PRESENTED BY Susan Miller-Cochran       ABOUT THE PRESENTER   Susan Miller-Cochran, now Director of the Writing Program at the University of Arizona, helped shape the First-Year Writing Program at North Carolina State University while she served as Director from 2007-2015.  Her research focuses on instructional technology, ESL writing, and writing program administration. Her work has appeared in College Composition and Communication, Composition Studies, Computers and Composition, and Teaching English in the Two-Year College, and she is also an editor of Rhetorically Rethinking Usability (Hampton Press, 2009) and Strategies for Teaching First-Year Composition (NCTE, 2002). Before joining the faculty at NC State, she was a faculty member at Mesa Community College (AZ). She has served on the Executive Committee of the Conference on College Composition and Communication and the Executive Board of the Carolinas Writing Program Administrators. She currently serves as Vice President of the Council of Writing Program Administrators. ... View more

PRESENTED BY John J. Ruszkiewicz ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM What makes teaching writing through genres so appealing is that it encourages students to work the way productive writers do. Because students encounter genres everywhere—in music, movies, games, reading—they quickly grasp the concept and see how it applies to the kinds of writing they produce. Taught right, genres offer writers the formulas they crave (at least initially) and the freedom they need to adapt to constantly changing rhetorical situations, audiences, and media. So the strategies students take away from a genre approach apply well beyond the composition classroom. ABOUT THE PRESENTER John J. Ruszkiewicz is a professor at the University of Texas at Austin where he has taught literature, rhetoric, and writing for more than thirty-five years. A winner of the President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award, he was instrumental in creating the Department of Rhetoric and Writing in 1993 and directed the unit from 2001-05. He has also served as president of the Conference of College Teachers of English (CCTE) of Texas, which gave him its Frances Hernández Teacher—Scholar Award in 2012. For Bedford/St. Martin's, he is coauthor, with Andrea Lunsford, of Everything’s An Argument; coauthor, with Jay T. Dolmage, of How to Write Anything with Readings; and the author of How To Write Anything and A Reader's Guide to College Writing. ... View more

PRESENTED BY Nancy Sommers ABOUT THE SYMPOSIUM For students to succeed as academic writers, they must become comfortable with arguing positions and anticipating counterarguments. Academic writing asks students to enter debates, respond to the words and ideas of other writers, and construct arguments supported with evidence. If students are reluctant to take a stance on an issue, confuse opinions with positions, believe that introducing counterarguments will weaken their claims, or come from culture that value different modes of argumentation, they will have difficulty grasping the expectations of academic argument. Nothing is more vital for students’ success as academic writers than becoming comfortable analyzing and constructing arguments. In this Webinar we will explore specific ideas for teaching argument and offer practical classroom activities for helping students succeed as academic writers. ABOUT THE PRESENTER Nancy Sommers, who has taught composition and directed composition programs for thirty years, now teaches writing and mentors new writing teachers at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education.  She led Harvard’s Expository Writing Program for twenty years, directing the first-year writing program and establishing Harvard’s WAC program. A two-time Braddock Award winner, Sommers is well known for her research and publications on student writing. Her articles "Revision Strategies of Student and Experienced Writers" and "Responding to Student Writing" are two of the most widely read and anthologized articles in the field of composition.  Her recent work involves a longitudinal study of college writing to understand the role writing plays in undergraduate education. Sommers is the lead author on Hacker handbooks, all published by Bedford/St. Martin’s, and is coauthor of Fields of Reading, Tenth Edition (2013). ... View more

The September issue of the Atlantic features an article that makes a strong claim: college campuses today are so focused on not offending anyone, ever, that they increasingly stay away from anything controversial. The authors, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, call this phenomenon “The Coddling of the American Mind” and argue that “in the name of emotional well-being, college students are increasingly demanding protection from words and ideas they don’t like. . . . Here’s why that’s disastrous for education—and likely to worsen mental health on campus.” Lukianoff and Haidt offer a number of startling examples in support of their claim:  law students at Harvard are asking the faculty not to teach rape law because it may traumatize some students; the University of California system’s schools identified “America is the land of opportunity” as a potentially offensive statement that should be avoided; Indiana University—Purdue University deemed a student who was reading Notre Dame vs. the Klan guilty of racism.  