Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 259

May 24, 2017: Star Wars Studying: Rogue One, Diversity, and War

[May 25thwill mark the 40th anniversary of the release of the first Star Wars film (it wasn’t titled A New Hope at that point!). So this week I’ll offer a few ways to AmericanStudy the iconic series and its contexts and connections. Share your own different points of view for a force-full crowd-sourced weekend post, my fellow padawan learners!]On two ways the newest Star Wars film pushed the envelope for the series.In many ways, the diverse characters and casting for last year’s Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) seem to parallel and extend what I said in yesterday’s post about The Force Awakens (2015). Both films feature a strong female protagonist, with Rogue’s Jyn Erso (Felicity Jones) helping Force’s Rey (Daisy Ridley) bring the series into a new millennium of equal opportunity gender heroism. Both surround that lead actor with impressively multi-national and –ethnic supporting casts, with Rogue spotlighting Pakistani British actor and rapper Riz Ahmed, Mexican actor and director Diego Luna, Hong Kong action superstar Donnie Yen, and Chinese actor and director Wen Jiang. And both have inspired similarly aggrieved reactions from sexist and white supremacist Star Wars “fans,” although it seems to me that the critiques of Rogue One were less prominent or loud than the prior year’s had been; perhaps the bigots have resigned themselves to the fact that this 21st century version of Star Wars is going to reflect the diverse global society in and for which it’s being created (although we’ll see how they handle an Asian American actress playing The Last Jedi’s “biggest new part”).Yet I would argue that in one important respect Rogue One’s diversity differed from, or at the very least significantly deepened, that of Force Awakens. For whatever reason, both of the main actors in Force Awakens(Daisy Ridley and John Boyega) didn’t use their natural English accents in the film, rendering their characters somewhat less diverse (or at least more ethnically neutral, let’s say) than the actors behind them. Whereas in Rogue One, Luna, Yen, and Jiang all speak English with their natural accents, opening up a window into a Star Wars universe where characters don’t just look ethnically different (although even there Roguepresents fuller diversity than any Star Wars film before it), they also sound it, at least suggesting a multi-lingual side to that universe. That might sound like a small or insignificant change, but to argue otherwise I would highlight this amazing story, shared by Luna himself on his Twitter account, of a Mexican American young woman who brought her Mexican immigrant father to see the film and then wrote about the experience on tumblr. Or I could share Luna’s own perspective on why it was important to keep his accent for the character, as a critical element to the diverse identity and universe he reflects. For those and other reasons, the accents in Rogue One represent a new side to the series, and they matter.[SERIOUS SPOILERS IN THIS PARAGRAPH] In a different but not unrelated way, I believe that Rogue One’s shifts in genre and tone from all other Star Wars films also matter. Of course “war” has been a part of the series all along, but one modified by “star,” producing a space opera or Flash Gordon serial version of war. Of course major characters/heroes have died throughout the films, but generally those deaths were of older characters whose time had come (Obi Wan, Yoda, Darth Vader/Anakin, Qui Gon), and whose deaths were thus not particularly traumatic for young audiences (Padmé being a definite exception, and Mace Windu at least a partial one; Revenge of the Sith is a pretty bleak film). Rogue One is a much grittier kind of war film, however—from the “suicide mission” sub-genre of war films, no less—and the uniformly tragic fates of all of its major heroic characters reflects that distinct genre and tone. I don’t mean to suggest that the other Star Wars films don’t have sad or dark elements, but I think it’s also telling that their young protagonists all survive; that none of Rogue One’s do is, to my mind, the precise reason why my sons have said that they love the film but “it’s really sad” (not something they’ve ever sad of any other Star Wars film, even Sith). As a result, Rogue One has brought the Star Wars universe and its audiences, perhaps especially its youthful audiences, into a very different universe and vision of war, just one more way this newest film has profoundly changed the series.Next StarWarsStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Star Wars contexts you’d highlight?

