Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 220

September 13, 2018: MassacreStudying: Reconstruction Massacres

[On September 10th, 1897, striking coal miners at the Lattimer mine near Hazleton, PA, were attacked by a sheriff’s posse, killing at least 19 and wounding many more. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy historical massacres, leading up to a special weekend post on contemporary hate crimes.]I’ve written a good deal, in this space and elsewhere, about the 1898 Wilmington massacre and the 1921 Tulsa massacre (both too often described as “race riots”), among other such acts of racial violence. But just as under-remembered, and perhaps even more historically telling, are the massacres that marred and helped undermine Reconstruction. Here are three:1)      New Orleans(1866): In late July, 1866, a group of African Americans (many of them Civil War veterans) marching to the Louisiana Constitutional Convention were stopped and attacked by Mayor John Monroe (a longtime Confederate sympathizer and white supremacist), New Orleans police forces, and an angry white mob. As happened in Wilmington, Tulsa, and so many other massacres, this individual starting point morphed into a city-wide rampage against African Americans citizens and communities, one that ended with hundreds of African Americans (both convention delegates and others) dead and wounded. This massacre took place early enough in Reconstruction that a federal response was both possible and swift—Monroe and many other officials were moved from office, and Reconstruction efforts in the city intensified. Yet at the same time, the New Orleans massacre (along with another 1866 massacre, in Memphis) reveals just how fully white supremacists were prepared to use official and political as well as mob and vigilante violence to oppose both Reconstruction and African American rights.2)      Colfax(1873): By the early 1870s, such white supremacist racial violence had been codified into organized groups—most famously the Ku Klux Klan, but also parallel groups such as Louisiana’s White League (which, as that platform reflects, was not only a paramilitary terrorist group but also a political appendage of the state’s Democratic Party). Not coincidentally, the League’s first organized action was the Colfax Massacre, in which members attacked an African American militia; although at first shots were exchanged by both sides, the militiamen were outnumbered and quickly surrendered, only to continue being massacred by the League members. All told more than 100 African Americans were killed, and only three White League members convicted of murder—and those convictions were overturned by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional. The Charles Lane book reviewed at that last hyperlink argues in its subtitle that both Colfax and the Court decision represented “the betrayal of Reconstruction,” and it’s hard not to agree that by this time, every level of America’s social and political power structure seemed allied with the white supremacists.3)      Hamburg (1876): The ultimate betrayal and abandonment of Reconstruction are usually associated with the 1876 Presidential election, but racial violence played a significant part in that culminating year as well. In many ways, the massacre in Hamburg (South Carolina) echoes the others I’ve written about here: a seemingly small incident of racial tension (two white farmers had a difficult time driving their wagon through a July 4th march by African American militiamen) exploded into an orgy of racial violence, as a July 8thattempt to disband the militia was followed by the arrival of a white mob who first attacked the militia’s armory and then expanded their massacre to much of the city’s African American population. Yet not only were there no federal or legal responses to the massacre, but instead it became part of the Democratic Party’s triumph in the state’s elections, as white supremacist candidate Wade Hampton uses a mythologized narrative of the massacre as a “race riot” to help gain the governor’s seat and put an end to Reconstruction in South Carolina—one more reflection of the central role that these acts of racial violence played in opposing and undermining Reconstruction throughout the period.Last massacre tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

