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By Bill Altreuter

Donald Barthelme's Syllabus. A list of 81 books that Barthelme recommended to his students. As it happens, thanks largely to Clay Lewis and William Ruckert I've read 34 of these. One semester they team-taught a four credit course called "Contemporary Literature" or some such. The fashion at Geneseo then was to have these monstrous surveys, taught by two or more faculty members. The idea was that you'd read a ton, and write a short paper every week, with a longer, more comprehensive paper two or three or four times over the semester. I took another like that with Ken Deutsch, (PoliSci) Bill Edgar (Philosopy) and Bill Martin (Economics) that amounted to a survey of 20th Century political philosophy and was one of the peak intellectual experiences of my life. There is a lot to recommenced this format, I think. Team teaching, done well, exposes the class to a diversity of opinion, and it spreads the load. I'm finding that goading undergraduates into discussion is not always so easy, and reading that many papers must have been horrible, but it was certainly valuable for me.

It's been years since I've read, or even thought about some of the books on Barthelme's list. "The Lime Twig" was one from the class that I took, and I was pretty knocked out about it at the time. I'm surprised that Robert Coover isn't on the list; we read "Pricksongs and Descants" that semester, a collection of stories that were shocking in their technique and freedom. Somewhere in out attic I probably still have the papers I wrote, and perhaps even the syllabus. Perhaps I should try to dig them out to use as a benchmark for the papers my students will be handing in. It's funny to think that the parade has probably passed by for a number of these writers-- there was a time when I thought John Barth was All That, but the moment passed for that sort of metafiction long ago. My respect for Kurt Vonnegut (we read "Slaughterhouse Five") has increased since then-- at the time I thought it was just a stunt, but now I think it may be the truest book to have come out of World War Two.

There is a lot on Barthelme's list that we didn't do-- Mailer is a personal obsession, a writer that my friend Kelly Kramer encouraged me to like; similarly Bellow. Chances are that undergraduates shouldn't be reading Saul Bellow anyway-- what could he possibly have been saying to me when I was in my 20s? My brother gave me "The Palm Wine Drunkard", a book I should get back to.

Full post as published by Outside Counsel on November 05, 2009 (boomark / email).