Benjamin A. Railton's Blog, page 86

January 20, 2023: Spring 2023 Previews: Short Stories for ALFA

[This week marks the beginning of a new semester, and so as always I wanted to preview classes I’m teaching, this time through individual authors and texts I’m excited to be including on this syllabi. Leading up to a special weekend update on my own newest book project!]

This Spring I’ll be teaching for a couple different adult learning programs as usual, including my return after many years away to the BOLLI program at Brandeis. I always enjoy each and every one of those courses, but I’m especially excited to be teaching for the first time in many years a reading-centered class for the ALFA program. Entitled “Great American Stories, Past and Present,” each meeting of this course will pair a great short story from American literary history with one from our contemporary moment. Of course I have plenty of starting points and ideas, but when it comes to contemporary short stories in particular I also know that there’s a lot I don’t know yet. Or rather that I still have to learn—which is where you all come in! I’d love to hear, whether here or by email, contemporary short stories (or authors) that have really struck you, that I should put on the shortlist for the contemporary readings in this course’s pairings. Thanks in advance, and here’s to a great semester!

Next Spring preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. So what do you think? Short stories I should definitely consider or include?  

January 19, 2023: Spring 2023 Previews: First-Year Writing II

[This week marks the beginning of a new semester, and so as always I wanted to preview classes I’m teaching, this time through individual authors and texts I’m excited to be including on this syllabi. Leading up to a special weekend update on my own newest book project!]

[NB. Gonna repeat a 2017 post on my use of a contemporary film and TV show in this course, as the same limits and benefits remain and indeed have only deepened as I continue using these texts and this assignment in my Writing II sections.]

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 Fruitvaleas 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.

Last Spring preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring semester authors, texts, classes, or other work to share?

January 18, 2023: Spring 2023 Previews: Grad Class on Multi-Ethnic American Lit

[This week marks the beginning of a new semester, and so as always I wanted to preview classes I’m teaching, this time through individual authors and texts I’m excited to be including on this syllabi. Leading up to a special weekend update on my own newest book project!]

As I wrote in my initial preview of this new (to me) Grad class, I decided at any early point that I wanted to take the course name as literally as possible: to include not just a range of ethnicities or cultures across our authors and texts, but to focus on works that explore the experiences and lives of multi-ethnic American characters and people (fictional and real). I’m really excited for the chance to work with all sorts of texts that I’ve taught many times before through this particular lens, from Helen Hunt Jackson’s Ramona to Gish Jen’s “Who’s Irish?” among many others. But I’m most excited that thinking about this course in this way offered me the opportunity to teach for the first time one of the most unique, complicated, and compelling American novels, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). Johnson’s sole novel makes for a really interesting pairing with Nella Larsen’s Passing (which we’ll also be reading in this class), but it’s also just a phenomenal and under-read book in its own right—and that under-reading apparently includes me, as I haven’t taught it any time in my prior 22 years of college teaching. Glad to have the chance to remedy that this Spring!

Next Spring preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring semester authors, texts, classes, or other work to share?

January 17, 2023: Spring 2023 Previews: The American Novel to 1950

[This week marks the beginning of a new semester, and so as always I wanted to preview classes I’m teaching, this time through individual authors and texts I’m excited to be including on this syllabi. Leading up to a special weekend update on my own newest book project!]

Like yesterday’s Sci Fi/Fantasy class, this upper-level lit seminar, which I taught for the first time as part of my first year at Fitchburg State back in Spring 2006, is another I only get to teach every few years (at best). So I’m always excited to return to it and to the many old friends that have remained on every one of its syllabi since that first iteration, from Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables to Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury (perhaps the most challenging text I teach in any FSU course, but one to which we build throughout our semester together). But I think my favorite two weeks of the semester are the two we spend with Willa Cather’s My Ántonia, one of the most beautiful and moving American novels and yet a deceptively simple text from which I draw new and compelling layers every time I teach to read and teach it. If I could offer advice to anyone teaching a literature course, high on the list would be “Make sure at least one of the things you read just makes you happy to think about,” and Cather’s novel most definitely fits that bill for me.

