Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 303

December 19-20, 2015: Spring 2016 Preview

[With this week’s final papers and exams comes the end of another semester at Fitchburg State University, and with it this week’s series of semester recap posts focused on inspiring student work and ideas, leading up to this predictive weekend post. Please share your own fall reflections or spring predictions in comments!]Five reasons I’m excited for the Spring 2016 semester:1)      Old Favorites: The five courses I’m teaching are all old friends: American Literature I, Major American Authors of the 20th Century, Ethnic American Literature, the English Studies Senior Capstone, and the graduate Intro to Literary Theory. But since I’m committed to never being the kind of teacher who brings out the yellowed lecture notes, old favorites mean new opportunities to examine the syllabus, readings, and assignments, as well as to remain open to student responses and ideas as the semester develops. I’ll keep you posted!2)      With a Twist: One thing that helps keep classes new is when I get the chance to work with a returning student in our Writing Associates program, where a student who has taken a course before works with the professor as an additional resource for the other students and the class as a whole. This spring I’ll have one of our best students, a member of our English Secondary Education track, working with me in Major American Authors, and I can’t wait to see what she brings to our discussions, the student writing, and many other aspects as well. I’ll keep you posted!3)      A New ALFA Course: I try to alternate more literature-focused Adult Learning courses with ones more linked to American histories and narratives, and so this Spring I’ll be offering a new course of the latter type. In it, I’ll be sharing figures, histories, and texts that help us consider other sides to moments with which we feel already familiar: Quock Walker and the American Revolution, Chinese American soldiers in the Civil War, anti-suffrage violence in the Progressive Era, and more. I look forward to finalizing my own choices but also and especially to hearing the student responses to them. I’ll keep you posted!4)      The NeMLA Conference: I’ve been working toward the March 2016 Northeast MLA conference for nearly 3 years, and couldn’t be more excited that it’ll finally arrive this spring. But there’s a lot to finalize before then, including the visits to Hartford Public Schools for which I’d love to include you and/or your ideas (email me with any interest and ideas, please!). You know I’ll keep you posted!5)      We’ll See: Every semester, some of the most exciting opportunities and experiences take me entirely by surprise. And a significant number of them over the last few years have come from online connections and conversations. So … keep me posted!Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think? Other reflections or predictions you’d share?

December 18, 2015: Semester Recaps: ALFA Class on Contemporary Short Stories

[With this week’s final papers and exams comes the end of another semester at Fitchburg State University, and with it a series of semester recap posts, this time focused on inspiring student work and ideas! Please share your own semester reflections in comments, and/or your spring plans and goals leading up to a predictive weekend post!]When I previewed my Adult Learning course on contemporary short fiction, I didn’t yet know which five authors and texts we’d read. I’m very happy with the ones I picked and the amazing conversations that resulted, and so wanted to share the five stories and authors with you as well. They are:1)      Karl Taro Greenfeld, “Horned Men” (2012)2)      Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “Apollo” (2015)3)      Phil Klay, “Redeployment”(2014)4)      Cristina Henríquez, “Goodbyes” (2011)5)      Yelena Akhtiorskaya, excerpt from Panic in a Suitcase (2015)I’d love to hear your thoughts on any and all of these great stories in comments! Spring preview post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think? Other reflections or predictions you’d share?

