Teaching Contemporary Fantasy in Spring 2015

Sorry about the delay in blogging here at Vargold: the end of the Fall 2014 semester, family vacation time during the winter break, and the beginning of the Spring 2015 semester have forced me to concentrate on non-blogging and (really) non-gaming matters. But I thought that I could at least spare a few moments to talk about my current course on contemporary fantasy novels. I've done the historical approach numerous times now, and I thought it might be interesting to concentrate only on recent books instead. I also decided to bite the bullet re J. K. Rowling and finally add a Harry Potter novel to my teaching repertoire. Since Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is my favorite Potter book, this made 1999 the terminus ab quo for the class. I also decided to try and split the reading list down the middle in both national and gender terms: four Brits and four Americans, four men and four women. The national split was easy to accomplish, with Rowling, Miéville, Pratchett, and Walton representing the UK and Le Guin, Díaz, Jemisin, and Wilson representing the States. I ended up with a slightly lopsided gender split of five women (Rowling, Le Guin, Jemisin, Walton, and Wilson) and three men (Miéville, Díaz, and Pratchett), largely because most of the contemporary male fantasists I admire are British writers (e.g., Joe Abercrombie, Neil Gaiman, etc.) and I already had enough Brits. I also tried to increase the presence of writers of color in the class (Díaz and Jemisin), a move augmented by books by white authors with explicitly non-white protagonists (Le Guin's Memer and Wilson's Alif). Finally, I owed Jemisin one, having dropped One Hundred Thousand Kingdoms from my Summer 2013 fantasy class.

In the end, I think I came up with a fairly diverse set of recent fantasy novels, both in social terms as well as thematic ones. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao is the odd book out as it's less a straightforward fantasy and more of a reflection on fantasy fiction's embeddedness in the imperialist and colonialist projects of the modern West. But then my sense is that most of the best fantasies are explicitly books about writing and fiction and the nature/power of language—so the more meta Oscar Wao fits right in in this regard.

Right now we've just started The Scar. Our class discussion of Prisoner of Azkaban was outstanding: the students did a great job, and I developed a new respect for what Rowling was doing in that novel, especially in relation to the uncanny and the problem of the past.

Klarkash-Ton Is Up in Your Canon

Just discovered today that S. T. Joshi has edited a collection of Clark Ashton Smith's stories and poems for PENGUIN FRICKIN' CLASSICS. What a great 45th birthday present! Say "hello" to my next ENGL 1119 "Literature of Fantasy" syllabus, Mr. Smith!

The Line-Up for My Fall 2014 Comics Course

Here, in pictorial form, are the ten titles I'll be teaching this coming fall semester in ENGL 121, the comics and graphic narratives class I added to my university's literature curriculum. The books are spread out across the 76 years since Superman's first appearance in 1938. (That said, the 40% of the titles that were published in or after 2000 reflect the mainstream presses' discovery that comics could be critically and commercially successful.) Los Bros didn't make it on the syllabus this go-round, but I'm reading Love & Rockets and will probably be adding them when I teach the class for the third time.

More You "Noh" You're a Gamer ...

Kusabira by Ise Monsui (1859-1932)

... when you're trying to decide whether or not to teach a kyogen about a yamabushi priest comically overwhelmed by demonic mushroom spirits, and all you can think is "Someone fumbled their 'Turn Undead' roll!"

You "Noh" You're a Gamer ...

Atsumori by Tsukyioka Kogyo (1869-1927)

... when you're deciding which Muromachi-era noh plays to place on the syllabus for your spring semester "Global Performance in the Late Middle Ages" and suddenly get a hankering to buy FGU's Bushido.

The Best-Laid Syllabi o' Mice and Men Gang Aft Agley . . .

In my last post, I outlined my planned reading list for my Spring 2014 fantasy literature course here at Big Midwestern Flagship Public University. I was very excited about this reading list.

And then I had to submit my book order. And discovered that Patricia A. McKillip's Forgotten Beasts of Eld has gone "out of stock indefinitely"—effectively out of print. And learned that ordering the UK paperback of Poul Anderson's Broken Sword—the only in-print edition of that novel—was going to be more difficult than I had assumed. And realized that ten novels was going to be too much for the number of classes I had available for the spring semester.