Particularly troubling to the authors of the essay is the proliferation of “trigger warnings,” “alerts that professors are supposed to issue if something in a course might cause a strong emotional response.” Lukianoff and Haidt aren’t the only ones disturbed by what they see as a harmful trend. Others have written about a raft of “disinvitations” issued to people who had been invited to speak on campus; the institutions withdrew the invitation when students, parents, or anyone else protested against the invitee.  And in late August, Inside Higher Education reported on student protest at Duke over a suggested (not required) reading of Alison Bechdel’s award-winning graphic memoir, Fun Home. This protest is especially surprising to me given that I have taught Fun Home for years at Stanford without the slightest ripple of anything other than admiration for Bechdel’s gorgeously drawn and written coming-of-age story, which has since gone on to become a highly-acclaimed musical that took in numerous Tony awards this year.  Like most campuses, Stanford prides itself on its openness to ideas, as a campus that encourages intellectual curiosity and debate. So I haven’t experienced the kind of disinvitations or “trigger warnings” that the authors of the Atlantic article write about first hand.  Stanford students aren’t shy about expressing their opinions – and they are ready to protest if necessary. Some years ago, after learning that President Bush was making an “unannounced” visit to the Hoover Institute on campus, they quickly massed over a thousand students to block the motorcade in protest of the President’s war policies.  But I can’t think of a person who was invited to campus and then “disinvited” because the University feared that the speaker would offend some students or faculty. Lukianoff and Haidt go on to argue that openness to alternative opinions and to controversy are hallmarks of strong critical thinkers, citing Aristotle, Buddha, and Marcus Aurelius among others.  Further, they argue that “coddling” or protecting students from contentious views actually harms rather than supports mental health.  Those in rhetoric and writing studies would be quick to agree, pointing out that attending carefully to alternate points of view (Dissoi Logoi) is part of what it means to be an effective rhetor/writer/speaker/thinker.  Perhaps it’s more important than ever to stress this aspect of rhetorical thinking and performing in our classes, and to invite students to explore the delicate (sometimes treacherously so) balance between protecting free speech and respecting the right to protest against speech that is truly dangerous to the University and its community.  Surely, though, it isn’t necessary to “coddle” students rather than to engage them in exploring and maintaining that balance. ... View more

Driving to work this morning I spotted the following billboard, promoting a new television series, which is set to debut on September 27.  Now, whether or not Blood & Oil is a commercial success or not, this billboard contains a great deal of information, not so much about the show itself (which, of course, has not yet been aired) but about American attitudes towards wealth, social class, and feminine beauty.   A semiotic analysis of the billboard begins with a description of its fundamental denotation: what it shows or contains.  We see four human figures, two men and two women, standing next to each other, all but one appearing as young-adult-youthful, the fourth as well preserved middle-aged.  All are dressed in black evening wear, and they are surrounded by black, some of it displayed in a drip pattern from the top of the image, and some displayed at the bottom, looking like a kind of sea in which the figures are standing.  The image is also set up in a kind of chiaroscuro effect by which the models’ faces, hair, and, most strikingly, the backs of women (strategically placed at the center of the image) stand out. Also standing out, just below the center, are the words “Blood & Oil,” in gold lettering. Our semiotic analysis seeks to move from the denotation of the image to its connotation—that is, to what it suggests or signifies—but this is not a simple direct step.  Our goal is a cultural interpretation, but to get to that we first need to look at the visual codes employed by the image.  Black evening dress, for example, tends to be codified as a signifier of high status in America, and so the image suggests that these figures belong to the upper class.  Their facial expressions support this connotative impression: the man on the left (some of you may recognize Don Johnson here) wears an angry, domineering expression, suggesting someone used to power.  The man on the right wears an aloof expression, with an eyebrow slightly raised, hinting at total self-assurance.  The women look over their shoulders (in a classic eroticized posture) with expressions that are at once daring and self-satisfied, and the way that they are placed in relation to the men suggests that each is the “trophy wife” of the man next to her.  All the figures, though one can detect subtle age gradations, are physically attractive according to America’s dominant beauty values. This first level of interpretation is supported by the gold lettered words, which suggest both family (blood) and wealth (oil). (It is also an allusive pun, alluding to the Nazi credo of “blood and soil,” thus hinting at a story about human evil.)  Indeed, my first reaction when I saw the billboard, at forty miles an hour, was “Oh my goodness, they’re bringing back some sort of Dallas clone!”  (Turns out I was right.) The words “Blood & Oil” on the image also clarifies what all that black is: it’s oil, dripping down to fill a sea of goo.  