Sunday, August 19, 2012

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 21st 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. 6th 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.

Saturday, August 18, 2012

Why Read? What She Said...

OK, here's a pretty comprehensive list of why reading is good for you: http://www.redheadedreads.blogspot.com/2012/08/adult-reading.html. What she said! :) Thanks, Jennifer!

Sunday, August 12, 2012

Blog Entry 22: Freestyle: Flaming Iguanas

I'm reading Erika Lopez's Flaming Iguanas for ENGL 339. I like it for several reasons: 1) it's cheerily risque, which is not my style, so it's good for me, 2) it combines narrative with cartoon images and harkens back to Crumb but from a female perspective, so I like the genre play and the legacy of cartooning represented, 3) it claims the road narrative and an approximation of the wild road life for women, and 4) the main character is funny--she's brash and insecure at the same time, very likable.

Here is an example of what I like about the main character: Tomato (Jolene) Rodriguez has decided that she and her friend Magdalena are going on a motorcycle road trip, but she doesn't know how to ride a motorcycle. She decides she's going to become a motorcycle gang of one, the "Flaming Iguanas." Because she needs a biker jacket, Tomato attempts to embroider the gang name on the back of a leather jacket but only gets through "Flam." That's OK with her: "I didn't care about the FLAM thing. Once I put on the jacket, I was leader of the pack, armed with a Jell-O theory of independent togetherness" (47). I love the just-do-it but with humor spirit of this: it doesn't matter that she doesn't know how to ride a motorcycle; it doesn't matter that her jacket is pathetic; it doesn't matter that her gang isn't really a gang; she's still gonna seek an adventure on the road. Tomato's attitude is both heartwarming and hysterical.

Work Cited
Lopez, Erika. Flaming Iguanas. New York: Scribner, 1997. Print.

Image Source
Book Cover for Flaming Iguanas. amazon.com. n.d. Web. 12 Aug. 2012. <http://www.amazon.com/Flaming-Iguanas-Illustrated-All-Girl-Novel/dp/068485368X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344806808&sr=8-1&keywords=Flaming+Iguanas>

Othello Posts

http://nknowles-reading.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-18-quote-response-othello-i-and-ii.html
http://nknowles-reading.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-entry-20-othello-acts-iii-v.html
http://nknowles-reading.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-22-freestyle.html

Blog Entry 17: Trifles

http://nknowles-reading.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-18-quote-response-trifles.html

Blog Entry 16: Scene Response to O

http://nknowles-reading.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-16-scene-response-tba.html

Blog 15: Freestyle: Brooks People of the Book


Geraldine Brooks’s The People of the Book tells the story of a medieval haggadah, a Jewish prayer book, that is unique in its beautiful illuminations. Brooks writes, “But no one knew why this haggadah was illustrated with numerous miniature paintings, at a time when most Jews considered figurative art a violation of the commandments” (19). The very fact of the book provides the first mystery--why was the haggadah illustrated?--and points to the interactions among religious groups that characterize the history of the haggadah.

Australian Hanna Heath travels to Sarajevo to do the preservation work that will allow the book to be handled and studied. In the process, Hanna inspects the book, noting the details that indicate its history: a Latin inscription, the binding, a butterfly wing. All the details of the book tell the story of its creation and its journey through history. Hanna’s story frames the narrative, and her connection with the book also unearths secrets in her past, and then other sections delve into the book’s history. In the end, the reader knows more than Hanna does about the book because the reader gets to put the historical pieces together. This multi-layered story is a gem. 

Works Cited
Brooks, Geraldine. The People of the Book. New York: Penguin, 2008. Print.

Blog Entry 14: Satrapi's Persepolis

I've made two posts already on Satrapi, so I think I won't write a fresh one:

http://nknowles-reading.blogspot.com/2009/11/blog-14-quote-response-satrapi-1.html

http://nknowles-reading.blogspot.com/2011/08/persepolis.html

Blog Entry 13: Frost "The Road Not Taken"

Robert Frost's "The Road Not Taken" has got to be the most-written-about poem in ENGL 104. I imagine it resonates particularly with Americans because it seems to be about individuality, that you've got to take a road different from the one other people would take. I'm all for individuality, but sometimes I wonder if we don't stereotype it in the way that young people declare their individuality through the same clothing that all other young people are wearing. Is it good to be unique in an acceptable way, or is it good to be unique in a really weird way that others won't understand? To be honest, I don't think we're as individual or as tolerant of individuality as we'd like to think.

Also, I don't think this poem is really about individuality, at least not in the puffed up way of "I'm going to be different from everyone else!" Here's why: whenever people try to analyze this poem, they spend a lot of time on the idea that the road taken "was grassy and wanted wear" (line 8), which suggests few people have taken it. But, then, later in the poem, the persona takes back the idea that there was a significant difference between the roads: "the passing there/Had worn them really about the same" (lines 9-10). So, if the roads are "worn [. . .] about the same," the persona can't really tell the difference between them in terms of prior travel. This retraction is just A LINE BELOW the line that everyone likes to focus on. Why doesn't anyone see it? I don't think we want to see it because we want to read this poem in the stereotypical American way. Also, the ending goes back to the "less traveled by" idea (line 19), which creates a more lasting impression.

