Vegas baby, Vegas
What happens in class, stays in class

Brittany Hutton | fact checker
bhutton@smcvt.edu

For the first time this semester, St. Michael’s is offering a class called The Fabulous Las Vegas.

Viva Las Vegas

Books surround the cluttered office. A poster of Jerry Garcia hangs adjacent from the door and on the desk sits a large book called Las Vegas: An Unconventional History.

This is the office of professor Nathaniel Lewis, chairman of the English department. Lewis has been a teacher at St. Michael’s College for 10 years and for the first time he is teaching a class called The Fabulous Las Vegas.

Last year he taught a senior seminar class on the American Southwest, and during part of that class he covered Las Vegas. He took five students on a three-day trip to Sin City.

Nathaniel Lewis is the professor for The Fabulous Las Vegas class. Larry Frisoli, photo

Lewis is still contemplating if he wants to bring this year’s class to Las Vegas.

“It is very important that this is a course in pop culture, and we don’t need to go to Las Vegas in order to understand it,” he says.

There are many problems that exist in planning such a trip without excluding anyone, Lewis says. The main snags are money, timing, student safety, and exclusivity, meaning that everyone attending needs to be 21.  It is fundamentally unfair for students who lack funds or who are underage, Lewis says.

Lewis says he likes to change his teaching style and not usually teach a class twice. He says he gets bored with the material, but is thinking of teaching this course again. The Fabulous Las Vegas course is not included in the school catalogue and no pre-requisites are required to take the class.

However, Lewis strongly encourages only upper-level English majors take the course. He engages his students through the culture and lifestyle of Las Vegas.

“It’s a lot of fun, but we do a lot of cultural reading and it will be misunderstood by non-English majors,” he says of the theory-based class.

What happens in class, stays in class

St. Michael's senior and English major Alexandra Smith says she has never taken a class with Lewis, but always wanted to. When she heard that Lewis was teaching a class on Las Vegas, she made sure to add it to her schedule.

The Fabulous Las Vegas course is unlike any other taught on campus, Smith says. For example, Lewis wore sunglasses during class, Smith recalls. When asked how a typical class is taught, Lewis says, “what happens in class, stays in class.”

For this course he wants the students to make sure they go in-depth when viewing movies and reading the required texts. The course is based upon literacy and film theory that applies larger ideas and meaning, which goes beyond the surface level, Smith says.

On Mondays and Wednesdays students read certain texts, such as “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas” and discuss them in class. Lewis wants the students to notice more detail, he says.   

Smith says they are reading and watching everything in a wholly different method than in other classes. Fridays are movie days like “The Godfather.”  There are multiple forms of representation, not just simple text, Lewis says.

Money, the only thing that matters in Las Vegas. Justin Veiga, photo illustration

However, Smith says she didn’t know she would be studying the history of Las Vegas as well. There is a lot more history in the course than expected, she says.

Lewis says he knows that Las Vegas has a rich pop culture, but he wants to give a rigorous examination of the city along with an academic approach.

Senior English major Erin Fay has taken a class with Lewis before and discovered that she has more of an appreciation of the history of Las Vegas, she says.

“We joke a lot and there are really no boundaries, everyone gets to talk,” Fay says.

True life: Las Vegas

Lewis is currently working on a book about Las Vegas with longtime friend Stephen Tatum. They are dissecting a single episode of the TV show “Crime Scene Investigation (CSI)” and writing about the number of philosophical and aesthetic themes in the post-industrial American Southwest. Their book will present the history, the problems with technology and questions of beauty within Sin City, Lewis says.

Lewis has been to Las Vegas multiple times and being able to teach a class like The Fabulous Las Vegas has really allowed the students to be free-thinkers, he says

“He teaches the class the way he wants to approach the subject," Smith says. "It's a completely different atmosphere, and he’s really funny."