This semester, I am teaching a literature and composition course centered around short stories collections. For this course, I chose writers specific to the region where we are located in Appalachia, with one obvious outlier from Louisiana. Students read Frank Yerby, Ernest Gaines, Crystal Wilkinson, Dorothy Allison, and Ron Rash. As I worked on the syllabus for this course, I kept thinking about the … Read More Short Story Anthology Assignment
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been thinking about constructing a fascism in literature syllabus. Right now, I keep going back and forth on whether or not to focus specifically on American literature or to expand it and make it a world literature course. For this post, I am doing the latter because I feel that reading novels about fascism in a broader context … Read More Fascism in Literature Syllabus
+ anna seghers, graphic memoir, graphic novels, joe sacco, keum suk gendry-kim, mana neyestani, marjane satratpi, nora krug, rutu modan, syllabus
Last semester, I taught a course entitled The Reverberations of World War II where students read works by Anna Seghers, Victor Serge, Magda Szabó, Intizar Husain, and Yasa Katsuei. The course focused, specifically, on the lead up to the war (Katsuei), the war itself (Seghers, Serge, and Szabó), and the aftermath of the war (Szabó and Husain) across the world from Korea to France to Hungary … Read More World Literature and Graphic Novel Syllabus
This semester, I am teaching four different courses, with four different preps. When thinking about these courses, I wanted to make sure that I had a firm grounding in the majority of the material to make it a little easier on myself when it came to class prep. So, for two of these courses I decided to construct the courses around texts and themes … Read More Short Story Collection Syllabus
Whenever I work on a syllabus, I always have some amorphous idea for a theme and for the texts I want to use in the course. For introductory composition courses where the goal is to teach students to write argumentative essays and move towards the incorporation of sources into their work, I always structure the course around personal narratives because, for me, starting by … Read More Personal Memoir Syllabus
Interminable Rambling 