Summary of class

As this was the first day of class, we did discuss the syllabus. We spent most of our time, however, in getting a list of favorite American (at least most of the time) authors from the last 150 years. We then rated these different authors on a scale from "Excellent" to "Dan Brown," using the overall class opinion of the authors. Some authors were rated low on the scale, like Mary Higgins Clark, but most of the authors named were some of the usual suspects: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Alice Walker, John Steinbeck, Ayn Rand, and more. 

Once we had our list, we talked about how in many ways our ranking of authors was really too simple. For example, the quality of Hemingway's works diminishes noticeably after the mid-1930s (at least in my opinion), so his ranking at 8/10 was questionable. With Clark, on the other hand, we had to acknowledge that only one person in class had read her before and that our placing her at a 3/10 had more to do with the fact that she was a genre writer--mysteries--than anything else. In other words, our choices were conditioned by our culture and a function of the classroom space, where there was obvious professorial/peer pressure to name a famous author rather than, say, Dan Brown, as Jae Sim bravely did. Our simple arrangement of American authors was, in other words, a simplified story about American literature. I suggested that the reading list for this semester will be similar to the exercise: we'll be reading a story that is too simple. It is important to remember this while learning the basics of authors, texts, and a larger historical context, and to then  take additional classes to complicate the story that we'll be telling throughout the semester.

Word count: 299

Passages

None for the day. As far as tests are concerned, however, I suggested that students will want to pay particular attention to the portions of the texts that I read aloud in the class, as those are more likely to appear on the identification portion of the exam.

Terms

story - While we typically think of stories as fictional accounts, I'd like to invite you to think about our lived experience as a series of overlapping narratives. Our perspective on our situations cannot be determined to be "True" (with a capital T), but are constantly being shaped. Stories, in other words, matter very much.