It has been a few years since I have taught an American literature survey course, either from the colonial period to 1865 or from 1865 to the present. When I teach survey courses likes this, ones that span multiple decades and centuries, I usually use an anthology. This semester, though, I wanted to try something different. Instead of using an anthology, which would limit … Read More American Literature (1865-present) Course
+ holocaust, memoir, poland, syllabus, warsaw ghetto uprising, warsaw uprising, warsaw, poland, world war ii
A couple of years ago, I proposed a study travel trip to Poland focused on the intersections between Jim Crow and the Holocaust. Unfortunately, the trip didn’t make, so we didn’t get to go. However, one student wanted to take the course, and we did a directed study which led to a co-written essay. I have thought about trying to get this trip make again, but I … Read More Resistance and Survival in World War II Poland Syllabus
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
