prominent example would be to hold every games in the same city/country (perhaps Athens and Greece), so that both the whole process of bidding (which has become inextricably tied to corruption) and the well-documented destructive aftermaths of the games would be done away with. But to follow up on yesterday’s post on athletic activisms, I would also argue that the Olympics, far from requiring athletes to refrain from political statements (as has been and remains the policy), will need to explicitly connect to political and social debates if they are to become more meaningful and relevant to our world. To cite just one particularly clear example: I don’t see how any global event in 2021 (and beyond) can fail to engage, forthrightly and centrally, with climate change, not just in making sure the games themselves do not contribute further to global climate change, but also in taking advantage of such occasions as an opportunity for collective activism. If the Olympics are to continue, they must leave tradition behind and evolve to meet the challenges of our 21st century world.

Next SportsStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Aspects of sports in 2021 you’d emphasize?

February 2, 2021: Sports in 2021: Activism

[There’s a lot happening in and around the world of sports these days. So for my annual Super Bowl series, I wanted to AmericanStudy a handful of such issues. Leading up to a special weekend post on the genuinely revolutionary possibilities of sports!]

On the huge step that athletes took in 2020, and where we go from here.

There’s a reason why I put an image of Colin Kaepernick and his anthem protests on the cover of Of Thee I Sing—few moments over the last few years have been more inspiring to me, or more representative of the best of critical patriotism and American ideals and identity, than was Kaepernick’s controversial and courageous social justice stand (so to speak). At the time, of course, his protests were also so singular that they made it all too easy for the NFL to single Kaepernick out and make an example of him (a likely illegal example at that), one that has frustratingly endured for the next five and a half years of Kaepernick’s inability to find work in the league (despite, as my sons and I like to note, far less talented players like the historically horrific Nathan Peterman continuing to get backup QB jobs). The subsequent years have certainly seen other moments of impressive athlete activism (from both individuals and teams), but I would nonetheless call those moments, like Kaepernick’s, the exceptions to the overall rule.

All that changed, and changed quite dramatically and powerfully, in 2020. I was particularly impressed by the thoroughgoing commitment of both NBA players and the entire league to foregrounding activism when they returned to play in the Orlando bubble during the summer of 2020—a commitment that was amplified further when, in the aftermath of the George Floyd murder, NBA and WNBA players took the additional activist step of an unprecedented, profoundly inspiring work stoppage. But many other leagues and athletes took their own activist steps in 2020, such as the NFL’s decision to play “Lift Every Voice and Sing” before each of the 2020 season’s opening games (a largely symbolic gesture to be sure, but also a striking contrast to the vitriol with which Kaepernick’s pre-game protests were met just a few years earlier). Taken together, this collection of athlete protests and activisms has made it truly impossible for any sports leagues, and indeed any sports fans, to embrace any longer the whole “shut up and dribble” mentality as either a practical possibility or a collective goal.

So what’s next? Will we gradually return to an era where athlete activisms are once again the exception, or is this collective sense of social and political purpose here to stay? Obviously I don’t know the answers to those questions, and as with every post this week (and every other week) I welcome your thoughts and ideas in comments (or by email if you prefer). But when I wrote in my holiday wish post for my sons that I hope their world doesn’t entirely or ever get “back to normal” after the disruption that was 2020, this is precisely one of those things that I hope remains forever changed. That doesn’t mean that athletes have to protest or be activists all of the time, no more than any of us do at our jobs or in our lives. But it does mean that we should accept and indeed celebrate a level of consistent activism from both these prominent public figures and (even more importantly) from the powerful institutions and leagues of which they’re part. I hope that in a few years’ time we’ll look back on 2020 as the start of a perennial trend when it comes to athlete and sports activisms.

Next SportsStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Aspects of sports in 2021 you’d emphasize?

February 1, 2021: Sports in 2021: COVID

[There’s a lot happening in and around the world of sports these days. So for my annual Super Bowl series, I wanted to AmericanStudy a handful of such issues. Leading up to a special weekend post on the genuinely revolutionary possibilities of sports!]

On playing and watching sports during a pandemic, past and present.

