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.
