I ran into one of this blog's regular readers at the bookstore the other day, and he wanted to know what I am reading now. It's rare that someone who's not your student actually asks for a copy of a syllabus, so this reminded me that I've been negligent about posting here. I don't have much of an excuse. I'm 6 books behind in my Goodreads challenge. One of my bad habits is reading too many books at once, which often means that I don't finish all of them, but I do try to keep reading in a few categories at all times.
For teaching, I just finished reading a book that's really valuable for anyone teaching the hard to define introduction to American Studies class, Paul Lauter's book From Walden Pond to Jurassic Park. Lauter is an American Studies veteran. He's an emeritus professor at Trinity College in Connecticut, has been the president of the American Studies Association, and also general editor of the original and now legendary, Heath Anthology of American Literature. This is a collection of essays published in 2001, based on essays and talks given at various spaces during Lauter's long academic career.. For anyone teaching American Studies, or American Literature, it's very helpful not necessarily as a source of essays to put on your syllabus, but because of how it prods reflection about what your overall objectives in a course might be. That is, how do you want to help students approach texts? What kinds of questions do you want them to ask? What are the politics of teaching and reading literature - what are the politics, conscious or unconscious, of your own course? The essays cover a variety of topics, including critical readings of texts, discussions of real-world academic labor unions, and the contemporary state of the field in American Studies, including a somewhat unorthodox take on academic priorities of transnationalism and exceptionalism. If I were teaching an American Studies pedagogy class at the graduate level, this would be on my syllabus. This would also be a book I would choose for a faculty group who wanted to learn more about the field.
For research: I just cracked open Stanley Fish's Is There a Text in this Class? I'm kind of embarrassed that I never read this when it came out, and though I thought it was old hat, it seems as if reception studies may be making a comeback. I was recently instructed by an anonymous reader of an article I'm working on that I need to read more reader-response criticism to frame my findings in my own reader-reception study project, so I decided I should make my way through it. I often find Stanley Fish's writing about academia and politics to be pompous and odious, but I'm already finding much of use in this book regarding the process of reading, and I hate to say it, but I think that given my argument in my own work-in-progress, that I will probably also read his newest book Winning Arguments and find it useful. Earlier in the summer, I read Janice Radway's Reading the Romance, which I had partially read in graduate school in the 1990s, and found it refreshing and still relevant. Radway has also written a more recent essay that appears in a good and wide-ranging edited collection New Directions in American Reception Study. What I especially like about this field of interdisciplinary scholarship on literature is how useful it is for thinking about students' encounters with texts.
For my book project, I've just started, and am impressed by, but have little to say yet about Laurent Binet's historical novel, HHhH, about the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich.
For the Academic Reading Challenge:
For the category of a book about places that are being discussed in the presidential election foreign policy debates , I'm reading Patrick Cockburn's collection of reporting on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the production of ISIS: Chaos and Caliphate. Cockburn writes for the British newspaper The Independent. At 90 pages in, this selection of his writing from the 1990s to the present, makes it clear that Americans have too easily forgotten and ignored the horrors of the pre-2003 sanctions regime in Iraq, as well as the subsequent and ongoing wars. This book is valuable because it both offers vivid reporting of how the ongoing wars have affected individuals as well as the larger international relationships, leadership decisions, and political conflicts that are driving the situation.
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