My Contemporary Literature Reading List

!!!!!

That's the only way I can type how I feel right now. I just got off the phone with a dean from a local university. I had applied for a teaching position there about a month ago. Since the school is a self-described "career-minded" college, I had assumed that they'd want me to teach composition or business writing or something similarly work-intensive and tedious. But the dean said that they would want me to teach a 400-level Humanities course in Contemporary Literature.

Again, !!!!!

The reason this is so exciting is that most adjunct lecturers (meaning lecturers who teach part-time and who aren't in tenure-track professorships) with English degrees are usually forced to teach a very limited array of composition courses semester after semester. At Penn State, full-time lecturers could teach intro to composition, business writing, technical writing, and writing in the humanities. If the lecturer worked really hard and hung around long enough and earned high enough student evaluations, he or she would be given a single coveted section of creative writing or literature appreciation. And that's a big "if."

So I'm absolutely thrilled at the opportunity to teach literature for this school. Of course, there's still the interview to get through, and maybe I will decide that this particular university is not for me. But I'm excited enough that I've already compiled a tentative reading list for a Contemporary Lit. course.

This particular university runs on 8-week sessions, meaning that I'd only have class time for 8 books at most. And really, if you take into account time for papers and tests, 6 books/reading units would be best. On a 6-week schedule, I'd allocate 3 weeks for novels, 1 week for short fiction, 1 week for drama, and 1 week for poetry.

Here's the reading list for my dream Contemporary Literature course, off the top of my head. Please feel free to suggest additions in the comments section!

Novels:
1) Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping (or maybe Gilead, since it won the Pulitzer)
2) Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (or The Road to exploit the movie tie-in)
3) Junot Diaz's The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao

Short Stories:
1) Alice Munro (I don't know what I'd pick, but she'd definitely be in there)
2) Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"
3) Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"
4) Selections from some contemporary short story anthology

Drama:
1) Tom Stoppard's Arcadia

Poetry:
1) Selections from The Best American Poetry 2009
2) Selections from Mary Oliver's American Primitive (Oliver's great for people who are new to poetry)
3) Selections from Billy Collins's Picnic, Lightening (also good for beginners, and funny, too)
4) Selections from Lynne Emanuel's Then, Suddenly--
5) Selections from Harryette Mullen's Sleeping with the Dictionary

So, my dear reader, would you take my class?