Posts in category: Teaching

I’m on sabbatical, but this post goes out with an affirmation of solidarity with everyone getting down to fall teaching in this low dishonest decade. It’s a bad time for teaching. On top of social and political crisis, there’s AI. Or rather, as part of said crisis, there’s AI. It is exhaustingly present everywhere you turn, even when you have retreated to your sabbatical bunker—perhaps especially there, if you are in your sabbatical bunker, as I am, to study the institutions of genre fiction. I am studying how, for a century, Anglophone culture and society developed a system of (apparently) formula-bound text production which, whatever its limitations, many people have turned to for its seeming copiousness and its openness even to those with few literary and economic resources. Meanwhile, in the past decade, Anglophone culture and society have developed a system of (apparently) formula-bound text production which, whatever its limitations, people are turning to in order to fill the internet with garbage text while filling the atmosphere with carbon dioxide and filling the pockets of some astonishingly awful people with more money than you can imagine. So here’s my idea: like the development of genre fiction, “AI” is the product and beneficiary of a significant transformation of literacy—that is, the production and use of writing—and its role in the distribution of social rewards.

Though course registration at Rutgers is over and done with, I want to put on record that I do know what courses I am teaching next term, even as I am still grading this semester’s finals.

A new semester approaches! Here’s what I’m offering the good people of Rutgers.

Rutgers students are about to enroll in spring 2025 courses—here are descriptions of mine. (Batteries not included. Images enlarged to show texture. Paid for by the Committee to Read Some Good Books in Class.)

Ursula K. Le Guin: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Literature

English 358:437, Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:00–3:20 in HC-E128
Syllabus etc.

I celebrate the labor movement on May 1 and syllabuses on the first Monday in September.

This semester I volunteered to teach in Rutgers’s revamped first-year writing course, College Writing (the Course Formerly Known As Expos). My last first-year writing course was a while ago, when we still used styluses and clay tablets, but I think I am ready to meet the younger generation where they are and make the leap forward to quill pens. The course-wide syllabus gives a sense of the revamped focus of this course on self-conscious practice with multiple genres, occasions, and media of writing.

The other course continues my streak of science-fiction teaching, this time in Interdisciplinary Honors guise: Science/Fiction: Ghosts in the Machine. The focus is on fictional machine intelligences, with occasional glimpses into philosophical, computational, and cognitive perspectives on the questions they raise. My qualifications for the interdisciplinary part of the course include having read Gödel, Escher, Bach at a vulnerable age and knowing a dimension-reduction technique when I see one.

It’s syllabus time again—what’s that you say? the semester has already started?—well I guess I’d better put something on the internet to show I have some idea what I’m going to be doing in class.

I am teaching a graduate seminar this term: Twentieth-Century Genre: The Case of the Detective. Through some unaccountable oversight I have been allowed to teach a course designated “theory,” which means all students will be required to rewrite Aristotle’s Poetics as if it were about Nancy Drew mysteries instead of tragedy. But seriously folks: the goal is to survey some of the variety of the genre over the last century-plus, from Nancy Drew to Percival Everett, and see what kind of shock we can give to our literary-historical and generic assumptions when we do that.

I am also renewing a course I haven’t taught in ten years, an undergraduate seminar designed around a selection of Anglophone novelists who have won the Nobel prize: Nobel Prizewinners. After much wrestling with my conscience I have had to leave off Patrick White in order to clear some room for the last decade’s very interesting new Anglophone-novelist laureates. The previous century’s laureates are represented on my syllabus by Kipling, Faulkner, Gordimer—and Morrison’s “Recitatif.” You decide which of these choices is trolling.

Those links go to course pages which summarize the schedule and link on to PDFs with the complete syllabuses. As time and the copyright window marches on, it is becoming ever easier for a twentieth-centuryist to point to digitized sources: it’s pretty to fun to be able to link to complete scans of pulp magazines and old mystery anthologies. So I did that. Long live the Internet Archive.

This past Tuesday, at the kind invitation of Wen Xin, I gave a talk at the University of Kansas, under the title “Data Is a Sandwich: Lessons from the Computational Literary Field.” My slides (PDF) might only be of use for pictures of the titular sandwich, but they do also contain R code for reproducing my figures demonstrating some of the lessons I taught out of my dataculture package of cultural data in last year’s Data and Culture course. The talk itself was a bit of a retrospective on different things I’ve tried to do in literary data analysis since I first started dabbling some 14 years ago (!?!), with gestures towards what I think are the lessons I learned about how useful data gets made and turned into evidence for meaningful scholarly arguments.

I honor Labor Day the way Karl Marx intended, by finishing up my syllabuses. Since it’s September, it must be Early Twentieth-Century Fiction time. I am also teaching Introduction to Science Fiction for the first time. Will there be Star Trek? Of course there will be Star Trek. The links go to pages with abbreviated schedules, but the full syllabuses are available in PDF: Early 20th-c. and SF. The two syllabus formats are not automatically generated from the same source, because getting that right (for my definition of “right”) remains much harder than it should be, and I am trying to spend less time fiddling with computer-y stuff and more time peering into the unhallowed depths of genre-fiction history.

Manual pin: My article, “Origins of the US Genre-Fiction System, 1890–1856,” is just out in Book History. Read all about it.

I made an R package with some “cultural” datasets of various kinds that might be of pedagogical use. It is available on github as agoldst/dataculture. See the repository page for a summary of the datasets, which I used to teach introductory analyses of:

1. cultural tastes over time and social space (names, music genres, recipes)
2. textual/paratextual signs of fictional genre (text-mining science fiction and crime)
3. historical and fictional social networks (Hamlet characters and eighteenth-century Bostonian troublemakers)

If that sounds interesting, take a look at the package and the lecture slides and lab exercises from the course I created it for, “Data and Culture” (Fall 2022). I’m hoping to save someone somewhere a few steps of wheel-reinventing.

As a kind of closing ritual for the past semester, I made webpages for my spring 2023 courses. I put enough work into these two courses that it felt good to collect slides/notes and handouts, breaking them free from the prison of Canvas:

• Principles of Literary Study, Spring 2023
• Introduction to Crime Fiction, Spring 2023

Also I wanted to supply the pedagogical context for two quixotic annotation projects I pursued this term: on Shahid’s Call Me Ishmael Tonight and Ngũgĩ’s Petals of Blood. There you have it. My teaching materials are of course available for anyone to reuse as they see fit. Of course future students should be alert to signs that these materials have been used to replace me with an “AI”-powered GoldstoneBot: dated pop-culture references or tired jokes would be especially clear signs that my human creativity has been replaced by a soulless mechanism.