Teaching ‘Literature and Social Change’ in a Time of Global Disruption
By: Jeanette Mcvicker
Tags: Introduction

ENGL 400, Senior Seminar, offers a capstone experience to English majors’ primary work in literature, theory, writing and cultural studies at our campus, the State University of New York at Fredonia. For Spring 2020, I organized the seminar around the theme “literature and social change.” Readings centered on a handful of landmark texts across genres (George Orwell’s 1984, essays by Virginia Woolf, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, and Jean-Paul Sartre, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring and the New York Times 1619 Project), in addition to a pair of contemporary novels (There, There by Tommy Orange and Exit West by Mohsin Hamid). Through these readings, we considered the role that literature and the humanities play in advancing social change, and by extension, how the English major serves as a foundation for students as they enter professions and become global citizens.

As part of the course, students engage in a high-impact practice in which they collaborate and design a group community engagement project. The project learning goals are several:

Work together as a team to brainstorm, find consensus and design a project that communicates the importance/relevance of your collective work as English majors for a community audience, broadly defined

Share all aspects of planning, implementing and presenting the project equitably, and with the learning outcomes of the campus, the English major, Fredonia Foundations (general education) and our class in mind, and engage in a collective assessment of the project

Utilize our course theme of ‘literature and social change’ in a meaningful project that demonstrates your understanding of how the humanities contribute positively to social change

None of us could have anticipated the direction the semester went just three days before our much needed spring break, when New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced — via tweet — on Wednesday, March 11, that all SUNY campuses would continue the remainder of the semester in a distance learning format due to the coronavirus pandemic. No one saw this coming, least of all college seniors, whose lives suddenly took a terrifying plunge into the unknown. For several students in the class ‘home’ was in what was already becoming a ‘hot spot’: New York City as well as Buffalo, adding an existential fear to the overall disruption. The chaos, sadness and devastation students experienced that week — economically, psychologically and emotionally — continues, which is why this project matters so much, for me as their instructor and hopefully for them––if not now, then at some future moment when they look back at their shattered final semester.

To be graduating into such a world and time will take all their courage and resourcefulness. My hope is that the seminar discussions, and the collaborative effort they put into this capstone project during the most dire of circumstances, also gives them confidence that their work in the humanities, and English in particular, matters. They possess the strong research, writing and reading skills necessary for any profession. But even more, they have developed greater empathy regarding the human and planetary condition, and considered the genuine impact literature and the arts can have in moments of crisis by reading deeply into the work of the generations who came before them, forced to deal with war, violence, racism, sexism, toxic environments and genocide.

As their generation graduates into a post-pandemic world, the humanities will offer some of the necessary critical tools to help them reimagine global society and renew our devastated planet in a more sustainable, equitable manner: one that values all life, human and non-human, and seeks to enrich connections we have with each other, regardless of race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion or national origin. I’m immensely proud of their perseverance, their humor, and their resilience in the face of the most severe crisis the planet and humanity have experienced in a generation, and I thank them for their work this semester and particularly on this project.

Works Cited:

Woolf, Virginia. “Thoughts on Peace in an Air Raid.” The Death of the Moth and Other Essays (New York: Harvest/HBJ, 1970; orig. 1940): 243–248. [main page citation]