May 23, 2017: Star Wars Studying: The Force Awakens and Marketing

[May 25thwill mark the 40th anniversary of the release of the first Star Wars film (it wasn’t titled A New Hope at that point!). So this week I’ll offer a few ways to AmericanStudy the iconic series and its contexts and connections. Share your own different points of view for a force-full crowd-sourced weekend post, my fellow padawan learners!]Two of the things this AmericanStudier loves most about the first film in the new Star Wars trilogy, and one that worries me a bit.I initially wrote about the “transnational force” at the heart of the Star Wars saga more than five years ago in this space, long before John Boyega and Daisy Ridleyhad been cast as the leads in a new trilogy (and Lupita Nyongo’o had been cast in a role that, without spoiling too much, could be called the Yoda of that new series). I stand by my argument that the films have always been cross-cultural in important ways; but at the same time, there’s no disputing that the world of the original trilogy was extremely white (smooth-talking space pirate Lando Calrissian notwithstanding). Moreover, while Carrie Fisher’s Leia was certainly an impressive heroine in many ways, she was also, quite literally, the clichéd princess in need of rescue whose plea for help set the entire first film and trilogy in motion. So to sit next to my 10 and 8 year old sons in December 2015 while they watched a Star Wars movie in which Boyega and Ridley were the unquestionable, kickass, and entirely equal leads was, to put it mildly, a wonderful experience for this AmericanStudier. Take that, haters!I watched The Force Awakens that first time with not only my sons, but also my Mom and Dad, and that multi-generational viewing experience was just as inspiring. While once again trying to avoid spoilers (for the three people who haven’t yet seen Force Awakens—get on it before December, folks!), I’ll note that the new film is deeply and powerfully focused on the relationships between the past and the future, including an emphasis on family bonds but also and most centrally through its pitch-perfect balance (in casting and character arcs, script and storytelling, plot and action, and much else) of the familiar and the new, of callbacks to the original films and fresh directions for the saga. In a world where my boys’ favorite toys (the Skylanders) were both created within the last ten years and utilize an innovative gaming technology I could never have imagined as a kid (and which has spun off into app games that they play on an iPad, about every detail of which ditto), to have a cultural text that can so fully and successfully unite 1977 and 2017 is nothing short of incredible. To paraphrase E.B. White’s great “Once More to the Lake,” I wasn’t entirely sure, sitting in that theater, whether I was myself, my sons, or my parents—and that’s a feeling we should all get to experience!My only problem with that Force Awakens theatrical experience had nothing to do with the film itself, and yet represents the one thing about it and Star Wars in 2017 that worries me. Before the movie began, there was the usual 10 minutes of commercials (before the usual 15 minutes of trailers), and I would say that about 9 of those advertising minutes featured Star Wars tie-ins. It felt at the time (and again this past December when Rogue One was released) like a roughly similar percentage of the TV and radio ads I encountered were part of the film’s merchandising empire. Star Wars has always had its share of associated products (writes the AmericanStudier who literally had a deal with a local store’s toy department to get a call every time a new Ewok figure was released), but it feels to me that Lucasfilm’s purchase by Disney has amplified those commercial and marketing campaigns many times over. I want to be clear that I’m extremely grateful that the company has made this new series of films (and all those aforementioned positive effects) possible. But I do worry that this all-out marketing blitz has the potential to make Star Wars into just another product, rather than the cross-cultural, multi-generational story that has endured so potently for nearly half a century.Next StarWarsStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Star Wars contexts you’d highlight?