December 17, 2015: Semester Recaps: Honors Literature Seminar

[With this week’s final papers and exams comes the end of another semester at Fitchburg State University, and with it a series of semester recap posts this time focused on inspiring student work and ideas! Please share your own semester reflections in comments, and/or your spring plans and goals leading up to a predictive weekend post!]My Honors Lit seminar on the Gilded Age featured lots of very strong individual student presentations, papers, and perspectives. But because it was such a strong group, our collective conversations also led to numerous interesting insights on our focal works and topics. Here are three of those impressive collective questions and perspectives:1)      Native American Agency, Stereotypes, and the Wild West Shows: Two of the supplemental online texts in our first unit (on the West) focused on histories and images/advertisementsof the era’s Wild West Shows. The students had a lot to say about such complex topics as visual culture and the role of popular entertainments in culture, but I was particularly impressed with their nuanced conversation about the shows’ Native American performers. We moved through a number of issues of agency and power, stereotypes and alternative narratives, and the possibilities and limitations that these shows offered for their performers as well as their audiences. Really strong models of visual, popular, and material culture analyses in this inspiring conversation.2)      Romance, Realism, and Literary Marriages: Our first two main texts, Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps’ The Story of Avis, feature central marriages that it’d be easy to read as entirely contrasted: Jackson’s idealized and romanticized union of Ramona and Alessandro contrasted with Phelps’ flawed and realistic marriage between Avis and Philip. But in our concluding discussions of Avis (the second of the two we’d read), the students acknowledged but pushed beyond that contrast, considering how both novels use both genres: Jackson keeping the marriage idealized and romantic in order to contrast it with her deeply realistic portrayal of histories of cultural oppression and dispossession; and Phelps starting with a romanticized portrait of love in order to develop her portrayal of how both genders are affected and limited by such romantic ideals and conventions. Conversations that helped me see both novels in new ways!3)      Assimilation and Resistance across Cultural and Historical Boundaries: In our last unit, I asked the students to read two complex texts at once: Charles Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Traditionand Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance. They were entirely up to the challenge, and responded with a number of interesting ways to link these two very distinct works. Some of the most nuanced conversations had to do with how Chesnutt and Far’s ethnic characters (that is, Chesnutt’s African American characters and Far’s Chinese American ones) respond to the pressures to assimilate into the mainstream (European American) culture that surrounds and oppresses them. Both authors create a range of responses to those pressures, and the students’ analyses of these distinct characters and themes helped us develop multi-layered readings of both works and of what they can help us see about culture and identity in the Gilded Age and in our own contemporary moment as well. Last recap tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other reflections or predictions you’d share?

December 16, 2015: Semester Recaps: Interdisciplinary Studies Capstone

[With this week’s final papers and exams comes the end of another semester at Fitchburg State University, and with it a series of semester recap posts, this time focused on inspiring student work and ideas! Please share your own semester reflections in comments, and/or your spring plans and goals leading up to a predictive weekend post!]As I highlighted in my fall preview post, the IDIS majors in my Capstone course spent the semester working on their Capstone Projects, culminating work where they combine their multiple disciplines of study to produce an in-depth investigation or idea of their own. Here are three of the resulting projects, each of which give me hope for the future in both specific and general ways:1)      A Safer Cap: One of the more interesting but challenging combinations faced the student whose disciplines were Exercise & Sports Science, Business, and Computer Science. He came up with a really interesting multi-layered project, an investigation into current safety measures in baseball caps (not batting helmets, but the caps worn by players in the field) complemented by a proposal for a new, safer such cap to help prevent concussions and head injuries (especially for younger players). There are few more significant issues facing our young people than head injuries in youth sports, and whether this particular proposal can come to fruition, I’m certainly confident that this student will contribute to that evolving conversation in meaningful ways in the years ahead.2)      An ASL Plan: Two of the most common disciplines among the students in this Capstone section were Psychology and Education, but each student found unique and individualized ways to link those disciplines and their other interests and develop projects as a result. Perhaps the most inspiring was this project, in which a student combined those disciplines with her interests in Disability Studies and Deaf Studies to create a multi-part proposal for educational, treatment, and American Sign Language plans (both within classrooms and in the home) for deaf students and their families. This student is hoping to pursue these interests in graduate school and in a career beyond, and her project reflects just how much she’ll be bringing to that vital work.3)      An Inspiring Montage: Getting the chance to work with students with all these different disciplinary experiences and interests was a wonderful part of teaching the IDIS Capstone, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I was very glad that one of the 11 students combined Art, English Studies, and History in a very AmericanStudies-like project. And a literally inspiring one, as she created both a tumblr page and an art project assembling inspiring quotes and voices from both literature and history that had influenced her own perspective and growth. This may have been the project that was closest to what I might have created if I took this class, but I found it most inspiring because, like so many of its counterparts in the course, it demonstrated how much these students will bring to their next steps and futures.Next recap tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other reflections or predictions you’d share?