September 12, 2018: MassacreStudying: Wounded Knee

[On September 10th, 1897, striking coal miners at the Lattimer mine near Hazleton, PA, were attacked by a sheriff’s posse, killing at least 19 and wounding many more. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy historical massacres, leading up to a special weekend post on contemporary hate crimes.]On three distinct attempts to raise our national awareness of a horrific event.It’s nothing short of a national travesty that we don’t better remember the 1890 massacre at South Dakota’s Wounded Knee Creek, perhaps the most egregious and symbolic violence committed against Native Americans by the US military (although that’s a long and tragically competitive list). That’s my take, but it’s also one of the central arguments of Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West (1970), among the truly pioneering works of Native American history and studies, multiculturalism, and ethnic studies. As its subtitle suggests, Brown’s book covers much more than just Wounded Knee—but throughout, his overt and impassioned purpose is to force such events into our collective memories and histories, to use his recovered sources and scholarly analysis to change Americans’ awareness and perspectives.Obviously I’m on board with such a project, and Brown’s book was a best-seller for more than a year, suggesting that his message reached far more readers than do most scholarly works. But it’s also possible to imagine that most of those readers were already sympathetic to Native American experiences and voices, and thus that while his book might have enriched and enlarged such perspectives, it didn’t necessarily change them. Genuine and sweeping change, this argument might go, requires more aggressive actions, ones that demand national attention and response on both political and social levels—actions like those undertaken by members of the American Indian Movement, including their 1973 “occupation” of Wounded Knee. That 71-day occupation, the resulting federal “siege,” and the accompanying and subsequent threats and even acts of violence, eerily mirrored certain aspects of the original Wounded Knee massacre—but that, as much as anything, was precisely AIM’s point: that so long as we don’t engage with histories and communities such as those connected to Wounded Knee, we will simply continue to replicate and reinforce those histories and further destroy those communities.  I couldn’t agree more, and despite the legal and controversial challenges that significantly derailed AIM’s efforts later in the decade, the group most definitely brought such awareness to Native American voices and histories. Yet as the Wounded Knee occupation illustrates, they did so in an explicitly confrontational manner, one likely to create as much anger as empathy in broader American audiences; while such activism is entirely appropriate and even necessary, it’s worth considering whether and how it can be complemented by efforts to entertain as well as educate those broader audiences. To that end, I would point to Michael Apted’s film Thunderheart (1992), a murder mystery and thriller that stars Val Kilmer and Sam Shepard, features a great deal of humor and suspense, and is in many ways a Hollywood movie. Yet at its heart, the film centers on, and connects the spiritual and psychological awakening of Kilmer’s protagonist to, two historical events: a fictionalized representation of AIM’s efforts; and an accurate engagement with the Wounded Knee Massacre. Thunderheart’s broad American audiences wouldn’t necessarily know they were learning about Wounded Knee and its related histories and contexts—but there’s no question that they, like Kilmer’s character, would come away with significantly strengthened perspectives on those questions.Next massacre tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

September 11, 2018: MassacreStudying: Mystic

[On September 10th, 1897, striking coal miners at the Lattimer mine near Hazleton, PA, were attacked by a sheriff’s posse, killing at least 19 and wounding many more. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy historical massacres, leading up to a special weekend post on contemporary hate crimes.]On three texts that help us remember one of post-contact America’s earliest dark histories.The central military action of the Pequot War(1636-37), the first large-scale conflict between the English and Native American communities in colonial New England, was the 1637 massacre of the Pequot village of Mystic (in modern-day Connecticut). A number of Puritan figures and historians wrote about the attack (including William Bradford in Of Plimoth Plantation), but perhaps the most telling such document was composed by military leader Captain John Underhill. In his account Underhill notes that mostly women, children, and the elderly were killed in the massacre (which was timed purposefully for a moment when the village’s warriors were on a raiding mission), and justifies that fact by writing, “sometimes the Scripture declareth women and children must perish with their parents. … We had sufficient light from the Word of God for our proceedings.” Violence and brutality are inevitable in war, but directing them at non-combatants comprises another level of brutality—and using religion to rationalize such actions another level still (if a far-too common one).Accompanying Underhill’s account of the massacre was a famous woodcutting that has become a central image through which the massacre is remembered (when it is remembered at all). The woodcutting certainly captures just how surrounded the village was, a detail that looks far different if we sympathize with the villagers more than Underhill himself was able to. But it also captures another and even more complex historical detail: the second circle of attackers are Native Americans, an attempt to include in the image the hundreds of Mohegan, Narragansett, and Niantic warriors who took part in the massacre as allies to the English and/or enemies to the Pequots. That Native American participation does not excuse the English in the slightest, neither for their overall impetus for the attack nor for their particular actions during it. But it does remind us of the quantity and variety of Native American tribes within even a relatively close geographic area, and of the individual and at times conflicting situations and needs facing each tribe (at any historical point, but doubly so in the post-contact era of course). That’s part of the story of Mystic as well, and one that the woodcutting accurately highlights.While texts such as Underhill’s account and the woodcutting can thus reveal (if sometimes unintentionally) multiple layers to the massacre at Mystic, they nonetheless originated from and are ultimately driven by an English perspective on the battle. Also originating from the perspective of an Anglo American author, but working hard and well to create a Pequot perspective, is the pivotal Chapter IV in Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s historical novel Hope Leslie (1827). As I highlighted at length in this early blog post, Sedgwick’s Magawisca—a composite fictional character who is the daughter of an actual historical figure, the Pequot chief Sassacus—offers in her long monologue (to her young English friend and potential love interest Everell Fletcher) about the Mystic massacre what Sedgwick’s narrator calls “a very different picture” of the battle. As with any historical fiction, and certainly any that seeks to cross cultural boundaries, Sedgwick’s chapter and novel are complex and open to critique as well as celebration (and everything in between). Yet I believe that Sedgwick succeeds on a number of levels in this chapter, perhaps especially in her portrayal of the profoundly human effects of the massacre and how those effects echoed and extended well beyond 1637. Such effects must be part of our collective memories of Mystic, and Sedgwick’s text helps us begin to engage them more fully.Next massacre tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