Oy.

I had to make up a new reading list on the spot. The key requirement for inclusion on this list: ready availability. The secondary requirement was that each text speak explicitly to one other text on the reading list. Here are the pairings I came up with:

Dunsany's King of Elfland's Daughter (1924) and McKillip's Winter Rose (1996)

The connection here is love that reaches beyond the fields we know into Elfland: a mortal man and an elf woman in Dunsany's case, a mortal woman and an elf man in McKillip's. I'm sad to lose Forgotten Beasts, but Winter Rose is  beautiful book as well.

Tolkien's The Hobbit (1937) and McKinley's The Hero and the Crown (1984)

Two books from the last version of the reading list that make it into the next. Here the connection is dragon-slaying—a fairly tenuous theme, but a valid one. The evil of the wyrms Smaug and Maur lives on long after their deaths; in a sense, the dragons are just misdirection for the real evil of the tales.

Vance's Dying Earth (1950) and Lee's Night's Master (1978)

Decadence and exoticism drive this pair of books entering the reading list for the first time. I recently reread The Dying Earth for the first time since I was a teenager and came away incredibly impressed with what Vance achieved in those six stories; 12 or 13 was clearly too young for me to really grok them. As for Night's Master, I lost my copy of the Sci-Fi Book Club Tales of the Flat Earth omnibus back in the spring when the basement flooded. So this is my chance to finally read all of Night's Master.

Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea (1968) and Miéville's Railsea (2012)

This pairing is so obvious I can't believe I missed it: thanks to Ceridwen Anne for the idea. Two young adult novels, two sailing stories, two great beasts (the Dragon of Pendor and Mocker Jack), and two tyro protagonists. I love Miéville's Scar, but I have included it on the reading list every time I've taught the fantasy course here—it may be suffering from overuse. So a change is good.

(Coincidentally, I'm interested in hearing suggestions for a book to pair with Le Guin's Voices—my favorite fantasy of hers—the next time I teach the course. I couldn't think of a candidate this time round.)

Pratchett's Wee Free Men (2003)

I needed a ninth book, so I decided to indulge myself and go with my favorite Pratchett of all time. What better rationale is there for a book besides Feegles? Crivens, I can't think of one!

Reading List for My Spring 2014 "Literature of Fantasy" Course

I'm scheduled to teach my university's "Literature of Fantasy" course in the Spring 2014 semester, and, while I have yet to write a description of the class, I do have a reading list drawn up for it. Some of the texts on this list will be familiar to those of you who've read my post on the reading list for my Summer 2013 "Intro to Fiction" fantasy class: J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit is back for a second round, and so are Patricia A. McKillip's Forgotten Beasts of Eld and China Miéville's Scar.

Other texts are different offerings from authors I taught this past summer:

Lord Dunsany, The King of Elfland's Daughter

Because the Spring 2014 fantasy course is scheduled to take place over fifteen weeks or so (instead of the eight weeks I had for the Summer 2013 course), I have the luxury of concentrating exclusively on longer works. In Dunsany's case, that means teaching his masterpiece. King of Elfland's Daughter is the quintessential journey "beyond the fields we know," and I enjoy teaching it as a time travel novel (even if the students aren't that interested in Dunsany's temporal musings).

Ursula K. Le Guin, A Wizard of Earthsea

I really enjoyed teaching Le Guin's Voices this summer, but I needed to teach one of Le Guin's 1960s or 1970s fantasies to make my roughly decade-by-decade survey of fantasy work for the new course. So I "reluctantly" replaced Memer's story with Ged's. I thought about pairing Wizard with Tombs of Atuan (something I've done before), but my decision to teach a total of ten novels in the spring means that I had to streamline when possible. 

Finally, because I am a masochist, I decided that I just had to teach five authors for the very first time. (This is a bad habit of mine: I prioritize teaching over research . . . which just isn't done at an R-1 school!) Here are those new authors in chronological order:

Mervyn Peake, Titus Groan

There's a very simple albeit very embarrassing reason for putting the first book of Peake's Gormenghast trilogy on the reading list for Spring 2014: I've never been able to finish any of the books in that series. I made a good faith effort earlier this year to get through Titus Groan, but stalled out around Titus's christening. So teaching Peake becomes a way to force myself to actually read his books. (Plus it will help the students understand where Miéville is coming from!)