Next Spring preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring semester authors, texts, classes, or other work to share?

January 16, 2023: Spring 2023 Previews: Intro to Sci Fi and Fantasy

[This week marks the beginning of a new semester, and so as always I wanted to preview classes I’m teaching, this time through individual authors and texts I’m excited to be including on this syllabi. Leading up to a special weekend update on my own newest book project!]

The last time I got to teach this very unique and fun course I had (finally) diversified the syllabus, adding Kai Ashante Wilson’s A Sorcerer of the Wildeeps (2015). But as you can see from that hyperlinked preview post, that semester turned out to be none other than Spring 2020, and by the time we were supposed to be reading and discussing Wilson’s novel, we were in that state of virtual teaching and triage that comprised the entire second half of that semester. We did what we could, but it was far from what it could and presumably would have been in a more regular series of class conversations. But I remain undeterred in my goal of continued such diversification, and for this semester’s section of the course I’m very excited to have the chance both to teach and to read for the first time Nnedi Okorafor’s Akata Witch (2011). I’ve heard nothing but great things about Okarafor’s book (and its two sequels), and can’t wait to see what my students think of it—hopefully (he wrote knocking on every bit of wood he could find) in a far more “normal” class setting this time around.

Next Spring preview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Spring semester authors, texts, classes, or other work to share?

January 14-15, 2023: Five Years of Considering History: Two Tributes and a Request

[Five years ago this week, my first Saturday Evening Post Considering History column dropped. That space and work have become crucial components of my career over these years, so for this anniversary I wanted to reflect on a few particular, telling columns from my first year there. Leading up to this special weekend tribute and request!]

On two people who have meant a ton to my five years of Considering History, and one request for the year(s) to come!

1)      Jen Bortel: I’ve mentioned my awesome Saturday Evening Post editor Jen a couple times already in the week’s series, and rightly so: not only is every moment of this experience tied and owed to her, but she’s also been the most thoughtful and helpful editor with whom I’ve ever had the chance to work. On everything from my topics to my ideas about audience engagement to the smallest details of my prose, Jen has been a meaningful and productive voice and presence in my online writing life throughout these years, and as I know you all know there’s no way in which anyone could contribute more significantly to my career than that.

2)      Bob McGowan Jr.: Speaking of audience engagement, one of my favorite parts of the Considering History experience has been comments from Saturday Evening Post readers. Only occasionally has a column become controversial enough that it has elicited a large number of such comments—I believe the columns on guns and Confederate generals are at the top of that list, not surprisingly. But there have been a handful of folks who have shared thoughtful responses on many posts over the years, and at the top of that list is longtime commenter Bob McGowan Jr. (see this post for one of those many examples of Bob’s awesome comments). I’m able to imagine readers even when they don’t have a chance to comment, but any and all comments are deeply appreciated, and ones as thoughtful as Bob’s really help keep me going.

3)      A Request for Y’all: It would be easy, and not at all wrong, to focus here on my goal of getting a few more such comments and responses on future CH columns, and I certainly hope anyone reading this will feel free to share their thoughts (here as ever, but over there too). But I want to highlight instead a different and perhaps less obvious goal: that folks continue to revisit and read (and, yes, even respond to) my prior columns, those that I’ve had the chance to write for these first five years (and that are collected under the Considering History category here). One of the tricky things about online writing is that the newest stuff can easily become the sole focus—but one of the best things about online writing is that much of the older stuff remains out there to be found and read. I’d love to challenge the former effect and help amplify the latter one, and that can start with you all checking out those prior columns, and even sharing them if you like. Thanks in advance and as always!

Spring semester series starts Monday,

Ben

PS. I’d love to hear from you!

January 13, 2023: Five Years of Considering History: The Mexican American Series

[Five years ago this week, my first Saturday Evening Post Considering History column dropped. That space and work have become crucial components of my career over these years, so for this anniversary I wanted to reflect on a few particular, telling columns from my first year there. Leading up to a special weekend tribute and request!]