September 10, 2018: MassacreStudying: Lattimer

[On September 10th, 1897, striking coal miners at the Lattimer mine near Hazleton, PA, were attacked by a sheriff’s posse, killing at least 19 and wounding many more. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy historical massacres, leading up to a special weekend post on contemporary hate crimes.]On one pessimistic and one optimistic takeaway from the anti-labor massacre.I’m gonna turn this first paragraph over to Erik Loomis, who as I highlighted in that tribute post is one of our most prolific and important labor historians. His post on the Lattimer Massacre is, as usual, a must-read. So check that out and I’ll see you back here after!Welcome back! As Erik likewise traces at length in this piece for Bill Moyers’ website, Lattimer was only one of many such episodes of brutal violence directed at American workers by police, corporate hired guns, and other such authoritarian mobs. (For two powerful cultural representations of such violence, both focused on the 1920 West Virginia coal wars, check out John Sayles’ film Matewan [1987] and Diane Gillam Fisher’s poetry collection Kettle Bottom [2004].) Indeed, while the Haymarket Square bombing might be the most famous single act of violence connected to the American labor movement, the telling irony is that the vast majority of such violence was directed at laborers, not emanating from them (if, as I wrote in that May series, the bombing even emanated from them at all). You can’t tell the story of labor in America without remembering such acts of violence, not only because they happened and happened so often, but also and especially because they reflect the lengths to which corporations and their allies would go to oppose strikes and protests and other labor activisms. That’s not a happy lesson, but it’s a vital one, and Lattimer helps us better remember it.Lattimer also helps us challenge another set of dark histories too often tied to the labor movement: narratives of ethnic and racial division and opposition. It’s true that corporate interests often tried to divide groups of workers along such lines (as Matewan portrays quite well), and of course also true that the labor movement was in no ways immune to the prejudices and bigotry that have been part of every community and moment in American history. At Lattimer, mining boss A.S. Van Wickle tried to capitalize on these histories by bringing in Slavic workers (who had historically been kept out of the United Mine Workers union) to break the strike; but the workers joined the strike instead, helping add their voices to a truly multi-ethnic community of striking laborers. Over the next few years, UMW membership surged dramatically, making the union far more powerful and successful in its activisms and negotiations, and there’s quite simply no way to understand that shift without considering the role of multi-ethnic workers and communities. As with so many of our darkest histories, Lattimer also featured moments and threads of hope, representations of the best of American communities that make it that much more important to better remember this historic massacre.Next massacre tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