And while oil connotes wealth (if you own the source), it also connotes pollution, filth, and the fact that the models are standing in it helps lead to the next level of interpretation. Because what this billboard is indicating is a story about oil barons and their women, and the barons aren’t going to be heroes.  Situating the image into a system that includes Dallas, but also the film There Will be Blood, reinforces this connotative impression of a new series about a glamorous but evil oil clan. I knew all this before I could get to my office and look the new show up.  And indeed, “Blood & Oil” is a kind of Dallas reprise, but with a sympathetic working-class couple (not included in this billboard image) standing as foils to the rich oil barons this time around. Now, what does all this tell us at the cultural level?  First, we see here the fundamental middle-class perspective on social class in America as reflected in popular culture.  This view could be called a love/hate relationship with wealth, one that is at once fascinated by the rich, and yet also in need of feeling morally superior to them.  Consider such programs as My Super Sweet Sixteen, which lavishly displays the privileges of the very rich while also making them look ridiculous.  Viewed by a mass audience of middle and working-class viewers, such shows satisfy the desire to see what the rich have while reassuring viewers of their moral superiority to such people.  Dallas, Falcon Crest, Knott’s Landing, most “Real Housewives of .  .   .” programs, and innumerable other TV shows and movies do the same thing. We also see a display here of what counts as feminine beauty in America, worthy of being possessed by wealthy men: slim, slinky bodies, blonde hair, high cheekbones, delicate facial features.  Male beauty (though less precisely codified than female beauty) is also represented in the image.  But the physical attractiveness of the men and women in the image is compromised by their facial expressions.  The women are smug; the men are either domineering or too cool by half, reflecting the middle-class view that the rich are physically beautiful (men as well as women), but their beauty is of an inhuman sort, enviable but ultimately repugnant. The fact that this show features working-class protagonists (again, not indicated in the billboard) is a very interesting addition to the Dallas narrative, however, reflecting the blossoming of class consciousness in America in the wake of the Great Recession.  Described (from my online sources) as a soap opera, Blood & Oil will clearly pit the working-class couple against these evil but glamorous oil barons and their wives in a soapy dramatization of what is happening today as the 1% (really the top tenth of a percent) increasingly swallow up most of the wealth in the world. I wonder if the show will survive the pilot. ... View more

B edford/St. Martin's is looking for examples of student writing for the next edition of Lee A. Jacobus' A World of Ideas.  In publishing these essays, we hope to celebrate students' writing successes and to provide future learners with attainable models. We are particularly interested in student research essays and essays written in response to one of the readings or assignments in A World of Ideas. If we accept a piece for publication from one or more of your students, you and the student will each receive $100. Please contact us at jennifer.prince@macmillan.com. We look forward to hearing from you! ... View more

Teaching Shakespeare’s Language A webinar with Russ McDonald, co-author of The Bedford Shakespeare Join master teacher and Shakespeare scholar Russ McDonald Thursday, September 24th, at 3 p.m. E.D.T. for a lively webinar for teachers and fellow scholars on helping students engage with, understand, and enjoy Shakespeare’s language. (Please remember to clear your cache if you have trouble accessing the link.) Discuss strategies for teaching how shifts in pronouns from “you” to “thou” can indicate an insult how tropes, punning, and wordplay serve multiple functions how the Oxford English Dictionary illuminates the connotations of key words like “honour,” “will,” “nature,” “art,” and “nothing” Russ McDonald is Professor of English Literature at Goldsmiths College, University of London, author of The Bedford Companion to Shakespeare, and co-author of The Bedford Shakespeare. The winner of multiple awards for distinguished teaching, including North Carolina Professor of the Year, he helped to direct the NEH-sponsored Teaching Shakespeare Institute for secondary teachers at the Folger Library. He has held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Folger Shakespeare Library, and the Mellon Foundation. In 2010 to 2011, he served as President of the Shakespeare Association of America.   ... View more

The Black Lives Matter movement continues to be an active and relevant force and one certainly worth teaching.  The saturation of violence against black people in this country demands careful thought and consideration.  Several essays in Emerging can offer you and your students tools for thinking about this campaign. By The All-Nite Images [CC BY-SA 2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Making Conversation and The Primacy of Practice.”  In the first part of this selection Appiah makes it clear that cosmopolitanism is as much a problem as a solution.  That is, the answer is not just “let’s all get along.”  Instead, that we live in an interconnected world demands that we pay careful attention to how to get along.  The second part of this selection is also useful since it is about the processes of social change in relation to values.  Appiah, then, can offer students strategies for thinking about how to achieve the change imagined by Black Lives Matter and also can help them evaluate the movement as it exists today. Francis Fukuyama, “Human Dignity.”  