December 15, 2015: Semester Recaps: American Literature I

[With this week’s final papers and exams comes the end of another semester at Fitchburg State University, and with it a series of semester recap posts, this time focused on inspiring student work and ideas! Please share your own semester reflections in comments, and/or your spring plans and goals leading up to a predictive weekend post!]For the individual student presentations in my American Lit I survey course, I ask the students to share three things: a couple bio and career highlights for their focal author; a couple close reading starting points for one of the readings by that author with which we’re working that day; and, most individually, an outside connection, some way they’d link this author and/or text to something from their own perspective, knowledge, experiences, or the like. That final one is not an easy element, but it can lead to some really interesting links, as illustrated by these three examples from this semester’s section:1)      Our first presenter, focused on William Bradford’s Of Plimoth Plantation, got us off to an inspiring start: in his outside connection he linked Bradford’s visions of arrival, the New World, and its native cultures to those from multiple other explorers, both of the future United States and those from other places and times (such as Marco Polo). I make sure that students don’t feel they have to have such immediately relevant outside knowledge to fulfill this presentation element—but if and when they do, it can provide an impressive additional layer to help frame our discussions, as did this presenter’s outside contexts for Bradford and our first class conversation for sure.2)      Just as valuable as such contemporary connections, however, are ways to link an author and reading from one historical moment to figures or events from other time periods. Our presenter on Chief Pontiac and his mid-18th century speech on Native American mythologies, identities, and relationships with European cultures, did just that: she linked Pontiac’s speech to Malcolm X’s 1964 Washington Heights speech (source of the famous “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock” line), thinking about how these orators use and revise cultural and national history to engage their audiences and develop their positions. I had never thought to link these two American speeches, but immediately saw the relevance and value of doing so, a great argument for this kind of cross-historical outside connection.3)      Finally, there are those more personal outside connections, the kind that allow the students to link one of our seemingly distant authors and readings to aspects of their own lives and identities; these always offer great reminders of how much of our own perspectives is always in our readings and analyses of any material. This semester, for example, the student presenting on Catherine Maria Sedgwick’s Hope Leslie linked Sedgwick’s creation of a character’s 1st-person storytelling voice within a 3rd-person narrated work of fiction to her own challenges and goals as a creative writer, helping remind us that all of our authors (whatever their genre) are creative writers not at all unlike us as we face our own writing struggles and efforts. A particularly inspiring and pitch-perfect lesson to take away from these presentation outside connections! Next recap tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other reflections or predictions you’d share?

December 14, 2015: Semester Recaps: First-Year Writing

[With this week’s final papers and exams comes the end of another semester at Fitchburg State University, and with it a series of semester recap posts, this time focused on inspiring student work and ideas! Please share your own semester reflections in comments, and/or your spring plans and goals leading up to a predictive weekend post!]In my fall preview series (which feels like it was about two weeks ago, but hey), I wrote about my plans to bring more digital and multimedia options to Writing I. Here are three examples of how my first-year students responded to these expanded possibilities:1)      A number of students chose to create tumblr pages for the personal narrative portion of the first paper (which includes both a personal narrative and an analysis of that primary text). In part, I was struck by how similar many of both the formal choices and the identity themes were in these digital personal narratives as in the more traditional written ones, reminding me that these forms aren’t as different as we might think. But at the same time, there were some striking distinctions, including the way in which tumblr relies heavily on using images and texts created by others, making these personal narratives much more multi-vocal than the largely first-person versions created in the written texts. Made for a richly multi-layered reading and grading experience, that’s for sure!2)      Speaking of multivocal, one student (a Communications/Media major) took that multimedia option for Paper 1 in a very different direction, creating a podcast conversation between him and a couple of close friends over some shared interests (especially anime) that had significantly informed his identity and perspective. This was a much trickier text to analyze, as it involved virtually none of the kinds of formal planning and choices that become key focal points for most of the student analyses of their personal narratives. But that challenge—the question of how to treat a podcast with the same analytical nuance we’d bring to more formal or constructed texts—is itself a valuable 21st century question, and the student found some great ways to consider elements such as structure and tone within his podcast.3)      My Writing I final paper, in which students combine more personal and more analytical/academic styles of writing a la Richard Rodriguez’s “The Achievement of Desire” and Adrienne Rich’s “When We Dead Awaken,” has always been a site of impressively original and innovative student work. That was certainly the case this time around as well, and one student found a way to link this assignment to the semester-long push for digital options: she created a hypertext version of the paper, where links in the academic section went to scholarly resources for her ideas, and those in the personal section to blog posts, photos, and other reflections of her perspective and experiences. It was a wonderful Paper 5, and a great reflection of what the digital and multimedia modes can bring to a first-year writing course.Next recap tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think? Other reflections or predictions you’d share?

