[This week marks the conclusion of another Fall semester, my 21st at Fitchburg State. Since we’re all going through it at the moment, I thought I’d share one significant challenge I faced in each class this semester, and a bit about how I tried to respond. Leading up to a special weekend post on my younger son’s first semester!]
For many years now, I’ve featured in semester preview and reflection series the question of whether I should substitute shorter texts for longer ones in my literature courses. There have been a number of factors pushing me toward that question, as those hyperlinked prior posts reflect; but certainly one has been my desire to minimize (and ideally eliminate entirely) the number of texts that students have to find their own copies of (ie, purchase, although there are always potentially copies at libraries), rather than that are available online in full. Of course there are plenty of longer readings available in that latter way, but they have to be out of copyright, meaning that any text published after 1930 (as of right now) is not likely to be available online in full yet.
For the first two-thirds of my American Lit II syllabus, that’s not an issue, as all of our readings (including the longer ones) are available online in full. But in the final Unit, in which we read texts from the late 20th and early 21st centuries, it is one—and the two longer readings in that Unit happen to be two of my favorite American novels, both overall and specifically to teach: Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony (1977) and Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake (2003). So when I was planning this semester’s section of American Lit II, I really debated whether to keep those two texts on the syllabus or to replace them with shorter readings by the same authors that are available online (such as Lahiri’s wonderful short story “The Third and Final Continent” [1999] in place of her novel, for example).
I ended up keeping the two novels on the syllabus, and made sure to have copies of both on reserve at the FSU library (e-reserve as well as hard copy for Silko, which was available in both ways; hard copy for Lahiri, which was not) so students had at least one guaranteed way to take a look at them without finding their own copies. But I also offered a compromise that I’m still not sure about but that did seem to help a bit—highlighting opening sections in each text that, if students were able to look at, would allow us to have meaningful conversations even if most folks were not able to read beyond those sections (which, indeed, most were not). Since I’m not requiring students to purchase any text, I don’t feel badly from that standpoint about not asking them to necessarily read the whole of a text; but since I especially love where those novels go in their latter sections, I most definitely did miss the chance to fully teach these books. This challenge remains a work in progress, and since I’ll have an American Lit II section next Fall it’s one I’ll be returning to to be sure.
Next reflections tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think?
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