Question 1

Where does "the contemporary" fit into your teaching and your ideas about teaching, and what encompasses it? What orders your notion of contemporary literature? Is it multicultural literature? World literature? Marginal/marginalized literature? Literature that resists canonization or literature that seems destined to be absorbed into the canon at some point?

How does your teaching define "the contemporary"? How do you define "the contemporary" for your teaching in terms of what you put on a syllabus, and what you identify as contemporary literature or contemporary texts? Is "the contemporary" synonomous with "recent" (which suggests a historical organization) or might it be more fruitfully described as an ethos (and thus as conceptually organized)? How might that organization carry over into such genres as the syllabus or the essay
assignment?

Question 2

Under the ideal circumstances, what sort of contemporary literature class would you like to teach? How would you decide what "texts" to put on the syllabus? Would you include critical theory? Film? Memoir or autobiography? Popular or virtual media such as zines, comic books/grapic novels, blogs, television?

Given the variety of possible texts that encompass "the contemporary," how do you envision the role of contemporary literature within the canon, especially in regards to your own area of specialty? How and where would contemporary literature fit into a survey course?

Question 3

What should students ideally take away or learn from a contemporary literature class? Another way of thinking about it: what are we teaching students "about" contemporary literature, about ways of reading, or about some other principle around which the class is organized? What do our preferences say about our values as teachers, researchers and scholars?

Question 4

What advice would you give to Ph.D. candidates who are going on the market in contemporary lit? What things are important to think about? What should candidates try to do (as well as avoid doing) in regards to their syllabi, in their discussions of their teaching experience, future research ideas, and so forth?