December 12-13, 2015: Circles of Friends: The Rat Packs

[December 12thwill mark the 100th anniversary of Frank Sinatra’s birth, and since Sinatra was as well-known for his famous group of friends as for his individual achievements, I wanted to spend the week AmericanStudying such circles of friends. Leading up to this special weekend post on the Rat Pack!]On how the famous group of friends started, how it changed, and why the shift matters.I’m not going to pretend that I knew the slightest bit about the original, 1950s version of the Rat Pack, one centered on Humphrey Bogart and his wife Lauren Bacall and featuring such Hollywood luminaries as controversial couple Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, Judy Garland, David Niven, Cary Grant, Rex Harrison, and many others, until I started doing research for this post. Indeed, I very much doubt that many people, outside of Rat Pack completists, hard-core Bogie/Bacall or Tracy/Hepburn fans, and historians of mid-20th century Hollywood, know about this originating iteration of the group, with a nickname allegedly drawn from Bacall’s assessment of the men at the end of a long night of carousing (“You look like a pack of rats”) and a full name (the “Holmby Hills Rat Pack”) honoring the neighborhood of the Bogart/Bacall residence where the group most often gathered.With Bogart’s death in 1957, the group’s de facto leadership shifted to singer and actor Frank Sinatra, who had been an occasional member in those early years and who even briefly dated Bacall after (or, possibly, just before, although the Daily Mail is always to be taken with a pound of salt) Bogart’s death. Leaving such gossip aside, this 1960s version of the Rat Pack is the one that came to be thoroughly associated with the name: Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Peter Lawford, and Joey Bishop, performing in concerts together, making films together, becoming legendary partiers and womanizers together, and coming to define collectively a certain version of cool for a generation. Perhaps to differentiate themselves from that prior version, and perhaps because rats aren’t exactly the coolest creatures in the animal kingdom, the members of this group apparently preferred the names “the Summit” and “the Clan” (although Davis of course was less fond of that latter option); but “Rat Pack” was too catchy and irresistible, and has not only stuck but even spawned imitations such as the Brat Pack on which I focused in Thursday’s post.So the leadership and membership significantly shifted from Bogart’s Pack to Sinatra’s—but is the shift worth analyzing in more cultural or historical terms? I would say that it is, for at least two reasons. For one thing, Sinatra’s Rat Pack was far more of a professional partnership, one where the members would not only make art together but would also consistently contribute to each other’s artistic efforts; this was distinctly different from the more purely social nature of Bogart’s group, and would link Sinatra’s more fully to the professional collaborations of the Algonquin Round Table (for example). And for another thing, Sinatra’s Pack was notably more diverse, with not only the African American Davis but Sinatra (son of two Italian immigrants), Martin (son of an Italian immigrant father and Italian American mother), and Bishop(born Joseph Gottlieb to two Polish Jewish immigrants) as core members. There’s certainly value in better remembering Bogart’s Rat Pack, but the significance of Sinatra’s, well beyond just notions of cool, remains and endures nonetheless.Next series starts Monday,BenPS. What do you think?

