Blog Party Post: Teaching Literary Classics

Hook: In 2007, Lev Grossman published a list “The 10 Greatest Books of All Time” on the Time magazine website:

·  Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

·  Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert

·  War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy

·  Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov

·  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

·  Hamlet by William Shakespeare

·  The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald

·  In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust

·  The Stories of Anton Chekhov by Anton Chekhov

·  Middlemarch by George Eliot

I’ve read eight of 10 books in the list, but I’m an English teacher. How many have you read?  

Inquiry Question and Conclusions: As an English teacher, I will assume that, as cultural records and aesthetic masterpieces, the classics are worth reading. But, given the multiplicity of entertainment available today, how do teachers instill an appreciation of classic literature when it may not be particularly fun to read? I would argue that liking literature is key to lifelong reading, but difficult literature can deliver more profound meaning because we have to grapple with language, ideas, and artistic techniques and see through the eyes of authors and characters from different cultures and historical moments. Through reconciling what we know about the world with exotic reality alive in classic literature, the difficult text challenges us to shift our worldview, to become different and potentially wiser people. This kind of intellectual growth is important personally and culturally. Given classic literature has this potential, how do I teach classic literature as a pleasurable intellectual and aesthetic experience--that the work of unraveling difficult but beautiful meaning can also be “fun”?

At this point, here are my conclusions: students need to 1) read the book, 2) understand the book, 3) reflect on the impact of the reading experience on their thoughts and lives, and 4) wrestle with the effect of literary techniques on meaning, arriving at a more multidimensional and therefore more profound reading experience.

Evidence and Analysis

1) Students need to read challenging texts. This means those texts need to be assigned, meaningful coursework needs to be built around them to encourage students to read them, and assessments need to be established to reward students for doing so. This combination of assignment, scaffolding, and assessment is the basis of my teaching. In ENGL 104, much of the literature we read is considered classic. Scaffolding occurs through the “apparatus” of the textbook, opinionaires, blogs and discussion board activities, contemporary and popular texts read alongside classics, and informal and creative responses that allow for personal and imaginative connections to classic literature. Assessment occurs through the informal writing and also through more formal literary analysis papers.

The purpose of these curricular gymnastics is engagement. Without engagement, many students won’t read. The ENGL 104 opinionaires are a based on a technique developed by Jeff Wilhelm intended as prereading to get students interested in the focus of a particular unit, encouraging engagement before reading begins. The textbook is intended to provide background knowledge necessary for appreciation of literary techniques so that students can better understand why a text impacts readers. Because most people are motivated by interpersonal interaction, the blogs and discussion board activities are intended to provide a sense of classroom community that engages students emotionally with the work. The contemporary and popular texts, like songs and graphic novels, read alongside classic literature are intended to encourage connections between pleasurable and more challenging kinds of reading. Finally, aside from their assessment role, the informal responses and formal papers are intended as a moment where students get to have their say about their reading and connect it to their lives and thinking, engaging both emotions and intellectual pleasures. The responses that also involve creativity, like the artistic response and use of creative writing as a means of understanding genre, are intended to enhance pleasure in reading by combining it with pleasures associated with artistic creation. Based on the resulting informal and formal writing, I have the sense that students have at least read some of the classics assigned, so I think that some of these strategies work. Some probably work better for some students than others, but the quantity and diversity of approaches are intended to reach out to all students and encourage reading.

2) Just reading the classics, however, is not enough necessarily to achieve a profound intellectual experience. I read the 700 pages of James Joyce’s Ulysses in two different literature classes without understanding what was going on in the novel! (James seems to be doing a little better with Shakespeare than I did with Joyce [Mulherron].) To access the profound depths of classic literature, students need to understand literary texts. In her article “A Matter of Relevance: Teaching the Classics in the 21^st Century,” Lamiaa Youseff presents three techniques that have proved helpful in encouraging a deeper connection with classic texts: approximation, thematic relevance, and application. The foundation of interpretation, approximation helps students “understand what the text [is] saying” through techniques like summaries, presentations, or YouTube films where students identify the literal meaning of the text (29). When I tried to read Ulysses for the third time, I went straight to Sparks Notes and got an overview of the action. Suddenly, I could distinguish the physical from the mental, and the whole drama of the story became clear. Definitely, the literal meaning has to come first before students can do anything else with the text. I think some of our quote-response and paraphrase strategies are ways we take this first step in ENGL 104.

