How do we make literature matter to students, who take our required General Education courses in order to graduate with majors they chose to secure economic stability? How do we show them that books can transform the way they think about social justice, race, and mental health—that reading can change their lives? With democracy, well-being, healthcare and racial justice on the line, general literature courses matter more than ever. As Anna Mukamal asserts, we must “make literature courses a self-evident resource for understanding contemporary cultural concerns.” Having been trained by an older generation of professors, and having written about literature historically and culturally, I am excited to learn from the work of early-career scholars who integrate intersectional theories of identity into literary studies in new ways.

In "Teaching Paired Texts Transhistorically," Elizabeth Weybright rethinks the World Humanities curriculum with transhistorical flexibility by highlighting thematic threads and persistent questions between paired texts across place and time. Some pairings feature direct adaptations, as in Margaret Atwood’s feminist revision of The Odyssey in The Penelopiad, while others involve less explicit permutations of thematic and formal elements, as in Sophocles’ Antigone and Toni Morrison’s Sula, to which might be added a consideration of the Theater of War production, “Antigone in Ferguson.” This intertextuality helps students think about what we mean when we say a literary work has had lasting cultural impact, so that students understand how a literary canon is formed. Students identify thematic arcs in light of some of the most pressing issues of our time: the integrity of democracy, race, and class. As a result, they learn about cultural influence—how older texts inform current literature, how the past is part of their current, cultural milieu.

In “Aesthetics of the Sad Woman: Teaching Sarah Ruhl’s Melancholy Play: a contemporary farce,” Anna Mukamal describes teaching Ruhl’s 2002 play in a required course she designed for English majors, “Mental Health and Literature, Midcentury to Present.” Examining how literature complicates binaries between mental illness and mental health, the course interrogates how intersectional identity factors such as gender, race, and class inform cultural constructions of mental health. Mukamal capitalizes on Melancholy Play’s transhistorical intertexts to contextualize historically her students’ understandings of depression—from Robert Burton’s conception of bodily humours to Ruhl’s resistance to Freudian psychoanalysis. Reading other art forms alongside the play, she also invites students to compare Ruhl’s depressed female character’s performance to exoticized renderings of melancholic women by painters like Paul Gauguin and Pablo Picasso, probing the politics of aestheticizing the depressive woman. Ultimately, Mukamal locates the purchase of Ruhl’s play in its nuanced exploration of mental health. Destabilizing our assumption that unmitigated happiness is the ideal emotional state, Melancholy Play casts all emotions, whether socially sanctioned “happiness” or pathologized “sadness,” as not only fundamentally performative, but also evaluated by culturally contingent and contestable value systems.

In “Reading Black American Literature as World Literature,” Anna Muenchrath similarly makes pressing issues such as race and social justice central to a General Education World Literature survey class, connecting disparate material to raise student interest in the content. Students read the oral story “All God’s Chillen Had Wings” and a selection of U.S. Slave Spirituals and Secular songs, along with the Langston Hughes poems, “I, Too” and “The Negro Speaks of Rivers,” Beyoncé’s “Love Drought” music video and Childish Gambino’s award-winning music video, “This is America.” She also shows one of the closing scenes of the Marvel film, Black Panther, and the Kanye West song, “I’ll Fly Away.” These short texts allow students to take a long view of Black writing in the United States and to expand their lexicon to include “orature,” “The Black Atlantic,” “America,” “hybridity,” and “The Other.” Muenchrath thinks about these American texts as world literature by allowing us to talk about the world historical events at Ibo Landing, the effects of the trans-Atlantic slave trade on contemporary U.S. culture, and how the question of whose writing gets published and circulated determines our literary canon.

These 15-minute papers foreground difficult issues like mental health and race in the teaching of literature, helping students understand the long and complicated histories of both through an intersectional approach. In addition, these scholars teach literary texts alongside other forms of media: visual art, clips of the performance of plays, music, and music videos. After synthesizing these scholars’ pedagogical strategies in making literature matter to students by animating pressing cultural issues in the classroom, we reserve 20-25 minutes for an open, unstructured conversation to learn from our audience.