A sudden thought this morning: what about organizing the course, not by secondary source, but by genre?
Teach a class with units on poetry, literary fiction, popular romance, fantasy, SF, and detective fiction?
Or skip the lit fic, and just do popular genres: romance, fantasy, SF (separate category?), and detective fic. Maybe chick-lit as something separate from romance; maybe the middle-brow bestseller as its own category, too.
3 comments:
Sounds great but ... how well do you know all those other genres? That would affect your ability to discuss their norms and find important/representative primary texts.
None as well as I know romance, Laura--but I know a bit about SF and detective fiction, and could learn the others. It would be a useful thought-experiment, sketching such a syllabus, I think, even if I didn't try to teach this next quarter.
Now that I come to think of it, you could turn this into a love-orientated, updated version of Cawelti's Adventure, Mystery and Romance. But it does sound like it would take quite a bit of work so you probably couldn't get it done before the start of the quarter.
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