the new novel, part II

So I've been kicking around a variety of books for that "New Novel" course I'll be teaching this fall, and some things are beginning to fall into place.

I'm definitely going with Patrik Ourednik's Europeana (2005) as my "experimental-form" novel; it not only pushes the boundaries of what could be considered a novel (in a way that will be fruitful for discussion), but it also gives a big recap of global 20th-century events and thus sets up some useful themes for us to work with, here in the early days of the 21st.

I'd like to follow this up with either Lynda Barry's Cruddy (2000) or Alicia Erian's Towelhead (2006), as sort of a way to look at how those 20th-century forces impact powerless people, specifically using the figure of the adolescent girl to get at this. Of the two, I marginally prefer Cruddy, in part because its status as an "illustrated novel" fulfills my interest in having a "hybrid" book on the list: it opens up a juncture where we can talk about the critical rise of the graphic novel over the last ten years or so. Plus Towelhead has a lot more sexuality in it, and there's only a certain amount of that kind of stuff that I feel comfortable dragging into the classroom.

I also wanted a classically-structured novel, but one which deals thematically with some of the "big issues" that the class increasingly looks to be built around: I'm currently reading Ann Patchett's Bel Canto (2001), which tells a story about terrorists raiding a high-class dinner party in South America as a possible candidate there. Patchett sees human interaction as being capable of generating real beauty, and the book is clearly focused on locating these moments even in the midst of violent crisis. Used too liberally, this could descend into Pollyanna-ism, and the book is definitely running that risk, but it might be a nice antidote to follow the bleakness of Cruddy. [Still a little tempted to wedge in William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2005) instead, although this would break my 50/50 gender breakdown.]

[I'd also consider dropping the "traditional" novel entirely in favor of another hybrid, if I could find another good one by a female writer... the obvious choice here is Carole Maso's utterly fascinating novel The Art Lover, which I'd love to re-read, but it seems a stretch to call something originally published in 1990 a "new" novel.]

And finally, I wanted something "outside" the realm of the literary novel, preferably a graphic novel or piece of genre work: I'm leaning here towards Colson Whitehead's great science-fiction-ish novel about elevator repair, The Intuitionist (2000), although I'm also still considering including a graphic novel in this slot, specifically Paul Pope's science-fiction-ish 100%. [One advantage of 100% is that it's a quicker read, and I'm concerned about having enough time to teach the writing elements of the course if I'm also dealing with four long-ish novels.]

Almost decision-making time! Anyone who wants to try to sway me, speak up!

Labels: book_commentary, teaching

Friday, August 15, 2008
9:34 AM
3 comments

the new novel

So those of you who read my Facebook news-feed know that I've accepted an offer to teach two writing courses at Boston University this fall, loosely themed around the topic of "The New Novel."

This is a topic I can have some fun with, obviously, and I quickly decided that a good course on the New Novel should endeavor to include the following things:

• A more-or-less classically-structured novel, but which deals with topics that are distinctly "21st-century" in orientation. [Something like William Gibson's Pattern Recognition or Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis or Falling Man are the types of books that fit comfortably in this slot.]
  

• Something that deals with similiar topics, but is more experimental or progressive in terms of its form. [Patrik Ourednik's Europeana might work well here, and I'm tempted to include something like Ben Marcus' Notable American Women or Leslie Scalapino's "trilogy" The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion, but these are probably both slightly too ambitious for college freshmen.]
  

• A hybrid text, something that is "novelistic" in orientation but clearly reacting to the pressures of "visual culture" / multimedia. [Steve Tomasula's VAS: An Opera In Flatland would be a blast to teach, but something like Lynda Barry's "illustrated novel" Cruddy or Zach Plague's brand-new boring boring boring boring boring boring boring could work equally well.]
  

• Something "outside" the realm of the literary novel, preferably a graphic novel. [In a pinch I could use a piece of genre fiction, most likely SF or horror.]

