May 14, 2024: Spring 2024 Stand-Outs: Ambiguity in Am Lit

[Another semestercomes to a close this week, and this time for my usual end-of-semesterreflections series I wanted to highlight stand-out days from my classes.Leading up to a weekend off for a very stand-out reason!]

As Ihighlighted and contextualized in this December2020 semester reflections post, and as has continued to be the case a goodbit of the time, in the semesters and years since Covid I’ve frequently movedaway from longer readings in favor of multiple shorter ones. A lot of the timeI think that can achieve my and the course’s goals equally well, but I’m alsocommitted to not abandoning longer works altogether, and more exactly to makingthe choice in each specific instance rather than having a blanket policy orperspective. And this semester offered a perfect illustration of something thatcan only happen with a longer work we’ve read and discussed across multipleclass meetings: our final day with NellaLarsen’s stunning novella Passing(1929), where we had one of our liveliest discussions of the semester aboutwhat we make of that book’s shocking and ambiguous ending (no SPOILERS here).We couldn’t have had that stand-out conversation if we hadn’t built to it acrossmultiple days of work with Larsen, and that was a great reminder of theimportance of continuing to find ways to make longer texts part of my classes.

Nextstand-out tomorrow,

Ben

PS. Whatdo you think? Semester reflections or other work you’d share?