Poul Anderson, The Broken Sword

The other, much-neglected fantasy masterpiece from 1954. (The first was Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring.) Anderson's novel was a major influence on Michael Moorcock: for example, Stormbringer owes much to Anderson's titular blade. Of course, influencing Moorcock means influencing Miéville: there's a direct line from Uther Doul and Mightblade through Elric and Stormbringer to Skafloc and his sword. In fact, it's clear that Anderson's novel has had a much greater effect on British fantasists than his fellow Americans. I'm going to have to order the British edition of the book; there's no American edition in print for decades now.

Robin McKinley, The Hero and the Crown

Unlike Peake's Titus Groan, Robin McKinley's Hero and the Crown is a book I've read. But I'd like to become more familiar with it, so on the reading list it goes. More substantively, the novel stands in for the incredibly popular YA female fantasy hero tradition that emerges in the 1970s with characters like Anne McCaffrey's Menolly and leads to characters like Tamora Pierce's Alanna and Kristin Cashore's Katsa. I see the book playing well with Wizard of Earthsea.

Diana Wynne Jones, Dark Lord of Derkholm

I wanted some British satirical fantasy on the list, and I wanted to maintain the reading list's gender balance (five male authors, five female authors), so I turned to this wonderful book by Diana Wynne Jones. It's a hilarious piss-take on the portal quest fantasy C. S. Lewis perfected: the benighted inhabitants of a fantastic reality find themselves forced to more or less play "Tolkien" for tourists from our world.

N. K. Jemisin, The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms

I'll end the course with this outstanding 2010 debut novel from N. K. Jemisin. It's about a society that has enslaved its gods, and the plan those gods have for turning the tables—provided the heroine is willing to go along with them. The book is also representative of an ongoing reaction to the Northern European focus of most modern fantasy fiction; Jemisin, like Charles Saunders and others, is trying to reimagine fantasy for a multi-racial, multi-cultural society.

Fantasy Course Now Underway

Although today was technically the second day of my Summer Session II ENGL 109 "Intro to Narrative" course, it was in actuality the first day that the students and I discussed fantasy literature. Our author for this week is Lord Dunsany, and our story for today's class was "The Sword of Welleran." I began by giving the students a mini-lecture on the concepts of liminality and threshold experiences in ritual and literature. There was much talk of weddings as liminal rites we all know from life, books, and mass media. There was also a nice exchange about Batman as a liminar. Then I shifted class into discussion mode by asking the students to identify all of the liminal elements in Dunsany's story. They did a great job of this and were also quite alert to Dusany's ironic conclusion to the tale (which I won't spoil here for those who might want to read it).

I won't bore you all further with regular updates about the class, but I thought that I'd at least mention it was up and running. Anyone who's interested further can look at my syllabus. We finish up Dunsany this week with "The Fall of Babbulkund" and "The Kith of the Elf-Folk," then it's on to Robert E. Howard and "The Phoenix on the Sword" next Monday.

Course Description for My Fantasy-Themed "Intro to Fiction" Class

Last fall I wrote about a fantasy literature course I was hoping to get to teach as part of my day job in Summer 2013. That teaching assignment came to pass (in the form of a section of ENGL 109, "Intro to Fiction"), and I'm turning in the course description now. Here it is:

This section of ENGL 109 approaches the critical analysis of prose fiction by considering that most fictitious of modern genres: fantasy. Detaching fiction from realism will allow us to focus primarily on storytelling: while the content of fantastic narratives bears a relation to lived experience, it does so in crooked fashion, calling attention to the formal elements from which stories are made. After all, fantastic worlds only come into being through authors’ deployment of narrative strategies such as plot, character, and point of view. Our texts are a mix of short and long narratives: stories by Lord Dunsany, Robert E. Howard, Angela Carter, and Kelly Link; novels by J. R. R. Tolkien, Patricia A. McKillip, China Miéville, and Ursula K. Le Guin. Because this course satisfies the Comp II requirement, we’ll also devote ample time in and out of class to the tactics and techniques of critical prose. Chief among these are peer review and revision of drafts.