September 8-9, 2018: Other Fall 2018 Updates

[This week I start my 14th year at Fitchburg State. For that momentous occasion, I decided to focus in this fall preview series on one thing that has evolved for each class I’m teaching, and one that’s a bit more longstanding. Leading up to this special weekend update on a few ongoing and upcoming events!]First, I have to admit that the original focus for this scheduled update post was a bit too optimistic, as I don’t yet have a definite update for my fifth book, Exclusion & Inclusion: The Battle to Define America . Thanks to my awesome agent Cecelia Cancellaro the manuscript is out with a publisher, so I’m hoping I might have news soon and will of course keep you all posted! But for now, here are updates on a few other good things:1)      An Upcoming Lecture: As I mentioned in Thursday’s post, I’m giving a talk on immigration histories and Celeste Ng’s Everything I Never Told You to help kick off Fitchburg and Fitchburg State’s Community Read events for the year. If you’re in the Fitchburg or Mass. area, the talk is open to the public and I’d love to see you there!2)      NeMLA Deadline: If you’d like to join us at the 50th NeMLA Convention in Washington, DC next March, you’ve got a few more weeks to submit abstracts. I’m the new American Lit Director, so let me know any questions or thoughts, and I hope to see you in DC!3)      NEASA Colloquium: On September 29that Boston University, the New England American Studies Association will host its annual fall Colloquium. This one will be focused on the theme of Community, and as usual should offer a range of practical and productive conversations for graduate students, junior faculty, and everyone interested in American Studies, academia, and public scholarship (among other topics). I’m the new NEASA President, so let me know any questions and I hope to see you at BU!4)      A Great New Blog: My most recent Guest Poster, Kathleen Morrissey, has started an awesome new blog of her own, Nerdy Vegan Fitness. The blog is as multi-layered, thoughtful, self-reflective, and inspiring as Kathleen herself, so check it out and help support a great new voice in the blogosphere!5)      Soccer: For something completely different, this Saturday I start a new season of soccer coaching, this one for my older son’s 7thand 8th grade travel team. We open with an away game in Newton, the first such travel game for both him and me, and I’ll be meeting the team’s 21 (!) players for the first time just a few minutes before the game. So send some good thoughts my way around 12:45 on Saturday if you would!Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you all have going on this Fall?

September 7, 2018: Fall 2018 Previews: Voices of Resistance for ALFA

[This week I start my 14th year at Fitchburg State. For that momentous occasion, I decided to focus in this fall preview on one thing that has evolved for each class I’m teaching, and one that’s a bit more longstanding. Leading up to a special weekend update on my next book project!]On a couple voices I know I’ll be including in my fall adult learning class, and a request for suggestions!After not teaching any adult learning classes in the spring for the first time in many many semesters (just a scheduling issue, as every semester is better with at least one such class on my schedule), this fall I’ll return to teaching in Fitchburg State’s Adult Learning in the Fitchburg Area (ALFA) program with a new course on voices of resistance in American history. I’ve generally tried throughout my fifteen or so ALFA classes to alternate between more specifically literary and more broadly AmericanStudies topics, and it was time for a more AmericanStudies one; within that latter category, I started with my Spring 2017 ALFA course on 21stcentury issues and events to move more overtly into topics that feel salient to our contemporary moment, and decided to continue that trend with this fall’s class. I probably don’t need to write too much about why a class highlighting voices and texts from across American history that have resisted and challenged the darkest sides of our national story fits that contemporary bill, do I?My plan for focal points for the course’s five meetings is to include both figures for which we can work with particular texts and those for which we can’t. An example of a textual focus would be William Apess, whose resistance went well beyond his essays and speeches(including his vital work with the Mashpee Revolt), but for whom we can still read those wonderful documents to examine his voice and perspective. An example of a less textual focus would be Elizabeth Freeman and Quock Walker, whose resistance does connect to documents like the 1783 Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court decision but for whom it’d be important to highlight and discuss multiple histories and moments that can help us think about their own identities and actions. Each of those figures resisted some of our darkest national histories (Indian Removal and slavery, respectively), and modeled both strategies for challenging those narratives and victories in arguing for an alternative vision of American law, society, and community. I think they still have a lot to tell and teach us in 2018!Obviously I have ideas for all five weeks, but I’d really love to extend my own knowledge with suggestions from y’all! So who or what would you recommend as voices, figures, texts, moments of resistance in American history? This AmericanStudying mind wants to know! Book update this weekend,BenPS. What do you all have going on this Fall?