Human dignity is in some ways central to the concerns of Black Lives Matter.  Why is it that black lives seem to be less valued? What are the consequences when any human is denied a basic level of dignity?  Fukuyama’s dense text offers students complex theoretical grounds for examining social violence in relation to human rights. Malcolm Gladwell, “Small Change.”  Gladwell’s essay is perhaps particularly apropos to the Black Lives Matter movement. Gladwell looks at the relation between social media and social change by drawing from the lessons of the civil rights movement.  His arguments about the kinds of connections necessary for real social change are perfect for thinking about this campaign and how to realize its goals. Steve Olson, “The End of Race: Hawaii and the Mixing of Peoples.” Olson’s essay makes it clear that there is no longer any biological basis to race.  He also hints at some of the reasons that race nevertheless persists (and powerfully so).  Leslie Savan, “What's Black, Then White, and Said All Over?” Savan’s essay offers a larger context for violence against black people by examining the pop cultural appropriation of black langue.  Her essay can offer students a broader context for looking at the ways that black lives and culture are devalued. Peter Singer, “Visible Man: Ethics in a World Without Secrets.” Singer suggests that a world saturated in surveillance may allow us to watch the watchers.  Given Singer’s example of the Rodney King beating, and given the role that video has played in many recent case of violence against black people, Singer perhaps offers students tools to think about how technology can combat this racial violence. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

This post originally appeared on October 7, 2014. When I talk to my students about writing papers, I discuss the idea of audience — most often, we discuss how things are different when speaking to our friends at another college about our weekend and speaking to our parents about it. From there I have the students think about what they’d tell the Dean of Students. That’s the one that typically gets students thinking about what they’d leave out of a discussion, and the different tone that they’d likely use. What we’re really talking about, ultimately, is the aspect of performance for our audience. And that performative aspect is something that I’ve been thinking about in terms of my presence in the classroom: I perform differently on Twitter than I do in person; I perform differently around my friends than I do in the classroom; in fact, I perform differently in front of my colleagues than I do in front of my students. This is not to say that the shifts in my personality are huge — the same basic “me” is there — but rather that I’ve recently become very conscious of that performance aspect of my teaching. In the classroom, my goal is to be approachable, but authoritative. I want my classroom to be a fairly laid-back space, where students are comfortable grappling with the complexities of the texts in front of them. I also want them to have fun with the literature, and this is where I’m most conscious of the way that I become performative — and, in fact, have become so increasingly over my years of experience. What I’ve noticed in teaching over the past several years is that I’ve become much more conscious of the space that I take up in the classroom — particularly the way that I take up that space.  I’ve always been one to pace across the front of the room, or even move into the rows of students.  While this has the potential drawback of being distracting for some students, I also think it’s important for keeping students engaged and showing that I’m paying attention to them. But that’s not quite what I’m talking about either. What I’m really talking about is becoming, in some ways, much bigger, more physically expressive than I normally am in day-to-day conversation. Perhaps the easiest way for me to explain this is to talk about what happens when I teach “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Students — particularly Intro to Lit students — don’t always quite visualize how very terrifying it is when the narrator is creeping about the smooch above the mopboard in that final section. What’s particularly frightening in that scene is when she looks over her shoulder at John and he faints. It always strikes me as a little bit like some scenes from The Grudge (a movie I’ve only seen trailers for, by the way), but I think that even just suggesting that to the students doesn’t quite do it. So, I show them where the mopboard would be, then I lean over — almost getting down on the ground — and begin creeping, turning my head abruptly back in to explain how terrifying this might be. It’s very physical, and it’s something that I find that I do more and more as I teach. The performance usually doesn’t wind up being quite this undignified (it is probably a sight when I’m wearing high heels and doing this), but as I continue to teach I’ve found much more hand waving, much more exaggerated movement on my part. It’s not really the sage on the stage — most of the courses I teach are almost entirely discussion-driven — but it is an acknowledgement that we’re onstage when we’re teaching, no matter what. ... View more