It turns out that the Summer II session is exactly eight weeks long, so I won't have to cut anyone from the reading list. (We'll lose a day of Forgotten Beasts of Eld class due to the Fourth of July, but that shouldn't be a big problem.)

Fantasy Reading List for My Summer 2013 "Intro to Fiction" Course

Every so often on this blog I mention or allude to the fact that I teach in the English Department at a flagship state university. My primary research and teaching area is medieval literature (with a specialty in early English drama). But I also routinely teach fantasy fiction. In Summer 2013, I'm going to be teaching a fantasy-focused section of our "Intro to Fiction" course. Syllabi for this course usually rely on a published fiction anthology filled with mainstream "literary" narratives. When genre writers do appear, it's inevitably their least genre-marked material that shows up: the primary example here is the ubiquitous selection of Ursula Le Guin's "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" instead of any of her equally excellent fantasy or SF stories. I've decided to buck this trend and will be teaching a syllabus entirely devoted to genre fiction. For the sake of coherence, I'm limiting myself to story and novel-length fantasy narratives. Here's the most recent draft of the course reading list:

Lord Dunsany, The Sword of Welleran and Other Stories



I had a number of Dunsany collections to choose from, but settled on this one from Dover. It's relatively inexpensive, and it contains many of my favorite Dunsany tales: "The Sword of Welleran," "The Fall of Babbulkind," "The Kith of the Elf-Folk," and "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth."

Robert E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian



Again, lots of choices here for editions. I settled on this movie tie-in volume partially because it's cheap but primarily because the table of contents allows me to hit all of my favorite Conan stories in a way that the otherwise wonderful Del Rey collections do not: "Tower of the Elephant," "Queen of the Black Coast," and "Rogues in the House" sit alongside "People of the Black Circle" and "Red Nails." Since Del Rey publishes this text as well, it's quite possible that the texts are identical to those in the REH Library series.

J. R. R. Tolkien, The Hobbit



Considerations of time were the primary factor in my decision to let The Hobbit stand in for Tolkien's work: there's just no way to teach The Lord of the Rings on the summer teaching schedule without basically abandoning the pretense of reading other authors. That said, The Hobbit is the book that turned me on to fantasy, and Peter Jackson's movie will have students primed to read the novel.

Patricia A. McKillip, The Forgotten Beasts of Eld



I needed a novel from the 1970s to fill in the large gap between Howard and Tolkien's 1930s texts and the books I was going to be choosing from the 2000s. McKillip is one of my favorite writers, and this 1974 novel is one of her best.

Angela Carter, The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories



Carter's 1979 collection of stories was the other book I picked to cover the 1970s. I selected it in large part because I've never read Carter's work, and this course seemed like a good opportunity to do so.

China Miéville, The Scar



My favorite New Weird novel: it's a big fat middle finger aimed at quest fantasy, and yet I love it just the same. If only this new UK paperback cover design was the American design as well! Sigh.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Voices



Le Guin was definitely going to be on the syllabus. I chose this book, the second in Le Guin's new Annals of the Western Shore series, because it brilliantly does everything Le Guin was trying to do with Tehanu and the second trilogy of Earthsea books but without any of the baggage that comes from revising an existing set of beloved books.

Kelly Link, Magic for Beginners



Like Carter, Link is a writer I've been meaning to read for some time. This is her major collection of stories, sitting right in the midstream of the slipstream between genre and literature. It's worth noting, though, that I have an alternate in mind if it turns out I don't particularly care for Link's stories:

Karen Russell, St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves



Russell has just exploded onto the scene recently, and whatI know of her work gives it a slightly more American feel than Link's work (i.e., Russell appears to be drawing on regional folklore as opposed to Link's more suburban and/or cosmopolitan feel). In the end, I'll go with whichever collection I like best.

So there you have the reading list. I've tried to strike a balance between American and British writers (four of each), short story collections and novels (four of each), and men and women (four of each). The books also make a decent historical survey of modern fantasy fiction: Dunsany is odd man out, sitting by himself in 1908, followed by clusters of work from the 1930s, 1970s, and 2000s. I'm looking forward to teaching the class and hope you've enjoyed this sneak preview of its contents!