I will certainly use the class presentation requirement in my next literature course. The presentations allowed students to glean supplemental contextual information that could never be covered otherwise. This requirement encouraged cooperative learning because students referred to presentations in their discussions of the primary reading and even consulted presenters who were now "class experts" on topics that became relevant to the students' literary analysis essays.

I highly recommend the Chopin, Wharton, Glasgow progression of reading because these texts inform and rework each other in interesting ways. Because I knew that the majority of students would be straight and white, I purposefully designed the course so that we would begin with white and ostensibly heterosexual texts. This structure worked amazingly well. By the time we got to the "Lesbian Section," the students were at ease in class discussions and invested in the readings and in the class as a community. I found that most of my students lacked knowledge but not maturity when dealing with lesbian issues, and several remarked that they enjoyed "The Birth of Lesbian Writing" the most because the topic was so new to them. One student suggested that we should have read all of The Well of Loneliness, and I agree. The students loved the reading about Sappho and were engaged in tracing her influence through women's poetry.

If I taught this course again, I would probably expand the number of African-American voices in the Harlem Renaissance section, cut one of Larsen's novels, and expand the time period to include Their Eyes Were Watching God.

The "How to write a literary analysis" days were very productive. I'm indebted to Kim Roberts for showing me the freewrite/mind map brainstorming exercises. Most of my students remarked that the exercises really helped them focus on a topic they were interested in. The students also found Greg Colomb's topic/question/significance exercises to be extremely helpful, though not quite as fun. One student remarked that she hadn't really understood what a thesis statement was until she completed Greg's exercises. In my next literature class, I will also repeat my method of having individual draft conferences with students instead of handing back written draft comments. I'm convinced that having a dialogue with a student about her paper engages her in the writing process and furthers the intellectual relationship between student and instructor.

I must add that the students were so engaged by the class that they have created an informal group (of which I am proudly a member) which now meets monthly to discuss films, readings, and women's issues.