I also am [typically] concerned with balance of representation, so I'd like to see at least one novel by a non-Caucasian writer and at least one novel by a non-North American writer, and I'd like the list to be fifty/fifty in terms of gender distribution.

The problem, sadly, is that I'm trying to limit myself to only four books (ultimately the course is a writing course and not a Lit survey), and trying to fit the four "types" that I want with the gender and ethnicity constraints that I set up is proving something of a diabolical logic puzzle. I'm pretty close to "locking in" on Gibson and Tomasula, white men both (sigh), which means that ideally I'll find a graphic novel and an experimental 21st-century novel, both written by women, at least one of whom is non-Caucasian.

Persepolis is holding a lot of appeal in the graphic-novel category, but its autobiographical status might eliminate it from the running, and as far as I can tell, most crticially-acclaimed graphic novels by women tend to be memoirish. (See also: Alison Bechdel's Fun Home.) Has anyone out there read Jessica Abel's La Perdida?

If I swap out the graphic novel for a genre novel, Octavia Butler is a potentially fruitful person to work with, although her only 21st-century novel is Fledgling, not generally considered her strongest work.

In terms of the experimental novel, I think Miranda Mellis' The Revisionist might hold some appeal, and its SF trappings might tie it well to the Gibson and Tomasula, but I haven't read it (a copy is winging its way to me as we speak).

You readers are good at this kind of thing. Recommendations?

Related: Roundtable on gender imbalance in SF / fantasy / speculative fiction publishing

Labels: book_commentary, teaching

Wednesday, August 13, 2008
5:11 AM
4 comments

what video games have to teach us about learning and literacy

Started to write a capsule review on James Paul Gee's What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy, a book I finished in January, and it quickly sprawled into a longer post. In any case, here it is:

Interesting thesis: Gee identifies thirty-six principles of learning, and argues that playing video games helps to stimulate all thirty-six. The argument that follows is well-written and mostly convincing, although in order to complete this argument, Gee needs to expand out from simply playing video games to becoming a member of the "affinity group" of gamers, which dilutes the focus of the argument somewhat.

For instance, the book seems sharper to me when it discusses a skill like nonlinear exploration preceding movement towards a goal --a skill that Gee convincingly argues that video games develop, as well as one that has an obvious relevance in the classroom. To an educator (like myself) who teaches students who were raised on video games, this information is useful, and it gives me ideas on how I might tailor my assignments accordingly.

By contrast, we have something like learning the rules of a "semiotic domain" or "affinity group." Gee is right to say that gamers learn "to see themselves as the kind of person who can learn, use, and value [a] new semiotic domain" (in this case the "semiotic domain" of the gaming subculture). I also think that Gee is correct to say that a science teacher, for instance, is asking students to do similar work with reference to the semiotic domain of "science," and that students who have learned how to integrate themselves into a domain through gaming might be at a light advantage here. But it seems at this point like we're no longer dealing with "what video games have to teach us," and more dealing with a broader concept of subcultural orientation: certainly a student who belongs to the "affinity group" of, say, Honda aficionados would have had an identical experience and an identical advantage.

Other than this minor quibble (and some other quibbles about the way Gee thinks about narrative in video games, which I may say more about later) the book is an engaging read, one that I'd readily recommend to those interested on the topic.

Note: my notecards on this book (and a few on James Paul Gee more generally) are available as a Dabbledb export, here.

Labels: education, game_commentary, teaching

Wednesday, February 28, 2007
11:36 AM
0 comments

composition of the filmed image

Been moving into a unit on "formalism" with my students, which is where the course is really starting to get fun (for me at least).

Tomorrow we do our day on "composition," and trying to select just a few images to work with (from the huge world of all films ever) was quite a challenge. Here are the ones I think I'm going with:

 

from Takashi Miike's Izo (2004)

Labels: media commentary, teaching

Thursday, February 22, 2007
6:39 PM
3 comments

six methods for five films

I've been spending much of this weekend watching films and thinking about my syllabus—I go back to teaching next week, and am writing a new syllabus from scratch instead of repurposing one of my older ones.

