The students have never read any fiction before, of any kind, in any language. What I should be doing is having story hour. In my elementary schools, after lunch, the teacher would read high quality, age appropriate books for a whole hour. I should conceive of this course the way I do of the extracurricular film club, where we see key films and have contextualizing information about them, and leave things at that. It is still teaching.
I am serious. Before before even learning the mechanics of narrative voice and so on, students should have some kind of familiarity with literature. In the past they got this in freshman and sophomore level courses but now they arrive to the junior level, where they are to study literature formally, and they have never seen any literature before, ever. So introducing it to them, showing them it can be interesting, has to come first.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 
Every time I teach my 100-level intro to fiction course I get less ambitious but the less ambitious I get, the more they get out of it. I read aloud a lot, too. They just don’t hear it in their heads–but they start to enjoy it more once they figure out how it’s supposed to sound. They also tend to think of Reading Literature as Serious Business. I find I have to tip them off to the fact that a given story is supposed to be funny. Or scary. Or fun. Once they figure out that it’s okay to laugh at things they find funny, the class gets a lot easier to teach.
Excellent. I must remember to unearth in my office a different anthology than the one I just ditched. I like it less for teaching how to read literature but as an anthology of texts it is fine and fun, and it is different form the set I am bored with.
I ditched American textbooks and am teaching an Argentine intro to lit studies book and a set of interesting modern texts … but it is too intellectual and too wiggy for them. I should do as you say.