When we started working on the new 2021 syllabus, my Literature colleagues and I came to the conclusion that our students have too little contact with the contemporary world. Our undergrads take in the first year an Introduction to English Literature, which basically covers the British and Irish 20th century, beginning with James Joyce’s “The Sisters” (1914). In the third year they take the core course Literature of the United States III: From 1950 to the Present, with Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) assuming the onerous task of representing the 21st century. Some of our electives (Modern English Poetry and Theatre, Prose in English, Literary Criticism in English, Gender Studies in English-Speaking Countries, Cultural Studies in English-Speaking Countries, English Literature and War, The Great Authors of English Literature, Teaching of Literature in English or Transnational Studies in English-Speaking Countries) can indeed focus on the 21st century, but since we only teach five every year and they are not compulsory (logically!), we agreed to introduce as a new core subject Contemporary Literature in English: 20th and 21st Centuries.
So far, our BA degree has only had one compulsory subject in the fourth year: the dissertation. This means that students who are not fond either of Literature or of Language/Linguistics could focus exclusively on the electives in their preferred area. From 2024-25 this has changed, and students now must take 12 more compulsory ECTS credits, detracted from the elective credits: 6 from Contemporary Literature in English: 20th and 21st Centuries and 6 from the other new core subject Seminar on Advanced Oral and Written Expression in English. This subject is mainly aimed at improving their academic skills, and I don’t anticipate it will raise any objections or issues. I worry, however, at how the students who don’t read (and that’s most of them) will react to Contemporary Literature. I doubt it will be with enthusiasm. Hence my crazy syllabus… read on…
As I reported in my previous post I have been teaching Victorian Literature for three decades, always on the basis of a selection of texts, which since 2009 with the new degree is down from five to four complete novels. There have always been many more writers alive than those any Literature subject may reflect, even if we go back to the Middle Ages. So, we always work on a very short list based on the principle that an English Studies graduate must have read some key canonical authors and a few second-tier figures. The closer we get to the present, the more problematic the selection becomes, not only because there are currently more living authors than in the whole history of English Literature but also because it is hard to understand which are the key texts that best represent the 21st century and might presumably survive the test of time. The solution to this problem is to extend the reading lists (I have seen some that are truly daunting) or focus very narrowly on just the habitual four texts. Now, Anne Brontë, Charles Dickens, H. Rider Haggard and Bram Stoker may suffice as representatives of the Victorian Age, but try to think of four names and novels since 1990 and you will see that it is much harder to make a good choice.
The experimental road I am taking is radically different: I will be using sets of four books for each student. The title of the subject Contemporary Literature in English: 20th and 21st Centuries is a bit deceptive because my colleagues and I agreed that the subject would cover from 1990 onwards. As I mentioned in my previous post, students read in the first year Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day (1989), so 1990 seems a good departure point. We also decided that Contemporary Literature should not be limited to British fiction. So, each student will have to read four books originally written in English published between 1990 and 2023: 1) a literary novel from the USA or the UK, 2) a literary novel from any nation excluding the USA and the UK (i.e. a transnational novel), 3) a popular fiction work from any Anglophone nation, 4) a non-fiction work (autobiography, memoir, narrative journalism, essay) also from any Anglophone nation.
I have already drafted the list of book sets, which has not been easy. To begin with, I don’t know how many students I will have, so I have planned lists for between 35 and 68 students. To complicate matters even more, I decided that, to prevent students from reading four books published in the same year, each of their books should belong to a different period: book 1 (1990-1997), book 2 (1998-2006), book 3 (2007-2014), book 4 (2015-2023). This means that, for instance, student A might read a 1992 non-fiction book, a 2000 UK/USA literary novel, a 2011 transnational novel, and a 2018 popular novel, while student B might read a 1995 popular novel, a 2002 non-fiction book, a 2009 UK/USA literary novel and a 2021 translational novel. And so on.