I’ve thought about the 1919 Black Sox scandal a number of times, including in that hyperlinked blog post and in my multiple viewings of John Sayles’ Eight Men Out(1988), but somehow I’ve never before realized (not until I started thinking about the subject of this blog post, anyway) that that infamous World Series took place at the heart of the influenza pandemic. The Wikipedia page on the scandal even notes that one of the players who was not part of the fix, pitcher Red Faber, “could not pitch [game one] due to a bout with the flu,” but doesn’t note the striking historical context for that individual illness. And I do think it’s a pretty significant historical context—if we agree with the thesis of Sayles’ film, that the White Sox players were exploited by owner Charles Comiskey (or, perhaps more accurately, that all major league baseball players were at least somewhat exploited in that era of precious few labor protections), it seems certain that the fraught reality of playing during a deadly pandemic would have only exacerbated that dynamic.

Of course professional baseball players and professional athletes in general in 2020-21 have far greater labor protections (and proportionally much higher salaries, although still somewhat less so for the journeymen making the league minimum than for the highest-paid stars), but the single biggest sports story of the last year nonetheless remains that of athletes being forced to play during a deadly pandemic. “Forced” is of course a complex term, since both professional and college athletes (on whom more later in the week) had the choice to opt out of their respective sports and seasons. But when the leagues decided (in negotiations with the players’ unions) to play, they did so knowing that the majority of players would take part and would thus be far more likely to get COVID than they otherwise might have been. And in the case of baseball, at least one team, the St. Louis Cardinals, did indeed experience a COVID outbreak that affected a large number of its players (other players and teams were also affected, but the Cardinals were especially devastated), with potential long-term physical and medical effects about which we still don’t know nearly enough.

Knowing all of that, what do I do with the fact that my sons and I still watched the MLB playoffs (among many other sporting events during this past year)? Compared to 1919 (when I’m pretty sure the stands were full for those World Series games), we’ve generally gotten better at understanding the social and medical realities and limiting the number of fans in attendance at games. But if we watch on TV—as the boys and I have done with all those 2020-21 sporting events—we’re still supporting the sports leagues, giving our money to them in one way or another, and at least not challenging in any way the fraught decision to play sports during the pandemic. None of that has led us to stop watching, though (not professional sports, anyway—college is a bit of a different story and I’ll have more to say on that later in the week). I don’t have a grand final conclusion about those contradictory thoughts—just a recognition of the complexities of playing and watching sports during a pandemic (and a request, as ever, to hear your own thoughts on these topics).

Next SportsStudying tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Aspects of sports in 2021 you’d emphasize?

January 30-31, 2021: January 2021 Recap

[A Recap of the month that was in AmericanStudying.]

January 4: Hope-full Texts: “A Long December”: A New Year’s series on hope-full cultural works starts with the Counting Crows song we were all quoting as December and 2020 ended.

January 5: Hope-full Texts: The Marrow of Tradition: The series continues the hard-won hope at the end of my favorite American novel.

January 6: Hope-full Texts: The Shawshank Redemption: What we can learn about hope from three famous quotes in the cult classic film, as the series hopes on.

January 7: Hope-full Texts: “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers”: One of the most beautiful poetic visions of hope, and an equally moving essay about it by one of my favorite AmericanStudiers.

January 8: Hope-full Texts: Radical Hope: The series concludes with perhaps the best of the many things I’ve learned from inspiring fellow teachers and scholars like Kevin Gannon.

January 9-10: Crowd-sourced Hope: My favorite crowd-sourced post ever, with countless responses from fellow AmericanHopers in all the week’s categories and more.  

January 11: Of Thee I Sing: Celebratory Patriotism: In honor of my forthcoming book, a series on my four categories of patriotism starts with the most familiar.

January 12: Of Thee I Sing: Mythic Patriotism: The book series continues with the exclusionary, white supremacist form of patriotism that our celebrations too often morph into.

January 13: Of Thee I Sing: Active Patriotism: The first of my two alternative categories of patriotism, as the series rolls on.

January 14: Of Thee I Sing: Critical Patriotism: The alternative form of patriotism for which my book is ultimately arguing.

January 15-16: Sharing Of Thee I Sing: The series concludes with a special post on five of the many places and ways I’d love to share this book and the contested history of American patriotism.