While there’s some definite overlap between my Considering History column and this blog (it’s all AmericanStudier’s writing and voice and ideas, after all!), I would say that there are even more distinctions between the two: CH is far more consistently inspired by and connected to current events, for one example; each column is edited by the great Jen Bortel and thus revised at least slightly, for another (inside baseball, but no, I don’t tend to revise blog posts after I draft them). Moreover, it’s almost always the case that each CH column takes on a new topic, rather than the weeklong series of posts that have been the norm for at least the last decade here on the blog. Which makes the trio of interconnected columns about Mexican American and border histories, political debates and issues, and voices and texts that I wrote around CH’s one-year anniversary in January 2019 really stand out. I haven’t really returned to the idea of a series of columns at Considering History since, but I’m still really proud of that trio, and wanted to include them in this week’s reflections.

Special weekend post tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Thoughts on these columns? Your own writing to share?

January 12, 2023: Five Years of Considering History: Early American Lit and Lives

[Five years ago this week, my first Saturday Evening Post Considering History column dropped. That space and work have become crucial components of my career over these years, so for this anniversary I wanted to reflect on a few particular, telling columns from my first year there. Leading up to a special weekend tribute and request!]

While I hope and believe my 100+ Considering History columns have covered a wide range of topics, I’d say that most have been inspired by the kinds of subjects I’ve mentioned in the prior posts this week: current events, historical anniversaries, and/or personal Ben-tastic connections. But occasionally I’ve had the chance to venture a bit further afield, and those columns tend to stand out in my memory as particularly fun to write (and hopefully to read!). One of the first of that type was my October 9, 2018 column “Predatory Men, Vulnerable Women, and Foundational American Texts and Lives.” Yes, part of my starting points there were ongoing (to this day) conversations about gender, sex, consent, #MeToo, and more. But also and especially this was a chance to share and think about two of my favorite under-read American novels and one of my very favorite under-remembered Americans—if you want to know more, as LeVar Burton and friends would put it, read the column!  

Last anniversary reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Thoughts on these columns? Your own writing to share?

January 11, 2023: Five Years of Considering History: Cville

[Five years ago this week, my first Saturday Evening Post Considering History column dropped. That space and work have become crucial components of my career over these years, so for this anniversary I wanted to reflect on a few particular, telling columns from my first year there. Leading up to a special weekend tribute and request!]

I have no doubt that no matter what I would have found some occasion to write about the one-year anniversary of the August 2017 Unite the Right Rally in my hometown of Charlottesville—my sons and I were literally driving down for our annual visit on the day in which all the violence erupted, and our next trip took place during that one-year anniversary in August 2018. But my Considering History column offered the perfect opportunity to do so, and in so doing to bring together those personal and familial contexts, my own experiences growing up in Cville, and my evolving perspective on the city’s histories and issues, among other subjects. Moreover, I had the chance to do so again for the two-year anniversary the following August, only deepening my own thoughts as well (I hope and believe) as our collective conversations. I can’t imagine I would have been able to keep writing this column for five years if it didn’t feel truly mine, and such opportunities and columns have most definitely helped make sure that it did and does feel that way.

Next anniversary reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Thoughts on these columns? Your own writing to share?

January 10, 2023: Five Years of Considering History: June 2018

[Five years ago this week, my first Saturday Evening Post Considering History column dropped. That space and work have become crucial components of my career over these years, so for this anniversary I wanted to reflect on a few particular, telling columns from my first year there. Leading up to a special weekend tribute and request!]

In yesterday’s post I wrote about the balance of different kinds of topics and inspirations out of which I drew the subjects for my Considering History columns from the beginning; that continued throughout my first year with the column, but of course I don’t want to just repeat myself for the rest of this week’s reflections, so I’ll try here to highlight a few other layers to the column through examples from that first year. The two columns I wrote in June 2018 exemplify two other layers to why this work has been so consistently meaningful for me: when I had the chance to write about Japanese American World War II soldiers (among others) for my D-Day column, it helped spark my continued  work with that community for my next book We the People; and two weeks later, the current events topic of family separations at the border led me to slavery, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and a chance to share some of the amazing work of my Dad’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture website. Bringing my own past, present, and future together while I write about America’s—that could be the catchphrase for Considering History!

Next anniversary reflection tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Thoughts on these columns? Your own writing to share?