This post originally appeared on September 23, 2014. Tomorrow is the first day of the new semester. My syllabi are printed on bright shiny goldenrod paper. Stapled. Neatly stacked. Books are by the door, and my water bottle, glasses, glasses lanyard, and power bars are in my satchel.  My nerves are jangly, in a good way. I’ve got new periwinkle blue notebooks for my classes. I’ve examined the rosters, and am happy to see names that are familiar to me. Qaadir. Renee. Sarah D. Faces pop up now in our online course management tool but their faces will never be familiar: I suffer from profound prosopagnosia or face blindness.  And I’ll open class with that news, asking my students to help me identify them each time we encounter each other. The first time I did this in front of a class of puzzled undergraduates, years ago, I was shaking so hard, I wasn’t sure I’d make it through my spiel.  But I saw the looks on the students’ faces that day: awe, curiosity, kindness, compassion.  I was stunned.  They leaned in—literally. Before leaning in was a metaphor, they physically leaned in, and peppered me with questions for 45 minutes. It was one of the most moving, meaningful hours I spent in a classroom. And I quickly learned how to boundary that conversation so the first hour wasn’t “Heather’s Medical Mystery Hour.”  But I start every single class with this request: will you help me? And they do. I allow ten minutes for questions (what do you see? can you recognize your own face? how will you know if someone slips in and takes our place?) (what you see, no, and I won’t.)  And then it’s their turn to tell me who they are. I’ve found that this necessary but deeply personal intimate disclosure on my part engenders an authenticity in our introductory conversation.  I always hated those dry, canned “Tell us a little about yourself, where you are from, what you are majoring in” openers. I hated them because they’re all surface and no news, no depth. And, worse, students unconsciously match their answers to fit what’s come before. It’s an exercise in conformity, not creativity.  Since I’m teaching creative writing, and asking my students to learn how to go in deep to find valuable, complex, interesting stories to tell, I want to set up a first-day introductory activity that pre-figures the work we will do during the course of the semester.  I don’t want un-boundaried self-disclosure—“tell us something no one knows about you.” That may or may not be the best route to a good introduction or a good piece of writing. Tomorrow I’m going to try a new prompt for the introductions.  Tell us your name, what you want to be called, and what you are fired up about.  I got the prompt from a friend’s luncheon this past summer; she got it from a life coach who runs “Women on Fire.” I will have them write down their response so they have a better shot at staying true to their own internal wisdom. I will use the introduction process as a way to launch my first lecture: how to engage the reader. I’ll let you know how it goes.  Meanwhile, I ‘d love to hear how you structure introductions—what works for you, what doesn’t, and why. ... View more

This blog was originally posted on September 2, 2014. Recently, I got into a conversation on Twitter with a number of other early modernists about survey courses, a discussion that stemmed from another English professor’s frustration with her anthology’s options for The Faerie Queene. While we discussed different anthology choices that we make for our surveys, we ultimately wound up in conversation about what we include in our British Literature surveys, and what we’re forced to leave out. Some of it simply has to do with what our anthologies give us; some of it has to do with our philosophy towards the course; and a lot of it has to do with the other options our departments provide for our students. My friend with the initial complaint admitted that she tends not to teach much Chaucer in the survey, because she’s at an institution with a great course on Chaucer — and as an early modernist rather than a medievalist, she feels she can’t do The Canterbury Tales the justice it deserves. Instead she teaches other Middle English texts like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and sometimes excerpts of Piers Plowman.  Other people in the conversation admitted to leaving out The Faerie Queene altogether, giving them more time to focus on 17th century works. And others admitted — like most of us — that one of the eras covered by our surveys always gets short shrift. For many of us, it winds up being late 18th century work. What I found most interesting was the conversation about how people chose the texts that they did, with many opting for relatively thematic courses (focusing, for example, on gender or the construction of the English national identity or on a particular literary pattern). Others — myself included — tend towards a more traditional style of survey course, which means trying to teach students a sense of literary history through the survey. I’m in an odd position in that I teach both parts of the British Literature survey.  While different schools divide the course differently, I’ve generally taught in places that use 1798 as the dividing line — so I run into the problem of trying to teach everything pre-1798 in 15 weeks, then everything post-1798 in the next 15.  