January 16, 2024: Spring Semester Previews: American Literature II

[As thisnew semester gets underway, it does so amidst a particularly fraught moment forteaching & learning the Humanities. So for this week’s Semester Previewsseries I’ll highlight one thing from each of my courses that embodies the valueof the Humanities for us all—leading up to a special weekend post on MLK Dayand the Humanities!]

I’ve hadthe chance to teach a wide variety of courses in my 19 years at FSU (and have writtenabout most of them at one time or another in this space, especially in semesterpreviews and reflections series), but by far the most frequent have been thetwo American Literature surveys: Am Lit I: Origins to Civil War, recently renamedSlavery and Freedom) and Am Lit II (Civil War to Present, recently renamedMaking and Remaking America). I love each and every chance to teach thesecourses, and while some of that unquestionably has to do with the fact thatnearly all of my favorite authors and texts make an appearance in them, evenmore has to do with a deeper and more communal fact: that there’s no way to bean informed and engaged American citizen, something that every one of us (andcertainly every young person) needs to be if we’re going to make it, without anawareness of and engagement with our history and culture, our literature and community,our national story in all its complexities. To repeat what I said in yesterday’spost, I don’t imagine I need to convince anyone reading this blog of that fact,and indeed would say making the case for those stakes of this work has been oneof the most central goals of the blog. But it’s also one of the mostsignificant desired outcomes of my teaching—not to get students to see any ofthose topics how I do, but to get them to see them at all, and then to see whatthey see and say about them themselves. La lucha continua in Am Lit II thissemester!

Nextpreview tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think?