January 17: Emily Hamilton-Honey’s Hope-full Guest Post: Following up the prior weekend’s Crowd-sourced Post, my twitter friend Emily shared some further thoughts on texts that offer hope!

January 18: MLK Histories: The Real King: My annual MLK Day post on remembering the full Martin Luther King Jr. beyond the most famous speech.

January 19: MLK Histories: “Give Us the Ballot”: A series on under-remembered King texts kicks off with one of his first prominent public speeches.

January 20: MLK Histories: Stride Toward Freedom: The series continues with his memoir and collective history of the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott.

January 21: MLK Histories: Where Do We Go from Here?: King’s final book and the first of two ways to think about his work resonating beyond his death, as the series rolls on.

January 22: MLK Histories: The Poor People’s Campaign: The series concludes with the collective action and the second of two ways to think about King’s work resonating beyond his assassination.

January 23-24: MLK’s 21st Century Heirs: A special weekend post on five figures who carry King’s legacy into the 21st century.

January 25: Spring 2021 Previews: First-Year Writing II: A Spring semester series kicks off with balancing schedule flexibility and assignment scaffolding in first-year writing.

January 26: Spring 2021 Previews: American Lit II: The series continues with the drawbacks and benefits of radically reworking a survey course’s chronology.

January 27: Spring 2021 Previews: Major American Writers of the 20th Century: How to achieve depth without longer works and what I fear might be lost in the process, as the series teaches on.

January 28: Spring 2021 Previews: American Art and Lit 1800-1860: The temptation of the familiar and pushing toward something new—with your help!

January 29: Spring 2021 Previews: Projects Old and New: The series concludes with three scholarly projects on my radar this Spring.

Super Bowl series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. Topics you’d like to see covered in this space? Guest Posts you’d like to contribute? Lemme know!

January 29, 2021: Spring 2021 Previews: Projects Old and New

[It was delayed by a week (leading to the cancellation of Spring Break), and its format may well change by the time this series airs (as of this writing my four regular classes will be hybrid, as they were in the Fall), but a new semester starts this week nonetheless. So this week I’ll preview some of what’s different and what will be the same in my Spring 2021 courses!]

On three scholarly projects on my radar this Spring:

1)      Of Thee I Sing: The due date for my 6th book has been pushed back a couple times—it will now be at the publisher in a couple weeks, and available for general purchase in March. But my plan to talk about the project, and the contested history of American patriotism, at any and every opportunity hasn’t changed, and so I hope that such virtual talks—at bookstores, at libraries and archives, at museums and historic sites, with classes and colleagues, with reading or discussion groups, and more—will be a big part of my Spring. I’d love to hear your thoughts on any and all such opportunities, whether here in comments or by email. Thanks!

2)      1893: Just a couple days before I’m drafting this post I signed a contract (once again with Rowman & Littlefield, natch) for my next book, discussed in that hyperlinked post and now with the working title 1893: The World’s Columbian Exposition and the Remaking of America. I’m so excited to spend a good bit of my free time this Spring researching and writing the stories of the many prominent Americans whose lives, texts, and identities intersected with the 1893 World’s Fair. I’ve already learned some great sources and resources about and around the Exposition from colleagues near and far, and would love to hear your ideas, whether here in comments or by email. Thanks!

3)      America the Atlas: Meanwhile, I’m excited to be working as the main scholarly advisor to another interesting project, a coffee-table type book that will tell the story of American history through maps (especially) and images. I’ve already been fortunate enough to recruit a diverse and impressive group of scholarly contributors to help structure and flesh out the book’s ten chapters (which move from the earliest peoplings up through our contemporary moment), but I could always use additional ideas for maps, images, communities, sections, and histories we’d want to include in a project ike this. Share ‘em here or, y’know, by email—thanks!

January Recap this weekend,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring courses or work you wanna share?

January 28, 2021: Spring 2021 Previews: American Art and Lit 1800-1860

[It was delayed by a week (leading to the cancellation of Spring Break), and its format may well change by the time this series airs (as of this writing my four regular classes will be hybrid, as they were in the Fall), but a new semester starts this week nonetheless. So this week I’ll preview some of what’s different and what will be the same in my Spring 2021 courses!]

