ENGL 378: Fantasy Fiction -- a success story.

Today was our final day for ENGL 378: Fantasy Fiction ... and, honestly, things couldn't have gone better. My students loved the course, and for the first time in my career, I got an ovation at the end of class. But they were really the best students any teacher could hope for. I'll miss them.

As our last mini-assignment, I asked for an open-ended reflection on readings, assignments, life in general ... anything. Honestly, I just wanted to hear them chat about anything they pleased. The results were fascinating, so I'm sharing some of them here.
  • So, so many of my students reported that they first learned to love reading because of fantasy -- YA fantasy in particular. One woman even admitted that she first learned how to read so she could play D&D with her dad. Others gushed about particular books they read for the course, or about general fantasy novels they loved from before. Nobody, though, ever seems to have had the chance to study in fantasy in college, at least before my course. As one woman put it, "This course has been so interesting and validating in my love of fantasy amongst English and Creative Writing majors who mostly consume classics and realist fiction."
That remark really resonates with me as someone who's often been frustrated by the conservative aspects of English studies nationwide. All too often, our discipline treats genre studies with ambivalence, especially when it comes to hiring practices. When departments do offer genre courses, it's often from older faculty who don't publish widely in SFF. If we're looking for one obvious reason English majors are declining, this seems like an easy one.
  • My most popular mini-assignment was easily “Tolkien Scores” … just a little something I cooked up to help people understand the prevalence of Tolkienian tropes. One-third of my class specifically singled out this mini-assignment for praise. One student, a native Arabic speaker, even did "extra" scores for her favorite fantasy novels in Arabic ... and was shocked to see one of them, Osamah M. Almuslim’s Arabistan Orchards, get 18/22. Her other novel, Ghada Ahmed’s The Red Moon, got 14 out of 22. Neither has ever been translated into English.
  • One thing I do are weekly, auto-graded D2L quizzes. Part of me worried that students would find these annoying. Not only did nobody complain, however, but 5-6 student went out of their way to highlight the quizzes' helpfulness.
  • Also, students were really fascinated about the fantasy publishing industry. Pulp magazines, Del Rey Books, trends in self-publishing ... you name it. They loved everything. Alongside genre fiction itself, the sociology of literature seems another topic that English Departments just aren't taking seriously enough. 
  • My "literary history" resonated highly with several students. Many fans of the genre even expressed surprise at how they didn't know about the genre.
  • Along the same lines, I worked hard to cover many different fantasy subgenres. This apparently worked quite well. As one student put it, “I think the most impactful aspect was the quantity of fantasy texts we were tasked with reading.” Another commented: “We encountered such a wide spectrum of Fantasy that it doesn’t even feel like a genre anymore.” And voila ... the distinction between genre and mode.
  • At least three CW majors explicitly stated finding inspiration from course content for their current creative submissions to CW workshop. One even wrote a story called, "No Age for Unicorns" (from our discussion of The Last Unicorn).
  • Of the many texts we studied, only one or two students cited Robert E. Howard's Conan yarns as a favorite ... but several people surprisingly mentioned "Gimmile's Songs" by Charles R. Saunders, the inventor of "Sword and Soul" (i.e., S&S set in precolonial Africa).
    • Other favorites included Tolkien's The Hobbit, Le Guin's The Tombs of Atuan, Beagle's The Last Unicorn, Brandon Sanderon's The Emperor's Soul, and Nghi Vo's An Empress of Salt and Fortune. In fact, everything we read got at least one vote, but Tolkien, Le Guin, Beagle, and Sanderson were the most popular.
In about 28 total reflections, the only real ambivalence involved our major writing assignment, the annotated bibliography. Apparently some students prefer writing essays, so I might an alternative essay option in the future.

But otherwise, I couldn't have hoped for a better semester. On a professional and pedagogical level, Fall 2024 has been the best I've ever had.

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