I'll be teaching three sections of Composition this fall, and the thematic center of the course is "writing about film." With that in mind, I'm using Timothy Corrigan's A Short Guide To Writing About Film as the class text (thanks to BB-A for the recommendation).

The real "meat" of this book, as far as I'm concerned, is Chapter Four, "Six Approaches to Writing About Film." I'm spending four weeks in the center of the semester focusing pretty intently on these six methods, and the rest of the semester is basically going to involve the students trying out these methods for themselves.

The six approaches are as follows:

• historical analysis (putting the film in the context of film history or other historical narratives)
  

• national analysis (thinking of the film as a product of its culture)
  

• genre-based analysis (looking at how the film conforms to / defies / subverts genre conventions)
  

• auteur-based analysis (putting the film in the context of other works by the same creator(s))
  

• formalist analysis (looking at the technical features of the film, mise-en-scene, etc)
  

• ideological analysis (analyzing the underlying values of the film; looking at it in terms of how it approaches race, class, gender, etc)

I've been trying to come up with films that are reasonably accessible to college freshmen but which can also be "read" interestingly through any of these six approaches. I've narrowed it down to a list of five finalists:

• Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992)
  

• David O. Russell's Three Kings (1999)
  

• Sam Mendes' American Beauty
  

• Spike Jonze's Adaptation (2002)
  

• Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol. 1 (2003)

(Semi-finalists? David Lynch's underrated The Straight Story (1999) and Paul Thomas Anderson's underrated Punch-Drunk Love (2002), both a little too off-beat for my students, I fear.)

The dilemma is this: there's really only room in the semester to screen two films, so I need to narrow it down further before the end of the weekend. If anyone wants to argue for or against any of these films, well, that's what the comments area is for. I'm also taking suggestions for any other films that might also be interestingly read through these six lenses for the next time I teach this course...

Labels: media commentary, personal, teaching

Friday, January 12, 2007
9:06 PM
1 comments

The new semester has begun; so far I'm enjoying it.

This new semester is especially exciting for me because I've radically reworked my syllabus, and, for the first time in my eight years of teaching, I've abandoned my grading rubric: I've instead set the course up on a system based on the Scout merit badge system.

The way that this works: I've identified 21 areas that I want them to demonstrate proficiency in, and I've associated each of these skills with a merit badge. As the semester goes along they can choose which of these badges they want to get; applying for one involves the completion of some set of assignments. None of these assignments are given a letter or numerical grade; they either earn the badge or are sent back for more revision.

For the most part, the students can do the badges in any order; getting fourteen or more gets them the "A." This setup offers them the ability to work at their own pace and play to their own (developing) strengths, and also enhances the sense of gradual progression towards a goal (as opposed to my old method, which involved them earning a certain number of points out of 1,000—although from one persepctive this could be seen as a similar process of accumulation, from another perspective it can feel like you start off with 1,000 points and get more and more chipped away with each misstep).

I've made actual badges for the students (they're stickers), which I hope will tap into the profound motivating force of the collector instinct.

We'll see how this works out. The students seem guardedly optimistic about it.

Labels: teaching

Thursday, September 09, 2004
3:36 PM
0 comments

"In the Icelandic skalds too much clarity is considered a technical fault. The Greeks also required the poet's word to be dark ... Modern schools of lyric ... with their restricted circle of readers ... are a closed cultural group of very ancient descent."

—Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens

I'm teaching Intro to Lit for the first time this semester, which means that for pretty much the first time ever I'm attempting to teach poetry. It's an interesting experience. It feels a little bit like my job is to induct a few of these students (and it will be a select few) into that closed cultural circle Huizinga is describing...