May 22, 2017: Star Wars Studying: A Cross-Cultural Force

[May 25thwill mark the 40th anniversary of the release of the first Star Wars film (it wasn’t titled A New Hope at that point!). So this week I’ll offer a few ways to AmericanStudy the iconic series and its contexts and connections. Share your own different points of view for a force-full crowd-sourced weekend post, my fellow padawan learners!]
On how the original Star Wars was directly influenced by a Japanese film—and, critiques of the American director notwithstanding, why that influence is a positive thing.
As the ongoing 40thanniversary celebrations illustrate, few cultural texts have had a more significant and ongoing presence over the last four decades than George Lucas’s Star Wars (1977) and its many sequels, prequels, novelizations, television spinoffs, parodies, merchandising and marketing and material culture connections, animated versions, Wookie-centric Christmas specials, and the like. Because of that lasting presence, and perhaps especially because a whole generation of students and scholars (including this AmericanStudier to be sure) has grown up alongside Luke Skywalker and friends, Lucas’s prominent debt to Joseph Campbell’s analyses of heroism and mythologies has likewise been very well established and documented; which is to say, this is a pop culture text and artist whose multigenerational and cross-cultural (at least in the sense of Campbell’s ideas linking myths from multiple cultures) connections and influences seem already well known.
Far be it for me to disagree with that longstanding and very thoroughly developed assessment—did you note the ridiculously comprehensive Lucas-Campbell chart at that hyperlink?—but there’s another, also very influential and much less broadly known, source for Lucas’s first film. As this website conversation highlights, Lucas’s initial story outline for Star Wars (particularly in the story’s initial events and exposition) closely parallels Akira Kurosawa’s 1958 film The Hidden Fortress; Lucas would change certain events and details between that outline and the film’s screenplay, but many of the Kurosawa echoes remained very much present in the finished film, as mashups of the two movies such as this one cleverly highlight. Such mashups could be used as exhibits in a plagiarism case against Lucas, and indeed many who have noted the similarities to Fortress have done so in a critical way, arguing that at least Lucas owed Kurosawa a more overt acknowledgment of the influence as Star Wars gained in popularity and Lucas became one of the most famous and wealthiest filmmakers of all time.Certainly I believe that Kurosawa’s film should be better known, not only because of its clear influence on Lucas’s early ideas for his own series, but also because it seems (from, admittedly, the handful of clips I have seen and the descriptions I have read) to be an interesting if minor work from one of cinema’s most prolific and talented artists. Yet far from serving as an indictment of Lucas or his film, this additional influence highlights, to my mind, just how genuinely and impressively American Star Wars really is: inspired in equal measure by centuries of cross-cultural mythology and a Japanese film, with the seminal fantasy series by a British author thrown in for good measure; starring young American actors and some of England’s most established screen veterans; shamelessly cribbing from the styles and stunts of early serials and pop culture classics like Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers; with all those elements thrown into a space opera blender and turned into a hugely unique and engaging entertainments. Lucas had called his first, much more grounded and local and historically nostalgic, film American Graffiti (1973)—but it’s Star Wars that really exemplifies the cross-cultural, multi-genre, intertextual, inspiring mélange that is American culture and art.Next StarWarsStudying tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other Star Wars contexts you’d highlight?

May 20-21, 2017: Summer and Fall 2017 Previews

[As the Spring 2017 semester comes to a conclusion, this week I’ve offered semester reflections focused on new things I tried in my courses. Leading up to this special post previewing my Summer and Fall courses!]My Fall 2017 semester will feature only one course (the Honors Lit Seminar on America in the Gilded Age that I’ll be teaching for the third consecutive Fall) that’s likely to stay very similar to its prior iterations. The others, which are either entirely new or will be significantly revised, are:1)      American Historical Fiction (Graduate): For the third straight summer, I’ll be teaching a hybrid course in our Graduate English Program. But while the prior two such courses were entirely new, and thus created as hybrid classes, this time I’ll be turning a class I’ve taught a few prior times, American Historical Fiction, into a new, hybrid version. To be honest, my initial impulse was just to use the same syllabus and have half of our discussions (those focused on literary excerpts and scholarly essays, rather than novels) online; but that’s not a truly hybrid class, nor would it take advantage of the form’s possibilities. I’m still figuring out how to best use digital materials for those online meetings and discussions (and as always I’m open to suggestions!), but am determined to make this class hybrid in meaningful as well as practical ways.2)      First-year Writing I: My Fall section of Writing I isn’t hybrid, but I’d say somewhat the same thing. That is, I’ve ordered the same two anthologies (the Seagull Reader: Essays and Short Stories collections), and am planning the same main units and writing categories (personal essays and analysis, short stories and argument, songs and close reading, and a combination of personal and academic writing on a topic of their choice), as has been the case for my last few Writing I sections. But I’m nonetheless determined to revise the course, and especially to find ways to include digital and multimedia texts, materials, and writing possibilities alongside those more traditional print forms. I’ll keep you posted, and again I welcome any and all suggestions and ideas!3)      Major Author: Mark Twain: Here’s where it gets really new and exciting. For my third section of our departmental Major Author course (previously I’ve featured Henry James and W.E.B. Du Bois), I decided to get seriously filial, focusing on Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain. As I did for the Du Bois course, I’m hoping to have the students produce their own work in (and as a way to analyze) many of the genres in which Twain worked: humorous sketches and satire, travel writing and autobiographies, stage performance, and more. I’m also thinking hard about following up my NeMLA roundtable on re-reading by having students begin and end the course by reading Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, to see how our readings of and conversations about that complex and important book develop and shift after working with all the semester’s materials. But those are just starting points, and again I welcome any and all suggestions for content, strategies, or anything else!4)      ALFA: Great New Short Stories: To reiterate what I said in my earlier post this week on my adult learning courses, my goal of balance requires that this fall’s new ALFA course be a literature-focused one, and it will be: we’ll be reading and discussing nine short stories (one together on the first day, two each for the remaining four meetings) from the Best American Short Stories 2016 anthology. But while that’s a relatively set plan, there are twenty total stories in that anthology (you can see the Table of Contents here), so if you have strong preferences or recommendations among them or their authors, you know what to do!Next series starts Monday,BenPS. Summer or Fall plans you’d share? Responses to these classes? Lemme know!

