Technically, this post should really be called “This Week For My Classes,” since of course I’m not actually teaching any right now. In between other projects, though (mostly finishing a small essayish review of Mary Balogh’s Only Beloved for the next issue of Open Letters — yes, that’s right, I am trying my hand at writing a little bit about romance, thoughtfully, I hope, yet while avoiding the pitfalls of the dreaded “romance think piece”) I am chipping away at preparations for next year’s offerings, particularly the one completely new class, which is the “Pulp Fiction” one. I think I’ve reached some key decisions about it that will help me focus that preparation better as the summer goes on.

One thing I’ve decided is to stop worrying about the problem that it’s called “Pulp Fiction” but clearly described in the official Calendar as an introduction to genre fiction. I think it’s the title that’s kind of misleading, but it was chosen (presumably) to be catchy. I’m just going to approach the course as in introduction to popular genres, which will in some cases involve talking about actual “pulps” as part of the literary-historical context, but which frees me from worrying about whether the texts I assign are actually pulpy. It’s an introductory writing course primarily, after all: I don’t have to wrestle with definitions or theories the way I would if this were a graduate seminar, or even an upper-level lecture class.

Following on that simple (if somewhat shoulder-shrugging) conclusion, I have decided not to spend a lot more time shopping for possible main texts to assign but just to call it for the ones that are my top candidates at this point, so that I can think about how to frame and teach them in particular (and what shorter texts to use to supplement them). So that means (I think – I haven’t actually placed the order with the bookstore yet) True Grit to represent Westerns, The Maltese Falcon for crime fiction, and Lord of Scoundrels for Romance. Valdez is Coming was another really appealing option for a Western (the only other one I seriously considered was Hondo, and I couldn’t finish it, which is a bad sign for teaching it with conviction) — but I enjoyed the subversiveness of True Grit so much that I’m just going to go for it. I’m 99% sure Elmore Leonard will be represented on the syllabus through one of his short stories, probably “3:10 to Yuma.” I went back and forth between The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep, and my decision is a bit arbitrary — I’ve been doing The Big Sleep in the mystery class the last few years, for one thing, but also I think Hammett’s blunter style and story will be better for a first-year class. Ever since I offered to do this class, Lord of Scoundrels has been my pick to represent romance.

I’ve been looking at the syllabi for two of my colleagues who’ve taught this class recently and one thing that struck me is how many more readings they included. My big three won’t be my entire reading list, of course, but apparently I just take things more slowly than they do — they both typically take one week per novel, for instance (not super-long novels, but including, for example, King Solomon’s Mines, which is 300+ pages in the Penguin edition, or Frankenstein, which is around 200 pages). Looking at their schedules, I wondered if I should try to fit more in, so I did up a version of the timetable with Lady Audley’s Secret added — but unless I sped everything up more than I’m comfortable with, that meant leaving out most of the short fiction I’d included. In the end I think I’d rather allow lots of time to talk about particulars (and also take up class time with writing instruction, editing workshops, and that kind of thing — which I’m sure my colleagues do too, but I’m not sure how they manage to get it all done and still have robust discussions of so many complex readings). Pacing is one of the many mysteries of pedagogy, of course: there is no right rhythm, and what works depends on your own style as well as the purposes of the class. I usually spend three weeks on Middlemarch when I teach it in the 19th-century fiction class, but we take five weeks on it in Close Reading — and it would certainly be possible to take an entire semester for it, if only there were such a course (or, if only I dared to offer such a course and anyone actually took it!). Anyway, I reverted to a schedule with just three full-length novels, with short stories interspersed, and for now I like the looks of it. I can always order a fourth book later on if I change my mind. In the meantime, with the main titles chosen, I can set some parameters for my preparatory research.

I have done a few more small things for teaching prep too: I began adjusting the plans for my two fall courses — both of which I’ve taught a few times before — to fit the university’s revised fall schedule (which includes a week-long fall reading break for the first time), and I’ve started poking around on our new Learning Management System, Brightspace. So far I don’t like Brightspace at all, mostly because we seem to have chosen the version that doesn’t let us customize any of it, even the colours. That takes a lot of the fun out of it! Obviously the real purpose of these things is utilitarian, but the more you restrict what I can do with it, the more inclined I am to use it as a document dump and nothing else. People who’ve been using Brightspace for a while tell me they like it better than Blackboard, though, so I’m trying to stay optimistic that in ways I haven’t yet discovered, it’s actually an improvement and not just a change.

We’ve barely settled into a routine in this term’s classes but the call already went out for us to propose offerings for next year. This request seems to get earlier all the time, and often it’s an unwelcome distraction in the hubbub of the fall term. It’s also frustrating to have to make these decisions before you’re quite sure how things are going this time: the success (or not) of a particular course might be a reason either to try it again soon or to give it a rest for a while. This year I was glad to get the request, though, because it came just as I was thinking that — good as I think the readings are for my section of Intro to Literature, and confident as I am that the basic principles and sequences I follow make pedagogical sense — I am feeling a bit tired of the course and would like to try something different.

