Spring Classes Postmortem

The spring term is done, grades are in, and so here is my regular, quick post looking back on how the courses went, an epilogue to the January post looking at the courses just before they began.


Currents in Global Literature went pretty well, though I certainly missed Petals of Blood. But having three short books after Sentimental Education and Burger's Daughter was an improvement over Petals of Blood followed by two short books, and The River Between was popular with the students. If I were teaching the course again, I'd probably redesign it from the ground up, but we hired a great person to take over the course, so she'll get to make it her own now. I find our whole curriculum structure annoyingly nationalistic, which makes teaching this course very difficult because it has to accomplish more than any one course possibly can. I hoped to give the students some glimpse of the richness of literature outside of the U.S. and Britain, and to give them some tools to seek out such literature for themselves in the future.

Introduction to Film continues to be a course that perplexes me. I think the students liked it well enough and certainly found that it broadened their perspective of what movies have been and can be, but I felt very unorganized teaching it, despite all the effort I put into organizing it. The challenges of the course have a lot to do with some incoherence in our curriculum, which makes this class, much like Global Lit, too much of a catch-all. I could have defined it better myself, and should have. At a small school with no real film program (film is a "concentration" within two different majors, English and Communications & Media Studies), Intro to Film has to function as a course in film history, film analysis, and film theory, and that's just too much for any one class to do — indeed, the ideal would be to have separate courses in Hollywood history, non-Hollywood history, and film analysis & theory, but I don't see us having the resources or organization to be able to accomplish that any time soon. So there's Intro to Film.

In the future, I think I'm going to cut the screening list down to maybe 10 movies at most, because by the end of the term it just felt like we'd watched too much, so what could be said about any one film was superficial. I may have to reconsider the textbooks, too, because as much as I like them, I think I need a book or book(s) that are more specific and less broad. I was disappointed in the updates to The Film Experience in the new edition, because there just isn't enough close analysis of specific films, so the book ends up leading us away from the sort of specificity that will, perhaps, make the class more coherent. Something like Film Moments might actually be a better bet. (Among textbooks, Film Art has more of the kind of specificity I'm looking for; I just wish it were balanced with Corrigan & White's more ecumenical view of cinema history and theory.)

Outlaws, Delinquents, and Other "Deviants" in Film & Society was fun, and would have been even more fun if it weren't at 8am on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, a schedule that made most of the students less than lively. Nonetheless, and if I do say so myself, the choice of materials worked very well together. Even though there were a lot of movies, it didn't feel like an overwhelming group, unlike Intro to Film, and I think this is because the course is much more focused and so I was able to create a set of films that spoke well to and through each other. As for the textbooks, I'm not sure I would use The Cinema Book again, because as good as it is, it just didn't end up having quite enough that was relevant to what we were doing.  One of the problems is that The Cinema Book doesn't have a chapter on war films, and we really needed one. (That said, the chapter on New Queer Cinema was extremely helpful when it came time to talk about The Doom Generation and My Own Private Idaho, and the chapter on "teenpics" was helpful with just about everything in the second half of the course. What's in the book that was relevant was great; it's just that the book spends way too many pages arguing about auteurism and not enough pages investigating other things that we needed for this course. I knew that would be a possibility when I first decided to use it, but I underestimated how much of a handicap it would really be until we were putting it to the test in class.) This is a course that can work really well, and I hope to be able to teach it again to further refine it.

Popular posts from this blog

"Stone Animals" by Kelly Link

If Kelly Link isn't the best short story writer in the U.S., then she's the equal of whoever is. I first came to this conclusion a couple of years ago when I read her story "Lull" in Conjunctions: 39 , and I am absolutely certain of it now that I have read "Stone Animals" in Conjunctions: 43 . (Of course, I've also read her collection Stranger Things Happen , but, much as I admire it, nothing in that book is as breathtaking as the stories she has written since it appeared, particularly the two Conjunctions stories.) "Stone Animals" both employs and parodies the basic elements of suburban psychological realism, the sort of scaffolding John Cheever and so many other writers hung their words and laundry on: a family buying a house and moving into it, a father commuting to a desultory job in the city, a pregnant wife who is uncertain about her marriage, suspicions and allegations of adultery, existentially anxious children, a controlling b
Read more

Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro

If you expect Never Let Me Go to be about cloning, you will be disappointed. If you expect to be able to read it as a logical science fiction novel, one that extrapolates an alternate world that makes sense, you will find much to grumble about. You will not be satisfied. You will be annoyed, even bored. You will have missed the point. Cloning is a MacGuffin that Kazuo Ishiguro uses to create symbolic situations and characters that coalesce in a powerful vision of life. The symbolism doesn't quite reach the level of allegory, because it's difficult to assign definite meanings to each scene and person, but nonetheless it quickly becomes difficult not to think about certain themes: mortality, love, fate, memory, art, nature. Each paragraph either illustrates or expands one of these themes. In the first half of the book, the ideas the novel personifies do not gain a lot of emotion, but by the second half of the book the characters have become familiar, their personalitie
Read more

