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
For the past couple of years, I’ve been tracking my reading habits with the Story Graph app. I like Story Graph because it easily allows me to track what Ive read, what I’m reading, and my to be read list. As well, it gives me a detailed breakdown of my reading habits, including genres, pages numbers, and more. This year, I’ve read 75 books … Read More What Have I Been Reading in 2025?
When the semester ended, I went to the library to find a few books to read at the start of the summer break before I turned my attention to some projects that I need to complete over the next few months. While there, I picked up Annie Ernaux’s Shame, J.M. Coetzee’s The Pole, Han Kang’s Greek Lessons, and Abdulrazak Gurnah’s Theft. For a few … Read More “What do these people want with us?”: Tourism in Abdulrazak Gurnah’s “Theft”
Over the past few weeks, I’ve started to read more works by French writers, including Leïla Slimani’s Adèle and Elisa Shua Dusapin’s Winter in Sokcho. To expand my reading, I asked individuals for other recommendations of female French writers, and one person suggested that I read Annie Ernaux. At the person’s suggestion, I went to the stacks in my library and pulled down a … Read More “All the images will disappear”: Memory and Existence in Annie Ernaux’s “The Years”
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