May 19, 2017: Spring 2017 Reflections: The Short Story—Online

[As the Spring 2017 semester comes to a conclusion, a series of classroom reflections, this time focused on new things I tried in my courses. I’d love to hear your Spring reflections in comments!]On a few takeaways from my first experience teaching an all-online class.Like pretty much every institution of higher learning in the country and world, Fitchburg State University has over the last decade or so begun to include online courses and even program offerings much more fully than was the case when I arrived in 2005. The first clause of that sentence makes clear why FSU has to do so, and I’m sure that for various disciplines online courses and programs can accomplish their disciplinary objectives perfectly well. But as an English Studies professor, I’ve always felt that there’s no substitute for in-person classes and conversations, no way to achieve what we hope to in our courses without that element of face-to-face work. While I’ve begun to teach hybrid graduate courses, classes that meet half in person and half online through Blackboard discussions and the like, as a way to accommodate the needs of our grad students, I had remained adamant that I didn’t want to teach an all-online course of any kind. But this semester one of my colleagues took an unexpected medical leave and the department needed someone on short notice to teach her online section of our Short Story literature course, and I decided to give online teaching a shot for the first time.As with so many of the things we fear, the reality of teaching online turned out to be far smoother and more positive than had been my concerns. The students consistently rose to the challenge of the weekly Blackboard conversations, both in their own weekly analytical posts and (especially) in the required responses to at least one classmate’s post. I hadn’t specified a length or content for those latter responses, but the students consistently went well beyond “I agree” or “nice job” or the like, really engaging with each others’ readings and ideas. Because this course was offered through our Department of Graduate and Continuing Education (an “evening” rather than “day” course, that is), my guess is that many of the students had taken other online classes, and thus were a more experienced cohort, a group more ready to participate online in these full and meaningful ways, than might be the case for a “day,” regular undergraduate online class. But whatever the particular factors, there’s no doubt that the class featured not only impressive individual analyses of our stories, but also and most importantly multi-vocal conversations about them and many related questions and issues. Those conversations weren’t and could never be identical to in-person ones, of course, but they were present and effective nevertheless.And yet I would also highlight a couple shortcomings that I believe are endemic to online teaching. For one thing, I personally hate the fact that I’ve worked with a group of 28 students for an entire semester and have never met any of them; I offered them the chance to come chat in office hours, but couldn’t require it (again, it was a DGCE course and at least some of the students work full-time), and so they understandably didn’t take me up on that offer. This is certainly a personal objection, but it’s a very real one, as it limited the human connections that to my mind are an important part of teaching and learning. And for another thing, I believe that the most effective literary analyses are built in multiple stages, with an individual sharing one idea or reading and then it becoming part of the kind of ongoing, multi-layered, communal conversation that can happen as a classroom full of students add their voices and ideas to the mix. As impressive as the students’ Blackboard responses to each others’ posts were, those are still more individual and isolated than would be such truly communal conversations—and in their absence, I’m not sure we developed any sustained analyses of any of the course’s complex short stories. If I do teach an all-online course again (certainly just an “if” right now), that’s an area on which I’d have to work much further.Summer and Fall preview this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Spring semester reflections you’d share?

