“What’s Good?”

This piece presents the joy of teaching together. Drawing on the authors’ expertise in queer and ethnic twentieth-century American literature, they taught a new course that featured social class: “Love and Work in American Literature.” The authors put together a syllabus of books that they had long taught on their own—but in reading them with each other, they encountered fresh aesthetic thrills. They challenged their students to rethink love and work, all the while displaying the extravagant pleasure they took in the material.