December 11, 2015: Circles of Friends: The Darker Sides of Friends

[December 12thwill mark the 100th anniversary of Frank Sinatra’s birth, and since Sinatra was as well-known for his famous group of friends as for his individual achievements, I wanted to spend the week AmericanStudying such circles of friends. Leading up to a special weekend post on the Rat Pack!]Let me start by saying that I’ve gotten a lot of pleasure out of Friends over the years; once they got into their rhythm, this was one of the better ensemble casts of any sitcom in history, and produced lots of very funny as well as many touching moments over the years. But at the same time, like so many hugely popular cultural works, this TV show also reflected and extended some of the darker elements in America’s collective psyche. Here are three such dark sides to the mega-successful comedy:1)      Anti-Intellectualism: As Richard Hofstadter knew all too well, there’s been a longstanding, influential current of anti-intellectualism in American society. And in its consistently snarky and often downright nasty portrayal of Ross Geller (David Schwimmer)’s job as a college professor of paleontology, Friendsunfortunately played into this current and to the stereotypes of eggheaded academics on which it has often relied. Each character’s work world was the subject of plenty of jokes, but I would argue that only Ross’s was so thoroughly tied to the character’s worst personality traits and tendencies, with virtually no attention to any other elements of the profession. Not smart, Friends.2)      Homophobia: To be honest, there’s not much I can say about Chandler Bing (Matthew Perry)’s constant homophobia that wasn’t said already in this great Slate piece. But I would particularly single out the character of Chandler’s father, who is either a cross-dressing man or a transgendered woman (it’s never made quite clear, but the character is played by Kathleen Turner), and whom both Chandler and the show treat almost entirely as a combination of cringing embarrassment and shameful joke. Transparent or Grace and Frankie this most definitely isn’t, folks—and even for its own late 90s/early 00s moment, Friends was behind the curve.3)      Diversity: None other than the great Ta-Nehisi Coates has referenced the thoroughgoing lack of racial diversity on Friends, as well as the careless way the show recycled the same plotline for its two prominent African American guest stars, Aisha Tyler and Gabrielle Union. But the show’s diversity problem was even broader and deeper than that: this was a show set in New York City in the late 20thcentury, and the only prominent Asian character was literally fresh off the plane from China; I can’t remember any significant Hispanic characters or indeed prominent characters of any non-white ethnicity other than the three I’ve mentioned (and that’s over ten seasons!). I’m not arguing that one of the six friends would have had to be non-white, necessarily—but if their turn of the 21stcentury American world is so completely white, well, that’s an indictment of either the characters or the show.Special post this weekend,BenPS. What do you think?

December 10, 2015: Circles of Friends: The Brat Pack

[December 12thwill mark the 100th anniversary of Frank Sinatra’s birth, and since Sinatra was as well-known for his famous group of friends as for his individual achievements, I wanted to spend the week AmericanStudying such circles of friends. Leading up to a special weekend post on the Rat Pack!]Three layers to how we can AmericanStudy the mid-1980s circle of young film actors.1)      Two Iconic, Complementary Films: Lots of films have been nominatedfor inclusion in the Brat Pack register, usually because they starred at least two of the group’s core members; but it’s really two 1985 movies, The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire, that form the center of this film history narrative. And what’s particularly interesting about this pairing is that the two films, starring many of the same actors and released in the same year, focus on two very distinct settings and stages of life: with Breakfast highlighting the social and identity issues faced by a collection of high school students; and St. Elmo’s portraying the turning point moments for a group of friends graduating from college. Neither film is perfect by any means, but each pays nuanced attention to these youthful stages of life—and taken together, they offer a compelling portrait of late teen and early twenty-something identity in the 1980s.2)      The Brat Pack Narrative: The two films coming out in the same year certainly contributed to a developing narrative that linked this group of young actors to one another. But the most influential voice in that narrative was that of a single journalist, David Blum, who wrote a June cover story for New York magazine that coined the phrase. Perhaps not surprisingly, the actors didn’t much care for the term, nor did they necessarily see themselves as a cohort at all; “the media made up this sort of tribe,” Andrew McCarthy would later argue. Moreover, Ally Sheedy would claim (as quoted in this book) that the article helped destroy whatever coherence they did have: “I had felt truly a part of something, and that guy just blew it to pieces.” Which makes the “Brat Pack” (not the group, but the phrase) a complex case study in how communal identities are created and how they can affect those defined within them.3)      Looking Back to Look at Us: Each of those prior two frames offers one compelling way to look back at this mid-80s cultural moment and see what it has to tell us. But while such historical lenses are of course important, I would argue that just as significant to an AmericanStudies approach would be to consider as well how we can apply those lessons to our own moment and culture. What can we learn about our own cultural representations of teenagers and young people from these iconic films? How can studying the role of media and collective perceptions in the development of the “Brat Pack” narrative help us think about our own cultural and communal categories? I don’t pretend to have all the answers to those questions (and would love to hear yours in comments!), but here are two interesting starting points for such comparisons: the Brat Pack compared to the Fast and the Furious and the James Franco/Seth Rogen cohorts, two 21st century communities of young actors that have been developed purposefully by the members themselves over many linked films.  Next friend circle tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?