May 18, 2017: Spring 2017 Reflections: Contemporary Issues in Adult Learning

[As the Spring 2017 semester comes to a conclusion, a series of classroom reflections, this time focused on new things I tried in my courses. I’d love to hear your Spring reflections in comments!]On how my most recent ALFA class evolved, and why I’m glad it did.This spring marked the ninth course I’ve taught in the Adult Learning in the Fitchburg Area (ALFA) program. As the many posts at that second hyperlink reflect, I’ve tried to balance my eight prior ALFA courses between two main focal points: more historical classes, focused in one way or another on “Expanding Our Collective Memories” (the title of my first ALFA class, way back in spring 2012) of American history and identity; and more literary ones, focused on short shared works (usually short stories, occasionally poems) that we’ve analyzed together. While the literary texts in those latter courses have often come from our own era, we’ve tended to keep our conversations about them grounded closely in the details and specifics of the texts themselves, meaning that in neither of these types of prior ALFA classes have we talked at any length about current events or 21st century issues. But last fall, when I sat down to propose my ALFA class for this spring, the time felt right and important to change that trend, and so I proposed a course entitled “Inspiring Contemporary Voices.”As that title suggests, my initial plan for the course was that we would focus on the voices themselves—talking at length about interesting, complicated, and of course inspiring individual writers or figures (one per week for the course’s five weeks). As of this January preview post, that was still the plan, but I was having a good deal of trouble settling on the five focal individuals. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that that trouble might well be a feature rather than a bug of such a course in our moment: that we’re in an era when we’re confronted by a staggeringly wide variety of complex and often dark and frightening issues and problems; and that trying to find inspiring individual voices or authors in any sort of vacuum in such a period is both highly difficult and, frankly, feels disingenuous and silly. So I took a step back and recalibrated, creating a syllabus where each week focused on a particular such issue (the environment, science, and climate change in week three, for example) and where for each I brought in a number of different authors and voices to help us talk about that issue (a group of pieces from the collection Coming of Age at the End of Nature for that third week, along with videos featuring Bill McKibben and 500 Women Scientistsamong others).I’m really glad that the course shifted in this way, and would highlight a couple particularly salient effects of the change. For one thing, I was able to include many more voices, including some I hadn’t been considering at all in the initial iteration: Zareena Grewaland Qasim Rashid in a week on Muslim Americans; and John Scalzi and Holly Genovese in a week on poverty and class in America, to cite two further examples. While some of their individual pieces were far from sunnily optimistic (with good reason), the collective effect of engaging with these groups of authors and figures was most definitely inspiring. And just as inspiring was a second main effect of the shift: that it allowed all twenty of the course’s students to add their voices and experiences into the conversations far more fully than might have been the case if we’d been focused more closely on individual authors and texts. What we ended up doing each week, that is, was brainstorming many different sides to these contemporary issues and problems, as well as distinct possible responses through which we might be able to counter and push beyond them. I’m not saying we solved global warming, exactly (well, not at all), but we most definitely modeled the kinds of informed, engaged, thoughtful, multi-vocal collective conversations through which we can at the very least begin to confront such crises. Inspiring indeed.Last Spring reflection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Spring semester reflections you’d share?