I have drawn a gigantic list of almost 300 books, which is still growing. Initially, I decided to put on that list 2 books of each type per year (so, 8 in total), which I selected using GoodReads (they have lists for each year) and diverse awards (Man Booker Prize, Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, Commonwealth Award and others like the Miles Franklin, Nebula, Hugo, Arthur C. Clarke, and a handful more). If this sound like a very painful task, believe me when I say it was great fun. It is still great fun, since I am not done. I am coming across more and more interesting books, and beginning to break my own rule of having just eight books per year; in the end, a few students will be given a choice between two titles for some of their four categories. I have excluded in any case extra-long books above 450/500 pages, and a few others that I know will not work. Just today I have crossed out Julian Barnes’s very disappointing The Sense of an Ending, but have decided to leave Alice Munro’s Open Secrets: Stories, despite the enormous scandal about her daughter’s revelations that the author knew she had been sexually abused by her stepfather. The student who gets Munro in his/her set will be given a second option.
To be honest, I’m not so sure how I have distributed the books but the sets look great (I’ll post the list in my website when the semester is over), and each could be potentially used for the whole subject. Taking into account the randomness of the whole procedure this feels good. Have I read the 300 books? Noooo…. I have read about half along the last three and a half decades. Now I am reading a lot, as I am beginning to see that not all the books might work well (and discovering plenty of exciting titles I had missed). I have left on the list books I don’t like or that I have abandoned for, here is the thing, I will be teaching students to write reviews, which is something no other teacher in my Department is doing. They will have to form their opinions beyond my own preferences, and that is going to be indeed a challenge since so far they have been trained to do academic work in which the opinion about the text studied is not a central element.
So, if you follow me, try to imagine a class of, say 45 students, each with four different books to read (I will assign them at random, possibly just following the alphabetical list). In the first two weeks I will teach students a brief introduction to current history, the publishing industry and the main literary trends. Then we’ll start working in blocks of three weeks, one for each subperiod (1990-1997, 1998-2006, 2007-2014 and 2015-2023). Sessions will consist of the following: in the first half (40 minutes), we’ll read reviews from all sorts of established publications and websites, and from social media like GoodReads. In the second half (40 minutes) students will talk to their classmates about the books they are reading and how they will review them. Every three weeks, then, students will read one book and write one review, but they will also get to hear about many other books in conversation with their peers. If, say, the class has 45 students, they will hear about 176 books, apart from the four they read.
I have already used many times flipped teaching, with students teaching each other using different texts. In my most recent MA subject, for instance, each student has worked on four films, but they have learned about 42 more from their peers. My record was set in 2020, when the 45 students of my course on Cultural Studies taught each other about 90 documentaries; you can read their work here: Focus on the USA: Representing the Nation in Early 21st Century Documentary Film. The novelty in Contemporary Fiction is that instead of 10-minute presentations in front of the whole class, I’ll use conversation. Students will have to keep track of who they speak with and which books they are reading and will have to hand in their list at the end of the subject. This time I am not aiming at publishing an e-book with their reviews, though I have not discarded this option fully for two reasons. One is that UAB does not allow me to include publication of the students’ reviews in GoodReads, as I originally wanted to do, because this is an external platform. I am considering opening a blog, which could run for as many years as the subject is taught, but I don’t know whether UAB accept my request. I am right now waiting for the web team to reply.
If the experiment fails miserably, I’ll go back to traditional teaching based on a common set of books for all students. If it works, I’ve already prepared the subject for many years to come since the beauty of the four-book sets is that they can be used as many times as a I want and with many different students. I am learning very much and being surprised in many ways. Also dismayed: it is evident that the 1990s were an astonishing literary decade in all the four categories I am dealing with. In more recent decades, there is a palpable decline in overall literary quality and narrative interest, with many authors failing to establish lasting careers and many overhyped books being actually quite poor. The literary novel is no longer ambitious, the popular novel is derivative. I would say, however, that non-fiction remains very strong and growing in strength. It has been a challenge, by the way, for me to choose the literary authors outside the UK and the USA, for I am not really familiarized with transnational fiction beyond a few key names. I have now, however, a wonderful reading list to go through.
I’ll keep you posted, as usual.