3) To create personal engagement, students need to reflect on the impact of the reading experience on their thoughts and lives. The second of Youseff’s steps, thematic relevance, encourages students to identify and connect with themes present in the text. She emphasizes that this act is “intra-thematic,” meaning that it isn’t enough to just talk about themes within a single text; we need to discuss themes in connection with readerly concerns (30). So, a text like Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis that addresses religious belief challenged by evil in the world might be connected to readers’ own journeys of faith (or lack of faith). The frame where Marji kicks God out of her life is poignant. God stands on the left side of the frame, and Marji stands on her bed on the right. The background is black, and God is almost all white, except for a few black lines to distinguish features. Marji yells, “Shut up, you! Get out of my life!!! I never want to see you again!” (70) Because her Uncle Anoosh is dead, Marji is rejecting God for allowing such evil to happen. This moment resonates with all of us who have made a decision, one way or another, about our faith based on life experiences, and those thematic personal connections make texts more interesting to readers.

ENGL 104 uses opinionaires to identify themes that may be of interest prior to reading and returns to those themes in the inquiry questions associated with the formal papers. Paper 1 in particular requires connection of personal experience to analysis. However, ENGL 104 could do more between those moments to build understanding of the theme in connection with the reader’s experience. Although Youseff doesn’t mention it, I think “intra-thematic” also implies thematic connections across texts, which might be easier to accomplish with a thematically based textbook than one focused on techniques.

4) In moving through the above steps, we arrive at the fun moment where students see a text as relevant to them. Maybe now they like the text. But there’s more to literature than liking. To access a more profound reading experience, students must wrestle with the effect of literary techniques on meaning. Youseff’s third step is application or applying understanding of those intertwined literary and personal themes to a piece of literature (30). Perhaps here is also the entry point for aesthetic study. Artistic techniques transform stories from three to four dimensions. Suddenly, everything that happens is more than a chronology of events; every detail means something! Because of the complexity of multiple symbolic elements “rubbing” against one another, to use Linda Hutcheon’s term for understanding irony, readers arrive at meanings that are multiple.

For example, I can’t decide whether I think “My Papa’s Waltz” is fun or scary, so I often think about both meanings at once, which makes the poem much more complex. In entertaining both meanings at once, my understanding of parent-child relationships becomes more complex: such relationships are about moments of weakness and exhaustion, about disagreement and pretending to disagree, and about both loving and fearing the parent. In this way, through aesthetic reading experiences, I look at the world more closely and think more deeply. This intellectual and aesthetic work is “fun.” I enjoy exploring the various meanings and the challenge of making meaning from difficult texts, and it’s satisfying to write up my interpretation to share with others.

However, I’m not sure I’m very good yet at creating assignments that support students in applying themes to texts and exploring the interaction of literary techniques with meaning. I ask students to do this in the paper assignments, but it would be nice to add activities as steps toward the papers. I suspect these smaller assignments would need to be text-specific. That is, I would have to identify a particular text and frame questions related to it. Usually, I shy away from mandating students work with a particular text, favoring their choice instead. But, maybe I could mandate a few more specific texts to support this kind of work.

In conclusion, I don’t feel I’ve really scratched the surface in dealing with this topic, so I need to do more research. However, I do feel that my four conclusions can guide my future course development to better support students in reading the classics: students need to read and understand classic literature, they need to connect the themes of classic literature to their lives, and they need to explore the aesthetic techniques involved in literature to access the multiple meanings that create a life-changing reading experience. Good literature courses should aim to achieve these ends so that our culture will benefit by increased reading of literary classics like War and Peace and Middlemarch.

Provocative Question: What was a good experience that you had reading a literary classic? What reading and/or teaching strategies made it an interesting experience for you, or what kinds of strategies do you imagine would have been beneficial?

Works Cited

Grossman, Lev. “The 10 Greatest Books of All Time.” Time Entertainment. Time. 15 Jan. 2007. Web. 19 Aug. 2012. <http://www.time.com/time/arts/article/0,8599,1578073,00.html>.

Hutcheon, Linda. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Joyce, James. Ulysses.

Mulherron, James. “Blog Post 18: Quote Response.” JM’s Reading Blog. Blogspot.com. 12 Aug. 2012. <http://jjmul4409.blogspot.com/2012/08/blog-post-18-quote-response.html>.

Roethke, Theodore. “My Papa’s Waltz.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. 6^th compact ed. Eds. X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. New York: Pearson-Longman, 2010. 423. Print.

Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis. New York: Pantheon, 2003. Print.

Wilhelm, Jeffrey. Engaging Readers and Writers with Inquiry. Scholastic, 2007. Print.  

Youssef, Lamiaa. "A Matter of Relevance: Teaching Classics in the 21St Century." College Teaching 58.1 (2010): 28-31. ERIC. Web. 19 Aug. 2012.