May 17, 2017: Spring 2017 Reflections: Contemporary Connections in American Lit I

[As the Spring 2017 semester comes to a conclusion, a series of classroom reflections, this time focused on new things I tried in my courses. I’d love to hear your Spring reflections in comments!]On two ways I worked to link my most historical class to our current moment.As I wrote in my January preview post on the class, there are lots of potential parallels between the figures and texts we encounter in my American Literature I survey course and our current president and moment. But while I’ve gradually made my peace with bringing my personal and political perspective into courses when and where it’s appropriate, it’s important for me to be clear that such occasions are still few and far between, and have to relate to the specific class reading or topic in an organic and central way. Which is to say, I most definitely did not raise any of those parallels between Christopher Columbus and Donald Trump in our American Lit I discussion of Columbus and two of his letters; that discussion focused, as did nearly all of our class conversations, on the texts in front of us, and if and when any contemporary or other contexts were brought into the mix, it was students who did so, not me. I believe that should be our consistent practice as teachers of literature and culture, and doubly so when the texts and figures in question are (as they are throughout American Literature I) significantly distant from us in time.There were, however, a couple particular moments in American Lit I where it felt appropriate to raise (briefly) such contemporary connections. One came as I was introducing our second unit, on the Revolutionary era; for each of our four focal units/time periods I provide just a few minutes of introductory contexts for the upcoming three weeks before we get to our first authors/readings. For that Revolutionary unit, the first week focuses on readings from prominent Framers and Revolutionary leaders, while the second and third add in other, less well-remembered examples from similarly Revolutionary communities (women in week two, African Americans in week three). We don’t have any readings related to South Carolina’s Revolutionary era Moroccan Muslim (Moorish) community, as I don’t know if any such texts exist; yet that community is well worth remembering, for its own sake but also for its relevance to our framing documents and laws. So I spoke about that Muslim American community as part of this unit introduction; and in so doing, I couldn’t help but address the way in which the elision of such communities from our history makes it far more possible to argue for banning Muslim arrivals and discriminating against existing Muslim American communities in 2017. I didn’t dwell on that contemporary connection, but neither did I pretend that remembering the past differently doesn’t have such present effects and stakes.Then there’s the last class meeting of the semester. In all of my courses I see that last meeting as (among other things) an opportunity for me to say a bit more about my own take on our topics, and thus potentially to provide my ideas about such contemporary connections. For many sections of American Literature I, I’ve brought in Pat Buchanan’s deeply troubling 2007 article “The Dark Side of Diversity” on the last day, using that text to highlight mythical narratives of a founding, homogeneous national identity and then contrasting those narratives with the realities of the America we’ve encountered in the course of our units and readings. I did so again this semester, but this time I went a couple steps further: talking at some length about the stakes of those differing definitions of America, the more exclusionary and more inclusive images on which my current book project focuses; and making the case for why I see 2017 as such a pivotal moment in the long histories of those competing narratives of national identity. To my mind, that’s not at all a partisan or even a political point, but rather a fundamental question of how we remember our histories and envision our nation; yet there’s no doubt that engaging with that question also means challenging quite directly the narrative behind “Make America Great Again.” If that’s a corollary effect of my American Literature I course and syllabus, well, I’m okay with it.Next Spring reflection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Spring semester reflections you’d share?