On resisting the temptation of the familiar and pushing toward something new--with your help!

The last few years my one annual graduate course for our English Studies MA program has alternated between Spring and Summer semesters, and this time I’m back to the Spring, with a hybrid class that will meet in person once at the start of the semester and once at the end (with weekly Google Meet conversations and plenty of asynchronous online responses in between). The class I’ll be teaching, American Art and Literature 1800-1860, was on the books before I started at FSU in 2005, and is one I’ve only taught once before, in the 2007 Summer session (making it the second graduate class I taught at FSU). I’d be lying if I said I remembered much at all about a class I taught 13.5 years ago, but in looking at the syllabus, I like the choices past Ben made, and especially the breadth of genres, media, and perspectives & identities featured therein: main texts from The Scarlet Letter and Leaves of Grassto A Son of the Forest and A New Home; Who’ll Follow?; and secondary ones including paintings, magazines and newspapers, speeches, essays, local color short stories, and more.

I’ve never believed in reinventing just for the sake of reinventing, and to that end, when I’ve found a syllabus that works well, I’ve tended to use it for at least a few sections of the course before considering any significant changes. Given that general attitude, and then factoring in, well, [gestures at everything], it stands to reason that I’d keep this syllabus the same for my Spring 2021 section of the course. And I sure considered doing so—but the truth is, I’ve learned a ton about this era in particular, and about American literature and culture in general, in those intervening 13 years. From individual voices and works like Henry Highland Garnet’s address and Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s “Cacoethes Scribendi” to more communal conversations like the Lowell Offering and the Young America movement to historical communities like the Chinese in California and the Mashpee Revolt in Massachusetts, there’s just a great deal that I’d want on a syllabus like this one that wasn’t there in 2007, and I’m excited to figure out where and how to include it this time around.

In that spirit, however, I’m also interested in broadening the “art” part of the course, in thinking about how to make my materials more genuinely multimedia. And for that I’d really love your thoughts and ideas, all—takes on either particular works, artistic or cultural genres, or websites/projects that would work well in this class? I’ll leave some room to slot them into the syllabus, so I’d love to hear your ideas, thanks!

Last Spring preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring courses or work you wanna share?

January 27, 2021: Spring 2021 Previews: Major American Writers of the 20th Century

[It was delayed by a week (leading to the cancellation of Spring Break), and its format may well change by the time this series airs (as of this writing my four regular classes will be hybrid, as they were in the Fall), but a new semester starts this week nonetheless. So this week I’ll preview some of what’s different and what will be the same in my Spring 2021 courses!]

On how to achieve depth without longer works, and what I fear will be lost in the process.

My Major American Writers of the 20th Century syllabus has changed a good bit since I first taught the class in Spring 2006 (that was the semester of the very, very ill-fated Portnoy’s Complaint experiment), but one thing has been the same across every section and iteration: I’ve organized it around a series of longer readings (mostly novels and short story cycles, with a couple poetry collections usually thrown in for good measure). For the last few sections I’ve settled into a pretty consistent group: Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie, Richard Wright’s Native Son, Langston Hughes’ collected poems (not all of them, but a good number across the two weeks), Sylvia Plath’s collected poems (ditto), Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral (which as I wrote in that above post works much, much better with undergrads than Portnoy did), and a rotating 21stcentury text (most recently Everything I Never Told You, which was our FSU Community Read book at the time).

That syllabus has worked very well, and I don’t imagine I would have changed it this time around (maybe I would have tried a new 21st century novel to keep things fresh). But then came COVID, and my decision—the focus of this Fall semester reflection post—not to use longer works in any of my current classes (and also not to require students to purchase any texts, which similarly limits the possibility of things like collected poems or short story collections). I still very much want this class to focus on reading individual authors at length and in depth (we don’t get a chance to do that in too many courses, and I believe it’s a distinct and valuable skill to practice), so the central question I’ve been grappling with is how to do that without diving into individual longer works. For poets like Hughes and Plath it’s easier to find a ton of poems online and thus mirror what two weeks with a poetry collection might have looked like; but this isn’t a poetry-centered class, nor in my experience do FSU students want to read only poetry for an entire semester. So my plan for the other handful of focal authors will be to choose folks for whom we can read a number of shorter works and/or excerpts of novels, to build that sense of a prose writer’s voice, style, themes, career through that kind of multi-textual deep dive.