Oddly (or not) it’s really difficult to pick literature for both of them. Because of my department’s size, I’m also the only person currently in the department to teach all of the British Literature courses (we simply run a course called “Studies in British Literature,” which I will develop each time to cover a different era or topic; I’m also making my “Studies in the Novel” course a British novels course). So basically: I’m responsible for making sure my students have some sense of British Literature from Old English up to contemporary works. This feels like a lot of pressure some days and my instinct is to look at lesser known writers, to focus on interesting issues of labor and gender through the time periods. But I also feel a responsibility to introduce my students to the traditionally canonical authors. I’m grateful that most anthologies include a wide variety of materials to work with — and I particularly like anthologies that include sections giving context, whether it’s the context of poetic traditions in the 16th century or the context of the laboring classes in the 19th century. Still it’s a tough balancing act, particularly given the span of time and the number of authors I always feel like we ought to be covering. For me, I think that it boils down to the idea that these are called “surveys” rather than “studies in.” The purpose behind this really is to give the overview of how the literary landscape is shaped.  And the choices that I make are certainly informed by that. But those choices — and my choice to include a lot of cultural context as well as less canonical authors — is also related to this idea of surveying everything. Alexander Pope (who I teach, most certainly) may have had major influence over the formation of the canon, but I cannot teach him without acknowledging — and having my students read — Mary Wortley Montagu’s work as well. They’re both part of the same landscape. As I prepared my list of readings for my post-1798 class for the fall, I was reminded of how much I rely on poetry to get me through these courses. We can read multiple authors on these occasions, if the goal is primarily one of exposure to the names and the major movements.  It does lead to some weird mash-up days (we’re reading Derek Wolcott and Seamus Heaney on the same day), but it also allows for students to get a sense of the entire field. For additional coverage, I have students give presentations on texts we’re not reading in class, but which are represented in the textbook — and the explicit goal there is simply to have the exposure to the names. Perhaps, most importantly, my course outcomes — beyond the sort of standard language about exposure to major figures of major movements — focus on the idea of students being able to articulate the relationship between the author, the text, and the world. I especially want them to do this through working on close reading and analysis.  And perhaps that is why, when it comes down to the moment of guilt about not including this author or that text, I am able to assuage some of my concern.  The real goal, then, is to teach students about the way we can read the work. Once they’re capable of that, they can go out and explore beyond our courses on their own. ... View more

This post originally appeared on September 11, 2014. The world these days is full of competing stories. I can’t turn on my computer without being inundated by them (unless I don’t look at any social media, but then what’s a computer for? Writing?). Everything that is happening, it seems, is represented by not one but at least two differing narratives. The recent retraction of a hiring offer at a major Midwestern university over a controversial Twitter feed is either an affront to faculty governance and intellectual freedom or it is a reasonable decision based on the evidence. Relatedly, (since this is what the tweets were about), recent events in Gaza are reason to condemn the Israeli government for war crimes or are reason to support it in defending itself. Unrelatedly, publicly airing a video of a football player assaulting his then-girlfriend, now-wife, in an elevator was the right move as it led to his suspension from professional football or it was a violation of the couple’s privacy. I bring these examples up not to talk about them in themselves but to make the point that the controversies over these events can be seen not as made up entirely of logical argument (or, for that matter, unreflecting passion), but as consisting largely of competing narratives. That is, the positions people hold on these things may come from aspects of their identities—national origin, gender, some kind of identification with a relevant group—but even if they do, they are informed and supported by a story. The stories may be about the past that led to the current state of affairs or about assumptions regarding human nature or the nature of the relationship between states and citizens or employers and employees. I’m thinking today about the importance of stories to the way we see the world (not a new insight, I know) in part because the anniversary of 9/11 is two days from the moment I am writing this. In this morning’s online reading I saw an article about still-classified portions of documents pertaining to the events of that day, documents that might or might not change our understanding of what happened. One congressman is quoted as saying these pages “tell a story that has been completely removed from the 9/11 Report.” The 9/11 Report is the official account of what happened, but it is one story among many, and it is a story informed by other stories about American history, global history, and the nature of armed conflict, just as competing accounts are informed by other, larger stories and smaller personal ones. This got me thinking about other stories we tell ourselves about those events, stories that are as much about ourselves as anything else. A scheduled event on my campus, an email from my chancellor informs me, will celebrate “Patriot Day,” the term some are using for the anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001. There is a wealth of narrative behind that labeling choice. I am also thinking about stories now because I am always thinking about stories. It is one of the chief job hazards of teaching and studying fiction. This job has taught me to see narrative everywhere. As Hayden White has argued even history, which at first glance seems about the facts of past events, is shaped by the same tropes and story-forms that shape novels.  