On short notice, I have been called upon to offer again a course on American autobiography, a seminar I last taught in 2005. I am not complaining; now I get the chance to teach my own book. One of the reasons scholars write books is because they believe there is nothing else available to take into the classroom.
But I also need other materials, of course, and so I looked to see what primary works are currently in print. There is no problem finding the cornerstones of "Lost Generation" life writing: Malcolm Cowley's Exile's Return, Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, and Gertrude Stein's The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Unfortunately, I have discovered that Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle's Being Geniuses Together is no longer available. Originally published by McAlmon seventy years ago, the book was republished in 1968 in an edition that included alternate chapters penned by Boyle. As a "dual autobiography," it is a fascinating text -- and one that is essential to my seminar.
The solution available to me is to have a coursepack prepared for my class. After paying copyright and printing costs, each student can resurrect a book that should never have gone out of print. There was a time that finding interesting and forgotten texts was often a cheaper option than using books from a scholarly publisher, but current copyright and printing costs now bring the price up to the average price of any other book.
But if there is no real financial advantage to custom learning resources anymore, at least there is still the flexibility they bring. Originally touted as the opportunity to build your own anthologies, coursepacks lost some luster when the impediments to reselling them became apparent: used book markets rely on demand across multiple campuses. Honestly, I find it just as easy (and inexpensive) to pick and choose from a publisher's anthology that students can then resell at the end of term.
So, I plan to use the flexibility to give students more choice. Over the years, I have taught -- and the university has digitized -- Bravig Imbs's Confessions of Another Young Man, Alfred Kreymborg's Troubadour, Harold Loeb's The Way It Was, and Samuel Putnam's Paris Was Our Mistress. If our "on demand" procurement system works properly, students in my class should be able to order, in the first weeks of next semester, a copy of McAlmon and Boyle and one of the other four texts bundled in one coursepack. The second book would give them something on which to base their term papers.
Obviously, in a perfect world, I would like the students to buy and read all these books. With this plan, though, I can encourage a range of term paper projects and still offer the primary texts necessary for the seminar.
Comments