September 6, 2018: Fall 2018 Previews: Major American Authors of the 20th Century

[This week I start my 14th year at Fitchburg State. For that momentous occasion, I decided to focus in this fall preview on one thing that has evolved for each class I’m teaching, and one that’s a bit more longstanding. Leading up to a special weekend update on my next book project!]On the difficult decision to replace a long-time favorite text, and the opportunity it has opened up.Despite the class’s title (one created in the late 20th century, of course), every time I’ve had the chance to teach the upper-level literature seminar Major American Authors of the 20th Century I’ve made sure to bring us up to the present, ending with a 21st century text. I’m not positive whether I initially used a different one, but for at least the last few sections it’s been the same novel in that slot, Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao(2008). I’m a huge fan of Oscar in any case and setting, but it also works very well as a representation of many ways in which American literature and culture have evolved as we’ve moved into the 21st century (or, more exactly, in which our cultural works have begun to reflect longstanding aspects of our community and identity more fully over this period): the bilingualism, the pop culture allusions, the multivocal and nonchronological structure, the ongoing effects of the 20thcentury past on our society and identity (best captured by Díaz’s invented but profoundly representative concept of the fukú), and so much more. I’m not sure any 21st century American novel would work better in the culminating spot for a course like this.Which is to say, it wasn’t the slightest bit easy for me to remove Oscar from the syllabus for this Fall’s section of Major American Authors. I had already placed my book orders by the time the #metoo movement accusations against Díaz surfaced in the spring, and it would have been simple enough to keep the novel on the syllabus at that point (and, for example, to address the accusations as part of our class conversations when we got to the book). I’m also not under any illusions that a fair number of the authors I feature in any particular course didn’t have various personal issues of their own, problems that might well in many cases even compare unfavorably to the accusations against Díaz. But at the same time, these particular accusations and their responses and effects are continuing to unfold in our own moment, in front of us, uncertainly and painfully, and so it felt appropriate to me to take a break from assigning (and thus asking students to purchase) Díaz’s novel—not to ban it and him from my classes in any long-term or permanent way, necessarily, but not to use one of my very few current syllabus spots on an author who at the very least represents some of the more troubling and ugly sides to dynamics of gender, sexuality, and power in our current moment.If the decision to remove Díaz from the Major American Authors syllabus was a tough one, the choice of a 21stcentury novel with which to replace Oscarwas far simpler for me. Our Fitchburg State Community Read text for the 2018-19 academic year is Celeste Ng’s wonderful debut novel Everything I Never Told You (2014), and I jumped at the opportunity to put her book on a syllabus of mine for the first time. Ng’s novel is a gripping mystery, a moving family drama, and a potent examination of multi-generational immigrant and ethnic American identities and stories, a combination of genres and themes that makes it another exemplary 21st century American book to be sure. But this will also be the first time I’ve had the chance to teach our university’s Community Read text, and I’m really excited to do so, to connect the students and class to the multi-part conversations and events that constitute our Community Read efforts each year (including this time a September talk by me on immigration in American history and identity, for more on which watch this space!). I continue to have mixed feelings about removing Díaz from the syllabus, and plan to revisit that question moving forward—but I have nothing but excitement when it comes to the chance to teach Ng’s novel, overall but this semester in particular.Last preview tomorrow,BenPS. What do you all have going on this Fall?