It has taught me that the arguments we have about the world around us are at bottom just stories, and that, as Billy Bragg sings in “It Says Here,” “…there are two sides to every story.” Maybe most importantly, it has taught me that there actually more than two sides—that is, that we too often fall into the trap of thinking there are only two choices, two ways to understand a particular event or phenomenon, while the best fiction can show us that the options are never-ending.  It can do this, as Bakhtin argued in his reading of Dostoevsky when a writer embodies opposing viewpoints in different characters and doesn’t pick a winner. It can also do this when it shows how difficult it is to understand the world at all, when it presents characters or narrators with points of view that do not seem to be endorsed by the author but to which the author seems to oppose no “correct” view (which Lukacs claimed is the definition of the modern novel). My ultimate point here could be seen as another answer to the question answered in a previous entry, “Why I Teach Literature.” Another reason I teach fiction is to offer my students the opportunity to see the competing narratives in the books I assign and in the world around them, to see how these stories are built on other stories, and to see how there are more than two sides to every story. There are ways to teach that encourage these lessons, which any teacher can easily enough apply in their classroom, methods that highlight the opposition, nuance, and ambiguity in fiction and in the stories we tell outside of the pages in books. Helping students to look at things in this way can, in a hoary old humanist formulation I still believe in, help them to better appreciate and understand not only literature but also life, which, to borrow an old concept, is stories all the way down. ... View more

This post originally appeared on August 19, 2014. Throughout the last decade-plus of college teaching, I’ve been called upon to do a lot of teaching outside my immediate area of expertise. A great deal of this began when I working off the tenure track at Florida Atlantic University, where I began teaching a course called “Interpretation of Fiction.” This is a course that primarily covers short stories (though we also read a novel) – and the short story was the one form that I felt, as a student of early modern drama, that I was unqualified to teach. Of course I’d studied short stories in classes – I’ve got three English degrees, after all – but I still felt like I didn’t understand the form, or know the types of stories to bring to the classroom, given that this form simply isn’t something we think about much when we read Shakespeare or Spenser or Milton. So it was a crash course in the short story, provided by Ann Charters’ The Story and its Writer. But because of that experience, I began reading much more world literature in earnest. I’d studied some Kafka as an undergrad; I’d read some Chekhov in my teen years, but never really thought much of it; and certainly I was aware of the weirdness of Borges’ works. But much of what I was doing in the first semester of teaching that course was learning alongside my students. Because of that initial experience after graduate school, and because I’ve since worked exclusively at small liberal arts colleges with fewer than 1500 students (and with very small English departments), I’ve spent a lot of time teaching outside of my immediate specialties. And this will continue for the foreseeable future. In my current position, I’m teaching the courses of a woman who taught at the school for more than 40 years (I am not replacing her. She is an institution unto herself, and I certainly am not trying to fill those shoes. I’ve got my own.). The courses I teach range from Shakespeare and the British Literature survey courses to the survey of modern world literature and the novels course. I’m also in the process of creating a 100-level course on literature about nature, because we’re an institution with a large number of environmental science majors – and this seems like a topic that will interest a large portion of our student population. On top of this, I’m already carving out a niche for directing honors projects that cover, in essence, nerd culture. Some days, it’s overwhelming. And I miss the comfort of being able to speak extensively on a topic without a whole lot of preparation when students have particular questions. But at the same time, there’s something extraordinary to me about being, ultimately, a generalist. I’m pushed to learn more and more every time I teach, and I’m pushed to expand my own literary experiences. And that probably explains why I don’t feel bad that my summer reading has been classical Japanese literature, and not the scholarly articles about non-Shakespearean dramatists that I know I should be reading instead. At the same time, I have these moments of guilt about relying primarily on my Twitter feed for news of what’s happening in my primary field (there are lots of great early modernists on Twitter, incidentally). I wonder if I’m doing this wrong. But those moments are ultimately pretty fleeting, because I’m coming to accept that I can still do my research in the field, and then turn my attention to the Tale of Genji the rest of the time. ... View more