So, why did Frost even include the retraction? I feel as if what's important about the road is that the PERSONA has not traveled by it. True, he hasn't yet traveled either road, but when he picks a new road, it's less important that it's less traveled by others than that it has never been traveled by him. So, this poem is more about accepting the challenge of change than it is about being stereotypically unique.

Blog Entry 12: Poem Paraphrase: Shakespeare "Marriage of True Minds"

Here is a paraphrase of Shakespeare's "Let me not to the marriage of true minds": There are no barriers in the connection between true lovers. Their love does not change when they change. Instead, their love is permanent, never shaken by storms. Their love is the star by which sailors chart a course. Nor is true love dimmed by time, though the lovers lose their beauty with age. Love does not change with time but lasts until the end of time. If I am wrong about this, I never wrote anything, and no one ever loved.

Blog Entry 11: Yeats's "Leda and the Swan"

William Butler Yeats's "Leda and the Swan" tells the story of the Greek god Zeus raping Leda, a rape that produced daughter Helen, whose abduction sparked the Trojan War. The poem is three stanzas long, with a line break in the middle of the third stanza. It's mostly iambic pentameter with some irregularity.

When I read this poem, I think about Yeats in love with Maud Gonne, who never returned his affection. In the context of this poem, I think that Maud is Yeats's lost Helen, and he blames her for not loving him. Yeats's dissatisfaction with Maud seems to extend to all women, who are at least partly responsible for the tragedies in their lives. In the case of Leda, the persona indicates Leda is "helpless" during the rape but then asks two questions:

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies? (lines 5-8)

The first question seems almost rhetorical, that Leda had no power to push Zeus away, yet the fact that the question is a question seems to suggest that she might have tried. The second question makes Leda more culpable by wondering how any object of passion could avoid feeling that passion, "the strange heart." In this way, Yeats suggests that Leda is partly responsible for the rape, blaming the victim, which I attribute to his negative attitude toward Maud. It's as if he asks, aren't all women slaves to their emotions?

The last stanza attributes even more destructive a force to women through Helen. The lines indicate that the passion of this moment created Helen and thereby spawned the destruction of Troy:

The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead. (lines 9-10)

These images are understatements: the whole city of Troy was destroyed, not just a wall, roof, and tower, and plenty more people than Agamemnon died. The understatement seems to mourn these losses, even though Agamemnon killed his own daughter, Iphigenia, in order to get favorable winds to carry his army to Troy. Yet, Yeats feels for the loss of Agamemnon in a way he does not feel for the rape of Leda. The line break in the middle of line 10 seems to emphasize the losses associated with Troy as painful tragedy engendering a moment of silence.

The second to last line again points to women as the cause of disaster: "Did she put on his knowledge with his power" (line 11). The question, again, seems rhetorical, in this case suggesting that, yes, Leda did assume god-like knowledge, plotting the destruction of Troy at the moment of Helen's conception, and that women altogether, including Maud Gonne, have that knowledge and wield it to the disadvantage of men.

I really like this poem. It's beautiful. Knowing Yeats's background creates complex undercurrents for me that weave additional meaning throughout. The poem also makes me angry at Yeats: poor baby! Maud doesn't love you. Get over it. Eventually, Yeats would get over Maud, marrying Georgie Hyde-Lees, a woman half his age, who engaged in his creative efforts in a devoted way Maud Gonne would never have done. Maybe women aren't quite as dangerous if they stand by their men?

Wednesday, August 1, 2012

Blog Entry 10: Song: Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now"

I grew up hearing Joni Mitchell's "Both Sides Now" on the radio but didn't pay much attention to the song until Bend Union High School teacher and OWP Co-Director Amy Sabbadini used it in a teaching demonstration this summer. During the discussion, participating teachers came up with all kinds of interpretations, so here is mine using the first part of the song:


Rows and flows of angel hair
And ice cream castles in the air
And feather canyons everywhere
I've looked at clouds that way

But now they only block the sun

They rain and snow on everyone
So many things I would have done
But clouds got in my way
I've looked at clouds from both sides now

From up and down, and still somehow

It's cloud illusions I recall
I really don't know clouds at all

I think the song is about understanding life. There are many ways to look at life. The song calls them "both sides," emphasizing that the many ways are contradictory. In memory, I look back on experiences as both positive and negative even when those interpretations contradict one another. 


In the lines above, the persona is looking at clouds. This passage uses a physical object as a starting point for more abstract thinking about life. The clouds are both "ice cream castles" and "block[ing] the sun." They are both beautiful fantasy constructions, tenuous as dreams, and also powerful enough to block light and threaten life.  



When looking back on these memories, the persona recalls only the positive, the castles, but she also claims not to "know clouds at all." I think she does know clouds, but it's difficult to put that knowledge into words because the memories are contradictory, and that's the point. Life experiences are complicated. Because of that complexity, we may feel we don't understand them, but we do. We just need to recognize they are contradictory and our interpretations of them are also contradictory. 

Works CitedMitchell, Joni. "Both Sides Now." JoniMitchell.com. 9 March 1967. Web. 1 Aug. 2012. <http://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=83>.

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Blog Entry 9: Haiku

On the street corner,
He waits with his dog, while she
Scolds the bank teller.

Blog Entry 8: Poem Paraphrase: Pound's "In a Station"

In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

Paraphrase: The crowd milling at the metro station seems one mass, yet faces emerge briefly, almost like ghosts. I see them individually, as unique as petals defined by droplets of water and by their brilliant color against wood turned black by rain.