September 5, 2018: Fall 2018 Previews: American Lit II Online

[This week I start my 14th year at Fitchburg State. For that momentous occasion, I decided to focus in this fall preview on one thing that has evolved for each class I’m teaching, and one that’s a bit more longstanding. Leading up to a special weekend update on my next book project!]On what I can’t change about teaching a survey online, and what I hope to.This past Spring semester I taught my second entirely online course, this one a section of American Literature II (my first such course was The Short Story). As I discussed in my preview post for that Spring 2018 class, one of my earliest and most consequential decisions as I revised my existing American Lit II syllabus for the online version was to swap out the novels that typically form the core of the class’s units (six books in total, grouped into three pairings) for multiple short stories, excerpts of longer works, and poems (including at least one text by each of those novel’s authors). I didn’t feel then, and continue not to feel, that there is any substantive value in (or even much practical possibility of) asking students in an online class to read longer works across multiple weeks. In my experience, even doing so in an in-person class requires (as I discussed in this long-ago class preview post) various strategies to encourage students to stick with and get through the longer works, and those strategies don’t seem possible in an entirely online setting. Perhaps I’ll change my mind with more experiences, but for now, shorter works and only shorter works it is in my online classes.So my syllabus and reading list for this second online American Lit II section look pretty much identitical to the first ones from last semester, and I’m okay with that. What I wouldn’t be okay with, however, would be using the same unit/time period introductory materials that I sent to the students in that prior section (or, more exactly, using them in the same way I did then). As I mentioned way back in my first blog thoughts on this online survey class, I knew that my desire to provide even brief historical, cultural, and literary contexts for each main unit/time period was going to present new challenges in an online setting, and I was unfortunately quite right about that. I created documents with some basic info about my chosen such contexts, and sent them to the students at the start of each unit; I also asked them to incorporate at least a bit of that information into their first weekly Blackboard post for that unit. A few did so and did so thoughtfully, but for the most part it seemed clear to me (and understandable, given the need in any class and especially an online class to budget time and effort as productively as possible) that the students didn’t much look at these unit context sheets, and certainly didn’t take a lot of meaningful information out of them.That may have something to do with how I presented the contexts on the sheets, and I do plan to revise to make them more concise and bullet-pointed and hopefully communicative. But in truth, I don’t think any version of the sheets would suffice if I can’t find ways to make them more central to the students’ work in the course. The most straightforward way to do so would be to create brief quizzes for each sheet, ones that quite simply ask students to provide basic info in order to verify that they have opened and looked at the sheet; I have literally never used a quiz in any class I’ve taught and thus hesitate to do so now, but doing so might make the most sense for this particular purpose. The alternative, it seems to me, would be to find a more significant way to ask the students to use info from the sheets as part of their weekly Blackboard posts, and/or their papers. While that too goes against a key part of my overall teaching philosophy (allowing students the freedom to write about whatever they choose in their individual work), it would at the same time represent an extension of the idea for which I argued in this article: that a democratic pedagogy needs a baseline level of informed understanding in a lit survey class. So one way or another (and I’d love to hear your thoughts or other suggestions, of course!), I’m likely to revise my pedagogy for this class this semester, perhaps an inevitability as I keep figuring out this teaching online thing.Next preview tomorrow,BenPS. What do you all have going on this Fall?

September 4, 2018: Fall 2018 Previews: American Lit II

[This week I start my 14th year at Fitchburg State. For that momentous occasion, I decided to focus in this fall preview on one thing that has evolved for each class I’m teaching, and one that’s a bit more longstanding. Leading up to a special weekend update on my next book project!]On the perils and pleasures of returning to an old friend after some time apart.For no particular reason other than the vagaries of departmental and university scheduling and colleagues’ schedules and the like, it’s been at least a couple years since I taught a section of the American Literature II: Civil War to the Present survey course (other than an entirely online section I taught for the first time in the Spring, on which more in tomorrow’s post as I’ll be teaching another online section of the class this Fall). Prior to this recent stretch I had generally taught at least one and usually a couple sections of American Lit II each academic year, making it one of the courses (along with its counterpart survey American Lit I) for which I’ve taught the most total sections in my 13 years at FSU. I don’t think I’ve ever quite experienced that combination in the same way that I will this Fall—returning after a significant time gap to a class with which I have numerous prior experiences—and it has me thinking about a couple distinct pedagogical possibilities that might arise in teaching this section.On the more pessimistic side, I’m a bit worried that I’ll fall into old rhythms or patterns that won’t necessarily work for this class, group, or moment. To be clear, I believe that my student-centered teaching philosophy would make it impossible for me ever not to respond to the particular and unique classroom community in front of me, and I also don’t plan to ever become the kind of aging professor (more a stereotype than a reality in any case, although I did have a couple in my undergrad days) who pulls out yellowed lecture notes and reads from them. But I did keep my American Literature II syllabus more or less the same this time around as it’s been for the last handful of those many prior sections, and that means that I’ve moved through this structure, this group of texts and units, these overarching conversations quite a few times by now—but of course never in the Fall 2018 semester, never in this moment in time, and never with this particular community of students. So I suppose this paragraph is expressing less of a concern and more of a recognition, that it’s going to be particularly important for me with this section and course to make sure (as much as is possible at least) not to rely on what I’ve done in the past.If I can live up to the goal, it won’t just make the class more successful for the students (although hopefully and especially that too), but also more compelling and meaningful for yours truly. For one thing, the section will offer a wonderful model for both of the topics I discussed in my presentation for this 2017 NeMLA conference roundtable: the overarching benefits of re-reading literary texts; and the specific value of re-reading the favorite novel I highlighted there, Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition. I can’t imagine a more important work to be re-reading in the fall of 2018, and of course I’m even more excited to introduce it to another group of students. While that’s a meaningful effect of returning to American Lit II that I can predict, it’s just as important to note that there will be many I can’t yet imagine, moments and connections and conversations that will take me by surprise and significantly shift my own perspective and ideas in the process. Each of my last few books has gotten its start in such classroom moments, and none of them would have been possible—or at least none would have affected me in that crucial way—if I hadn’t been open to what was unfolding there, in front of and with me. I look forward to all that will unfold this fall, and will keep you posted!Next preview tomorrow,BenPS. What do you all have going on this Fall?