May 16, 2017: Spring 2017 Reflections: Sui Sin Far in the American Novel

[As the Spring 2017 semester comes to a conclusion, a series of classroom reflections, this time focused on new things I tried in my courses. I’d love to hear your Spring reflections in comments!]On what didn’t work and what did when I used a short story collection in my American Novel course.Compared to the relatively stable reading lists for many of my recurring courses, the texts for my American Novel to 1950 class have changed a good bit over its handful of iterations. That’s been especially true for the two works in my middle category, Realism (preceded by Romanticism and followed by Modernism): when I first taught the course, I put Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and The Marrow of Tradition there; subsequently shifted Huck into the Romanticism category (replacing The Morgeons as a second Romantic novel after The House of the Seven Gables) and added The Rise of David Levinsky into Realism; and then (hard as it is to leave Charles Chesnutt out of any class I teach) replaced Marrow with The Awakening. That was where the class stood as of the last time I taught it, a couple years ago; but for this spring’s section, I decided to take out Levinsky (which was by far the longest novel on the syllabus) and replace it with a particularly unusual choice for a novel class: Sui Sin Far’s short story collection Mrs. Spring Fragrance (1912), a book that includes not only the dozen or so separate stories under that title, but also another twenty or so in the section “Tales of Chinese Children.” I’ve written here before (in an entire week’s series, in fact) about the complex genre known as the short story cycle: books like The House on Mango Street (1984) and Love Medicine (1993), in which distinct individual stories are clearly also linked together into an overarching, unified whole that could indeed be called a novel. But while there certainly were 19thcentury versions of that genre, I don’t think we could describe Far’s book as an example; individual characters recur in a couple of the stories, and many are set within the same setting of San Francisco’s Chinatown during the Chinese Exclusion Act era, but compared to the books highlighted above the stories in Mrs. Spring Fragrance exist separately from one another. Including Far’s book in this course was thus a bit of an experiment, and not one that necessarily worked: many of our discussions across the four class meetings dedicated to Fragranceunderstandably focused on individual stories, and we thus didn’t quite get to the same kinds of continued, evolving analytical threads that we’re usually able to carry across a series of conversations. I believe that difficulty also made it harder for students to analyze Far’s text as a whole in Papers 2 and 3, and so only a handful worked with the book in either of those assignments (even though it and The Awakening were the two main options for Paper 2, for example).So I’m not sure I would include Mrs. Spring Fragranceon this syllabus again. But at the same time, there were a couple significant benefits to having done so this semester; one was more expected, and the second more of a surprise. The expected benefit stemmed from the reason I added Far’s book in the first place: it’s one of the most multi-layered and compelling literary representations I’ve encountered of themes like immigration and assimilation, culture and community, multi-cultural and –racial identities and perspectives, language, and more, and our discussions of individual stories allowed us to engage in depth with how Far depicts those crucial American issues and histories through her fictional characters, settings, and plots. Moreover, the division of Far’s book into more “adult” short stories and the children’s stories in “Tales” opened up an expected and interesting conversation about genre and audience, about the similarities and differences across those two sections and forms, and about how authors use young characters in works of fiction (a topic that could then be applied to many of our other texts, from Edna’s sons in The Awakening to the depictions of childhood in The Sound and the Fury, to name just two examples). If including Far’s book in a novel course was thus in some ways a mistake, it was, at the very least, a provocative and productive mistake.Next Spring reflection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Spring semester reflections you’d share?

May 15, 2017: Spring 2017 Reflections: Fruitvale and Black-ish in Writing II

[As the Spring 2017 semester comes to a conclusion, a series of classroom reflections, this time focused on new things I tried in my courses. I’d love to hear your Spring reflections in comments!]On the limits and benefits of using contemporary multimedia texts in a first-year writing course.As I mentioned in my preview post back in January, this semester marked my second time using a First-year Writing II syllabus focused on analyzing 21st century identities. That syllabus’ third unit asks students to utilize a pair of multimedia texts of their choice to practice comparative analyses; for some reason that I can’t entirely remember, the first time I taught with this syllabus, back in Spring 2014, I used two such texts from the 1980s (the film Working Girl and an episode of the TV show The Wonder Years) for our collective practice with those skills. Since this semester, as I mentioned in that preview post, I was determined to find a way to include more contemporary debates and issues as part of our class conversations, I decided to go with two recent multimedia texts that could allow us to make such connections: the film Fruitvale Station (2013) and the wonderful 2016 “Hope” episode of the sitcom Black-ish. My hope was that these texts would help us to discuss police brutality and shootings, #BlackLivesMatter, and race in 2017 America while we modeled analyzing a dramatic film and a TV sitcom as part of a sample paper pairing.We did indeed have those conversations, but with a limitation that I probably should have seen coming: our consistent, necessary focus on the writing skills and approaches comprised by that unit and paper. I’ve written many times in this space (and elsewhere) about my student-centered teaching approach, and that focus is never more central than in first-year writing courses, when any and all content is (to my mind) always secondary to the skills on which the students are working at any given moment. That’s not something I see myself ever changing, but it can lead to frustrations, and I certainly felt them in the course of our film and TV analyses, conversations in which we briefly touched upon incredibly challenging and difficult topics (particularly those related to police shootings) but simply didn’t have the time or space to delve into those subjects at length without sacrificing the focus that we needed on the paper in progress. To be honest, I think it might be necessary to make such topics the subject of the entire syllabus/course (as I did with a series of central readings in my Fall 2016 Seminar on Analyzing 21st Century America) in order to do them justice while still devoting sufficient time to our papers and their many related skills and elements.At the same time, I’m very glad to have shared these texts, and especially the very under-appreciated Fruitvale Station, with my students. Despite my giving them the freedom to choose any two multimedia texts they wanted for the comparative paper, five of the twenty-three students chose to include Fruitvale as one of their pair; all five of them, and at least a few others in the class, noted that they had neither seen nor heard of the film previously, and that they were powerfully affected by viewing it and wanted to pursue those responses further by analyzing it in their papers. Even if we had been able to have more extended conversations about our contemporary topics than we did, I of course wouldn’t have wanted to proscribe any particular perspectives for the students, and instead would have hoped only that they’d be pushed to think more fully and deeply about such challenging and crucial issues. And it seems that the very experience of watching a film like Fruitvale, and then for this group of students the follow-up experience of writing about it, presented them with precisely such an opportunity, adding the film into their evolving perspectives on all those topics and many others. That’s a significant benefit in and of itself, and one made possible by utilizing a complex contemporary text like Fruitvale.Next Spring reflection tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Spring semester reflections you’d share?