December 9, 2015: Circles of Friends: The Algonquin Round Table

[December 12thwill mark the 100th anniversary of Frank Sinatra’s birth, and since Sinatra was as well-known for his famous group of friends as for his individual achievements, I wanted to spend the week AmericanStudying such circles of friends. Leading up to a special weekend post on the Rat Pack!]Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley are the most famous members of the group of 30 writers, editors, and actors who met regularly for lunch at New York’s Alongquin Hotel between 1919 and 1927. But here are four other members who might surprise you and whose collective contributions to American culture and society are just as significant:1)      Edna Ferber: Ferber published two of her most acclaimed and enduring novels during the Round Table years: So Big (1924), which won the Pulitzer Prize; and Show Boat (1926), which was adapted into one of the most popular American musicals the following year. Two of her later novels became iconic Western films: Cimarron (1929; adapted into the 1931 Best Picture winning film) and Giant (1952; adapted into the 1956 film with James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Tayor). All told, Ferber was one of the 20th century’s most popular and influential novelists, and the Round Table helped launch that career.2)      Ruth Hale: Hale’s striking biography connects to a number of crucial early 20thcentury histories: she was a prominent advocate for women’s suffrage and the 19th Amendment, a lifelong feminist who established the influential in 1921, one of the first female New York Times reporters who traveled to Europe to report on World War I, and a drama critic who traced and contributed to the rise of modern American drama. And along with her husband, the journalist Heywood Broun, she became one of the most consistent participants in the Round Table, helping shape its social and political activisms. 3)      Herman Mankiewicz: During the Round Table’s era Mankiewicz was best known for his theatrical efforts and criticisms, which included becoming the New Yorker’s first regular theatre critic and collaborating with fellow Round Tablers Heywood Broun, Dorothy Parker, Robert Sherwood, and George Kaufman on multiple productions. He would bring these experiences to the exploding new world of Hollywood filmmaking, becoming one of the most prolific and influential screenwriters in Hollywood history: Citizen Kane (1941) would be sufficient all by itself, but Mankiewicz also worked on The Wizard of Oz (1939), Dinner at Eight (1933), numerous Marx Brother movies, and dozens of other films. 4)      Harpo Marx: Thanks to his relationships with both Mankiewicz and (especially) theatre critic and Round Table co-founder Alexander Woollcott, the second-oldest Marx Brother became a frequent Round Table participant as well. Although Harpo is of course known for the entirely non-speaking, very influential style of physical comedyhe employed in the Marx Brothers films, his Round Table connections led to another comic role: the character of “Banjo” in George Kaufman’s play The Man Who Came to Dinner (1939) was based on Harpo, and he would perform that role (opposite Woollcott) in a subsequent production of the play. Just one more example of the cultural and social legacy of this New York circle of artistic friends.Next friend circle tomorrow,BenPS. What do you think?