I think that plan should help make this section of Major American Authors somewhat equivalent to my prior ones, at least in that funhouse-mirror way that all COVID teaching has been and remains. But I can’t lie, I think there is something distinct about spending two weeks reading a single longer work—and, at the risk of sounding like a truly old fogey, about holding that work in your hands while you do so, although I know that many of my students now read longer works on a device—that can’t be replicated through a collection of shorter ones. I’d say the same about reading through an author’s collected poems, rather than reading a series of individual poems online. Perhaps I’ll just have to resign myself to the fact that this, like many other aspects of teaching and learning and life, will be less present (if not entirely absent) in Spring 2021. But if there are ways to balance these elements and goals differently, as with every topic this week I’d love to hear your thoughts!

Next Spring preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring courses or work you wanna share?

January 26, 2021: Spring 2021 Previews: American Lit II

[It was delayed by a week (leading to the cancellation of Spring Break), and its format may well change by the time this series airs (as of this writing my four regular classes will be hybrid, as they were in the Fall), but a new semester starts this week nonetheless. So this week I’ll preview some of what’s different and what will be the same in my Spring 2021 courses!]

On the definite drawbacks and potential benefits of radically reworking a survey’s chronology.

One thing I know I’m going to do with my Spring semester section of American Lit II (to be clear, I’m drafting these posts in late December, so my Spring plans are still very much unfolding) is what I highlighted in this Fall reflection post: use only shorter readings (and more of them), rather than the six longer works around which I have organized every American Lit II syllabus since I first taught the class in Spring 2006. That’s a significant change, but it’s one that will be even more prominent for the course I’ll write about tomorrow, so I’ll save those thoughts for that post. So in this post, I’ll write instead about a potential change I’m considering for Am Lit II in particular, one that would respond to the contemporary realities and needs I highlighted in this Fall reflection post but would represent an even more striking shift from my normal pedagogical practices: breaking the course’s usual, entirely linear chronology (with four main Units/time periods, from the mid-19th century to the late 19th century to the early 20th century to the turn of the 21st century) in favor of a back and forth between interconnected historical and contemporary texts and authors.

The main drawback to this reworking is likely obvious, but deserves a paragraph of consideration nonetheless: it will make it much more difficult for students to learn and engage with American history between 1865 and 2021. Let me be very clear: I’m not one of those who suggest that today’s students know less history than their predecessors did; quite the opposite, I think college students are always still learning such histories, from classes like this one. And while a literature survey isn’t a history one, I have always believed (good AmericanStudier that I am, natch) that the former does offer a chance to think historically, to move across time period Units and then consider what different literary texts and authors help us see in those respective eras (and in their literary and cultural trends, of course). If I do replace that straightforward linear chronology with pairs or groups of readings that cut across different time periods (and especially that put aspects of our own moment in conversation with those from distinct historical eras), I would certainly still try to frame historical contexts for the students—but I have no doubt that it would be far more difficult for the students to keep them in mind than it is when we have one time period and its particular contexts in front of us at a time.

So that’s the main drawback, and it’s not one I take at all lightly. But I think there are significant potential benefits to this strategy, including a compelling historical one: the opportunity to think about the relationship between historical periods (and works and authors) and our own moment (and its works and authors). To name just one example: I’d be very excited to have students read Sui Sin Far’s “In the Land of the Free” (1912) in conversation with Cristina Henriquez’s “Everywhere Is Far from Here” (2017) to think about immigration laws and restrictions, detentions and family separations, American ideals and realities, and much more. The two stories aren’t identical by any means, no more so than are their historical contexts, and that’s precisely the point: such pairings wouldn’t be about similarity necessarily, but rather about comparative reading and analysis. As I write this post I’m talking myself into this major syllabus change, but I’d also love to hear your thoughts—on survey classes, on chronology, and on bringing the contemporary into our classes.

Next Spring preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring courses or work you wanna share?