May 13-14, 2017: The Scholars Strategy Network and Me: Leadership Summit

[Last week, I had the chance to attend a national meeting of the Scholars Strategy Network, a vital public scholarly organization of which I’ve been a Member for almost four years. So this week I wanted to share a few sides to my work with SSN, leading up to this weekend post on that national meeting and SSN’s expanding role in Trump’s America!]On three questions about the Scholars Strategy Network that the leadership summit helped clarify for me.1)      Who: Literally every person I met or heard from at the summit was impressive and inspiring, but I’ll focus here on three who reflect the event and organization’s breadth and depth: Lee Badgett, a Professor of Economics at UMass Amherst whose book The Public Professor: How to Use Your Research to Change the World (2016) shot to the top of my reading list after meeting her; Heide Castañeda, an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of South Florida who is helping get a Tampa SSN chapter off and running (it’ll be our first in Florida!); and , Chief of Staff for Massachusetts State Senate President Stan Rosenberg. I could really have highlighted any three attendees and speakers here, but Lee, Heide, and Natasha each offered unique and vital perspectives at the summit and together reflect our organizational efforts and strengths on many levels.2)      Why: At the start of the summit, SSN Executive Director Avi Green shared three 2017 objectives for the organization: to communicate the impacts of current national and state policy shifts; to strengthen our state/regional chapters and expand their efforts; and to defend democracy. Those three goals certainly reflect the different (if always interconnected) kinds of political, regional, and scholarly work that SSN features and advances. But honestly, my answer to why SSN does the work it does, and why that work matters, would be even simpler and more overarching still: because scholarly voices are needed in our conversations and communities, at every level and in every way; and because such voices are stronger and more effective, and such work more possible and happier, when they’re part of a community. I felt all of that at the summit very fully. 3)      What’s Next: For me, the most immediate next step will be taking on more of a leadership role in the Boston SSN chapter. Professors Erin O’Brien and Rachael Cobbhave done phenomenal work leading the chapter for many years now, and I’m very excited to join those efforts and help the chapter move forward in many ways (and if you’re a Massachusetts or New England scholar reading this, please let me know if you’d like to be part of those efforts!). But of course, all of us at SSN, like all of us in America, are wondering about what’s next for the nation—during the summit alone, the House passed the abomination that is the AHCA and Trump signed the unconstitutional horror that is his “religious liberty” Executive Order. I can’t pretend to know what’s next on that broadest level—and the summit featured its share of understandable pessimism among the more inspiring and activist perspectives—but I know I feel better prepared to respond to and help shape it as a part of SSN.                                                                                                                Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Thoughts on SSN, or other organizations or efforts you’d highlight?