Novel Readings

Book orders for our fall classes are due by April 1. It’s not a hard and fast deadline, but earlier orders make things easier for the bookstore staff and also enable them to organize book buybacks from students for texts that will be assigned again next year. In theory (though things have not always worked out this way) it also means that if there is some kind of supply problem with a fall book selection, they and thus we find out in plenty of time to choose an alternative. So I do always try to meet the deadline! The problem is that it comes up right when the current term is at its most hectic, which is one reason it is tempting to default to the same reading lists (or very close to them) that I used last time around–and that, in turn, is why I have made it one of my priorities this term, while I’m on sabbatical, to see what else I might assign.

This is an ongoing process for my Winter 2020 courses (British Literature After 1800 and 19th-Century British Fiction from Austen to Dickens): I have some ideas, but I’m still thinking, including about just how much change I can realistically handle all at once! For my Fall 2019 courses, though, the die is now cast.

For Pulp Fiction, I have changed two of the three novels on the list (I’m keeping the short readings the same, so as not to overwhelm myself with new prep!). The first two times I taught it, we read Valdez Is Coming, The Maltese Falcon, and Lord of Scoundrels. I was actually very happy with this list for my purposes: they are all terrific novels, exemplary of their genres but also thought-provoking in their particulars, and the sequence was unified by their engagement with problematic models of masculinity. In practice, however, things did not go as well as I would like. For one thing, Valdez Is Coming was not popular, and it also proved difficult to use for exercises in close reading: there’s a lot going on but it’s subtle, more below the surface than on it, which fits the book well but gave students a lot of trouble. The Maltese Falcon raised different problems: I had more plagiarism cases involving students’ writing on it than I’ve had (to my knowledge, of course) for any text I’ve ever assigned in first year. As a result, I have replaced both of these books: this time our representative Western will be True Grit* and for noir we will read Vera Caspary’s Laura. I have a lot more work to do before I’m ready to teach either of these, but I know already that there will be ripple effects across all of our discussions and assignments because they are both written so differently from the books they are replacing. There is still an underlying thematic link, but it too is different: the new sequence highlights women who break the rules, or upset their prescribed roles.

My other fall term course is an upper-level seminar on Women and Detective Fiction. I have put three new books on the syllabus for this iteration, replacing Sara Paretsky’s Indemnity Only (which many of the students will have studied with me already in the detective fiction survey), Katherine Forrest’s Death at the Nightwood Bar, and Prime Suspect with Dorothy B. Hughes’s In A Lonely Place, Barbara Neely’s Blanche on the Lam, and Katherena Vermette’s The Break. The result is a more diverse list of authors and also (and relatedly) a change in the underlying conceptual apparatus of the course, away from a narrow focus on women as detectives and towards an exploration of how women writers also interrogate or subvert other aspects and tropes of the genre, from point of view to women’s conventional roles as victims or femme fatales. Neely and Vermette in particular also complicate the classic detective story’s commitment to closure, going further than the other readings to challenge the possibility of a real or meaningful “solution” to the crimes they address.

I feel good about these decisions, but I also have some concerns about taking on so much new material. More specifically, I’m worried that the new books for Pulp Fiction will actually prove more difficult for first-year students, not least because of their idiosyncratic first-person narrators–one of my tasks now is to think through their challenging aspects and provide my students with the right tools and approaches to have a productive discussion about them. I was very comfortable with my old reading list for Women & Detective Fiction–too comfortable, of course, as I realized. Now, however, I am anxious about how to handle the difficult scenarios presented in both In A Lonely Place and The Break and about equipping myself to address the appropriate historical and critical contexts for Neely and Vermette responsibly. But there’s plenty of time between now and September to do this work, and at least now that the book orders are placed my attention will no longer be “dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe” but focused on these particular books.

*No sooner had I pressed ‘publish’ on this post then I got an email from our bookstore saying they aren’t sure True Grit will be available! The best laid plans etc. etc. but we’ll see.