I do rotate through a fairly consistent set of classes most years, but I try to keep them fresh, which I do mostly by mixing up the reading lists. I’m passionate enough about the classes in Victorian literature that it’s hard to imagine ever tiring of them in any deep way, and the mystery class usually keeps me pretty engaged and entertained precisely because so much of what we cover is outside my usual territory. Intro classes can feel like more of a chore, though, partly because the ones I teach have such a generic mandate (literally generic, meaning, they are meant to introduce the major literary genres). That leaves a lot of latitude, of course, for building in thematic approaches or finding other ways to provide unity and momentum across the term. I think I haven’t done too badly with that over the years: we always read a lot of splendid short works and some of the combinations of longer texts I’ve assigned have been quite exciting to teach together. That includes this year’s pairing of Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and Carol Shields’s Unless: the first time I assigned them in juxtaposition it was actually kind of a random decision, but they turned out to play off each other quite brilliantly and I’m looking forward to working through them again.

Still: every intro class I’ve taught has been some variation on the same basic model, and when the call for proposals appeared in my inbox I was in the mood to seek out something genuinely new. As a result, I put myself down for a section of another of our intro-level courses, one I’ve never taught before: English 1050, Pulp Fiction. Here’s the basic course description from the university’s Calendar:

This course provides an entry point to the discussion of literature through ‘pulp’ genres such as romance, mystery/crime, the Western, sci-fi/fantasy, horror, sports literature, and comic books.

The first thing that might occur to you, looking at this, is that “pulp” is being used in a fairly imprecise way: the course sounds more like a general introduction to “genre fiction,” or to “popular” (rather than canonical) fiction. (I suspect that the course title was chosen partly as a marketing ploy.) Then, the list of possible genres covered is itself a bit oddly various. But we usually keep Calendar copy deliberately open-ended: specific enough to mark out some distinctive parameters for a class but vague or flexible enough that different people could take the job on and do it in a way that suits their interests and judgment.

I don’t know yet how I’ll approach the “pulp fiction” class, much less which books I will assign. I do know, though, that I’m already interested in thinking about these questions, so that’s exciting. Looking at book lists from a couple of my colleagues who have taught the class before, they don’t actually strike me as very “pulpy,” at least not in the longer texts, which have included works by Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Shakespeare. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that! Indeed, I can see how any of these writers might be used to provoke really exciting discussions about canonicity, literary prestige, historical shifts in taste and popularity, and so on.) I do have some relevant experience from teaching the mystery fiction class (a hard-boiled novel might make a good choice for this one), and over the last few years (thanks to Twitter and blogging friends) I have accumulated some helpful ideas about romance fiction, both in and out of the classroom (at the moment I’m tempted to assign Lord of Scoundrels). The Victorian period is also full of possibilities, including some I know well (Lady Audley’s Secret, for example) and some I know a bit about but haven’t actually read yet (such as H. Rider Haggard’s She or King Solomon’s Mines). I know basically nothing, so far, about Westerns (unless Cormac McCarthy counts, and though he is many things, I’m not sure “pulpy” is one of them), and have only a spotty sense of what might be a useful sci-fi or fantasy title for these purposes. Happily, I have until next fall to work out the reading list and until January 2017 to fix all the details — so you can expect to hear more about it here. If you have ideas for either primary or secondary sources to help me figure it all out, do let me know! I’d be especially interested to know how you would define “pulp fiction” as a category: it won’t be possible to make good choices for specific readings until I settle on a satisfactory working definition of the term, or at any rate choose the definition that my course will be organized around.*

It looks like I will also be teaching our survey of British Literature Since 1800, which I’ve done a couple of times before and very much enjoyed (but haven’t taught since 2010), plus two Victorian classes – The 19th-Century Novel from Dickens to Hardy and an upper-level seminar on the ‘Woman Question’ (which I haven’t taught since 2011). So, my 2016-17 courses will be a good mix of levels and material, and will involve plenty of class prep that won’t seem at all routine.

But for now, it’s back to the realities of my 2015-16 classes … though not quite yet, since it’s a long weekend. Happy Canadian Thanksgiving!

*Quick update: After posting this I read James M. Cain’s The Postman Always Rings Twice, which was one of the first titles I thought of as I brainstormed possible readings. It certainly is lurid and suspenseful — and it’s short and reads briskly, too. That combination keeps it on the list of possibilities, as for a first-year course (and one that’s also supposed to spend class time on writing skills) I can’t get too ambitious with the reading list.