So. The world is changing -- in ways that I didn't will, and can't do much about -- and I am trying to plan out syllabi for classes that will be taught in that new world, without fully knowing what it will look like. Perhaps it will be very much like the Bush years; perhaps it will be very different from everything we've ever known, and very scary.
I asked one of my colleagues if she could cover my Shakespeare class on January 23rd, the Monday after the Women's March on Washington, just in case I got arrested. That is definitely something that I have never said, or had to think about, before.
But Shakespeare class will probably look much like it always has, only with more Coriolanus, and with the "you must needs be strangers" speech from Sir Thomas More to start off the semester. I just realized I'll be teaching that speech in the very last hour of Barack Obama's presidency, which is both very right and very wrong.
Brit Lit II is shaping up to be ... different. It was always going to be different this year, because I've been doing some new stuff in all of my gen ed classes, but it feels like it's been wrenched out of shape these last few weeks, woken from summer dreams. There are a couple of contemporary texts (one play, one novel) that I've ordered secondhand from Amazon and am planning to give away, because the deadline for ordering books had long past by the time I realized that I very much needed to teach them this semester. The rest of the syllabus is ... skewing later, away from the hopeful Romantics and confident Victorians, toward the catastrophes of the twentieth century and beyond. (For ages, I didn't really do much with the twentieth century. A couple of early Joyce stories, sure, and Woolf's A Room of One's Own, but the class often stopped in the 1920s. That's going to be different next semester.) I feel like I'm axing a lot of the readings I love to make room for these new ones -- maybe not forever, because I change things up all the time anyway -- but maybe it is forever. Maybe we are not going to have time ever again for comedy, or for beauty for beauty's sake. Maybe I'm not going to have this job until retirement, like I thought I would. Maybe our profession won't exist at all in a few years (because God knows, there seem to be some concerted, very specific, rhetorical attacks on universities just now, and someday it won't be just rhetoric). I don't know. I have no idea about the shape of this new world.
I have been looking over the dates on this new syllabus -- that list of as-yet-interchangeable Tuesdays and Thursdays -- and wondering if some of them will end up being Dates That Matter, like September 1, 1939, or whether they will all, perhaps, be days that we will forget, like the fifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875. I hope that we will, after all, be given the grace to forget.
I asked one of my colleagues if she could cover my Shakespeare class on January 23rd, the Monday after the Women's March on Washington, just in case I got arrested. That is definitely something that I have never said, or had to think about, before.
But Shakespeare class will probably look much like it always has, only with more Coriolanus, and with the "you must needs be strangers" speech from Sir Thomas More to start off the semester. I just realized I'll be teaching that speech in the very last hour of Barack Obama's presidency, which is both very right and very wrong.
Brit Lit II is shaping up to be ... different. It was always going to be different this year, because I've been doing some new stuff in all of my gen ed classes, but it feels like it's been wrenched out of shape these last few weeks, woken from summer dreams. There are a couple of contemporary texts (one play, one novel) that I've ordered secondhand from Amazon and am planning to give away, because the deadline for ordering books had long past by the time I realized that I very much needed to teach them this semester. The rest of the syllabus is ... skewing later, away from the hopeful Romantics and confident Victorians, toward the catastrophes of the twentieth century and beyond. (For ages, I didn't really do much with the twentieth century. A couple of early Joyce stories, sure, and Woolf's A Room of One's Own, but the class often stopped in the 1920s. That's going to be different next semester.) I feel like I'm axing a lot of the readings I love to make room for these new ones -- maybe not forever, because I change things up all the time anyway -- but maybe it is forever. Maybe we are not going to have time ever again for comedy, or for beauty for beauty's sake. Maybe I'm not going to have this job until retirement, like I thought I would. Maybe our profession won't exist at all in a few years (because God knows, there seem to be some concerted, very specific, rhetorical attacks on universities just now, and someday it won't be just rhetoric). I don't know. I have no idea about the shape of this new world.
I have been looking over the dates on this new syllabus -- that list of as-yet-interchangeable Tuesdays and Thursdays -- and wondering if some of them will end up being Dates That Matter, like September 1, 1939, or whether they will all, perhaps, be days that we will forget, like the fifth of April 1868, or the second of November 1875. I hope that we will, after all, be given the grace to forget.
4 comments:
What wonderful and timely changes! Good for you!
Coriolanus seems like a great choice!
I love the phrase "the grace to forget." We live in hope.
For your readers with anxiety, if the march goes badly but you're *not* arrested, would you be willing to drop a post/comment here just to let us know you're okay? :)
Sure!
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