September 3, 2018: Fall 2018 Previews: Writing I

[This week I start my 14th year at Fitchburg State. For that momentous occasion, I decided to focus in this fall preview on one thing that has evolved for each class I’m teaching, and one that’s a bit more longstanding. Leading up to a special weekend update on my next book project!]On the value of stability, and the need for growth nonetheless.I taught two sections of First-Year Writing I in my initial (Fall 2005!) semester at Fitchburg State, and have taught at least one section of the course pretty much every year since. It’s quite difficult to remember much about my mindset or work as a teacher (or just about anything else about me) way back then, but in this case I’ve got a very clear memory aid: my Writing I syllabus, the overall structure of which has stayed fundamentally the same across those 14 years. I start with a unit on personal essays (reading examples and then writing and analyzing our own), move to one that uses short stories to write thesis-driven analytical essays, transition to a brief unit in which we practice the skill of close reading on songs of our choice, and then conclude with the most complex unit and genre, one in which we read and then write essays that combine the personal and the scholarly to deal with broad overaching questions and topics (a genre modeled by Adrienne Rich’s “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision” and Richard Rodriguez’s “The Achievement of Desire: Personal Reflections on Learning ‘Basics’”). I know it might sound pedagogically problematic to use the same syllabus for a decade and a half, but I would argue that there are at least a couple significant, interconnected benefits to having done so. For one thing, as I’ve discussed elsewhere in this space, a class like Writing I is to my mind entirely focused on student skills and voices, on helping them practice and develop different sides to their present and future work as a college student (and beyond). I believe these units, readings, and paper genres work very well for those purposes, and as long as they do so I wouldn’t want to reinvent the wheel. Similarly, for a class to achieve such student-centered purposes, it seems to me that the professor has to be able to focus virtually all of his or her time on working closely with each and every student, rather than (for example) reading and engaging with a ton of new content or materials. Obviously if a particular reading—or an entire unit or genre, or the whole syllabus for that matter—no longer feels as if it works, it’s important for us to be able to recognize that and make a change; but again, as long as it continues to feel that way, this is one more argument for maintaining some fundamental stability in Writing I in order to maximize our success in achieving the course’s crucial collegiate objectives.Yet fundamental stability doesn’t preclude specific additions or changes within that course’s syllabus, of course, and indeed keeping the overarching structure the same can make it easier for a professor to make such focused tweaks. As I’ve also discussed here previously, finding ways to add digital and multi-media content and paper options has been one such tweak I’ve attempted in my last few Writing I courses, and I plan to continue doing so this fall. But for this semester’s section, I’ve also been thinking about ways to get the students writing more frequently without it feeling to them like busy work. My current plan is to do so on days when there’s a reading in front of us, and to try to find prompts for brief bits of in-class writing that will both help drive our discussions and connect to their ideas or work in progress for the upcoming paper. But as always, I’m very open to thoughts or suggestions, for likewise as always my continued evolution as a teacher depends at least as much on all those in my community as on my own fourteen years of experiences!Next preview tomorrow,BenPS. What do you all have going on this Fall?