College profs often say that you should never try to teach the writers you love the most, because invariably (the truism goes) your students will be bored or indifferent to these writers, and your heart will break. I'm starting to realize that as much as I love the John Ashbery poems in the anthology we're using, I cannot teach them: my appreciation for them is so fundamental that I do not know how to explain them adequately to anyone who is not my double.

That said, here's a nice introductory essay, in the form of a review of a John Ashbery audio-book.

Labels: poetry_commentary, teaching

Friday, January 30, 2004
6:53 PM
0 comments

Well, yesterday I collected rough drafts of my students' first assignment.

I teach three classes, of roughly 25 students apiece. Each of those students must complete four assignments over the course of the semester (five, really, but I've combined two into one two-parter). For each assignment they complete, they write a rough draft and a final draft, so eight drafts total. 75 students x 8 drafts apiece = 600 drafts. I can grade no more than four per hour, which means that I face 150 hours of grading between now and May. (Er, I mean between now and December. Forgot what semester it is there for a second. Gah.)

I have graded 16 papers so far. Only 584 left to go.

Labels: teaching

Tuesday, September 10, 2002
1:21 PM
0 comments

A new semester at UIC starts tomorrow, so I've been busy this week putting together a syllabus and a course packet. My course this time around is about how values differ among subcultures, and so I've spent a lot of time over the past few days digging around in the Jargon File / New Hacker's Dictionary as well as this hip-hop dictionary. I've also been skimming the Savage Love archives in search of bits of advice that illustrate Dan Savage's ethos but which don't use words like "cocksucker." (I'll be contrasting him against Dear Abby and "The Ethicist" from The New York Times Magazine—should be an interesting day.)

Also, if anyone knows of a good feminist critique of the scientific method, feel free to drop me a line to let me know about it. I'm considering using Donna Haraway or Sandra Harding, but something a bit more introductory might work better with my students.

Labels: subcultures, teaching

Sunday, August 25, 2002
8:57 PM
0 comments

A Chicago Tribune article on the working conditions of adjunct lecturers (like me), focusing in particular on UIC.

This is not the article about higher education budget cuts in Illinois, which is reportedly still in the works.

Labels: academia, teaching

Tuesday, April 30, 2002
4:47 PM
0 comments

The state of Illinois is suffering a budget shortfall this year.

As a result, the new state budget (to be voted on in June, if I recall correctly) contains serious cuts to higher education.

In response to these cuts, the English Department at the University of Illinois was, well, let's say strongly encouraged to cut a bunch of lecturers. About half of them (twenty-five or so) went. I've stayed on, although many people who I like and respect will not be returning.

This upcoming fall, UIC will have a record number of incoming freshmen. The lecturers traditionally teach a huge percentage of the University's freshman composition courses. (By my conservative calculations, those twenty-five lecturers were responsible for the education of about 1,500 students per semester.)

To cover for the lack of lecturers, UIC has had to cancel various classes and programs, eroding the undergraduate experience significantly. This article, from the UIC school paper, deals with some of the particulars. (A Chicago Tribune article is allegedly in the works.)

I anticipate a scene of grim chaos in the fall.

Labels: academia, teaching

Wednesday, April 24, 2002
2:25 PM
0 comments

"We are pleased to offer you an appointment as Lecturer in the UIC English Department for the academic year 2002-2003. Fall semester instruction begins on Monday, August 26, 2002."

Labels: teaching

Thursday, April 18, 2002
10:56 AM
0 comments

Have I mentioned recently that my job is at risk? I'm an adjunct lecturer at UIC, and because of state budget shortfalls, UIC is cutting about half of us. Notices are supposed to be going into people's mailboxes today, so—cliffhanger! Tune in tomorrow to find out what happens.

Until then, here's a website documenting one guy's series of invented instruments.

Labels: academia, personal, teaching

Wednesday, April 17, 2002
3:44 PM
0 comments