Chapter 10: A Journal of The Pandemic Year: Teaching at the Margins in the Age of Novel Coronavirus

An 18th century London merchant, a 19th century New England naturalist, and a 21st-century shapeshifting trans person: What might these individuals have in common? They mark the boundaries of teaching (and learning) amid a pandemic crisis that finds us caught in a paradoxical intersection of the old, the new, and an increasingly ambiguous future. The old: A lesser known early modern work by Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year (1722/1948), its protagonist, the abovementioned London merchant. The new: Henry David Thoreau’s naturalist writing and modern meditations on nature and culture, specifically, “Walking” (1862/2012), a posthumously published text grounded in both his journals, his lectures, and his own experience. The ambiguous future: A postmodern contemporary work of LGBTQ+ literature by Andrea Lawlor, Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl (2019), in which Paul, the protagonist, who, like a postmodern Tiresias, lives as both a man and a woman but without the help of divine intervention. At the crossroads of this improbable intersection: One English professor and 12 students in an inaugural course offering about LGBTQ+ literature and theory, “Queering the Literary Landscape.” In the postapocalyptic tradition established by Defoe, this chapter presents a pedagogical journey through a collective academic experience—in real and virtual space—of the pandemic crisis and how a potentially traumatic experience of a world turned upside down came to shape a safe space in which we were able to explore our own academically-framed and reinforced experiences of intersectionality. A quarter of the students in “Queering the Literary Landscape” also enrolled in Africana Literature, another student simultaneously enrolled in “Major Authors” reading Chinua Achebe and James Baldwin, and one professor taught all three courses. All emphasize race, gender, gender identification, and class, in the fragile aftermath of an “American Dream” that has been revealed as an illusion. It is an account of how we developed our own, if not trauma-pedagogy, reading practice that allowed for the working through of our various traumas (individual and collective), one memoir, novel, or poem at a time, three times a week, in a virtual classroom.