The Penny Poet of Portsmouth by Katherine Towler

     Dawn again, and I switch off the light. On the table a tattered moth shrugs its wings.      I agree. Nothing is ever quite what we expect it to be. —Robert Dunn Katherine Towler's deeply affecting and thoughtful portrait of Robert Dunn is subtitled "A Memoir of Place, Solitude, and Friendship". It's an accurate label, but one of the things that makes the book such a rewarding reading experience is that it's a memoir of struggles with place, solitude, and friendship — struggles that do not lead to a simple Hallmark card conclusion, but rather something far more complex. This is a story that could have been told superficially, sentimentally, and with cheap "messages" strewn like sugarcubes through its pages. Instead, it is a book that honors mysteries. You are probably not familiar with the poetry of Robert Dunn , nor even his name, unless you happen to live or have lived in or around Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Even then, you may not
Read more

"Loot" by Nadine Gordimer

I've intended to write about Nadine Gordimer's very short story "Loot" for years, ever since I first read it in The New Yorker , and for some reason I actually thought I had written a post here about it.  I recommended the story to a friend a few days ago and intended to include a link to my post about the story when, after a bit of searching, I realized I'd never written the post.  Now I will fix that mistake. From the first sentence, "Loot" is a story about time and history, about legends and imagination.  "Once upon our time," it tells us, there was a Great Event -- the greatest earthquake every recorded, the greatest of all measured "apocalyptic warnings".  Not only is it a Great Event (indeed, the Greatest of such events), but it is ours: we possess it. The second paragraph details the effects of this greatest event of ours.  Most giant earthquakes at sea produce floods and tsunamis, but not ours -- our special earthquake d
Read more

Reflections on Samuel Delany's Dark Reflections

At the Los Angeles Review of Books , I have a new essay about Samuel R. Delany's 2007 novel Dark Reflections , which is about to be released in a new and slightly revised edition by Dover Books . Here's a taste: In many ways,  Dark Reflections  is a narrative companion to Delany’s 2006 collection of essays, letters, and interviews,  About Writing . In the introduction to that book, Delany says that its varied texts share common ideas, primary among them ideas about the art of writing fiction, the structure of the writer’s socio-aesthetic world both in the present and past, and “the way literary reputations grow — and how, today, they don’t grow.” The book is mainly, though not exclusively, aimed at aspiring writers. It provides some advice on craft, but it circles back most insistently to questions of value, and especially to questions of the difference between  good writing  and  talented writing  — and what it means, practically and materially, for a writer to shape a li
Read more

What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell

Garth Greenwell's debut novel What Belongs to You  is one of the most celebrated and successful gay novels of 2016. Its success seems to me both odd and gratifying. It is a book that garnered the attention of the literati, and not just the gay literati, though it certainly has that (Edmund White blessed it with a blurb). It received praiseful notice from nearly all the major literary institutions in the U.S. (and elsewhere). It is a remarkable novel, but were I a literary agent or publisher, much of what makes the novel remarkable would have caused me to assume it would not sell very well and would find, at best, a niche audience. (This is perhaps reason #28,302 that it's good I'm neither a publisher nor an agent!) I don't know the sales figures for What Belongs to You , but it hit the LA Times  bestseller list for a couple weeks, got tremendous review coverage, and often seemed to be among the books of the moment — I traveled a lot during 2016, and nearly everyw
Read more

The Snowtown Murders

The Snowtown Murders  (aka Snowtown ) inevitably draws comparisons to another brutal and disturbing Australian crime movie, Animal Kingdom , with which it shares some general plot elements and stylistic moves (both films were shot by Adam Arkapaw ). But where  Animal Kingdom  shows one young man's struggle to stay innocent in a family of thieves and murderers, Snowtown  depicts the power of a small-time messiah to employ hatred as an excuse for torture and murder. Both films focus their narrative on a quiet (eventually traumatized) adolescent surrounded by monsters, but Animal Kingdom,  for all its virtues, is primarily a drama of demons and angels fighting for a soul, whereas Snowtown  is less allegorical, less schematic, and more deeply disturbing. (A more meaningful comparison than with Animal Kingdom  would be with  Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer .) Though in some ways Snowtown  is the story of how Jamie Vlassakis goes from being an apparently gentle and unassuming t
Read more