My Methods (Maybe)

Like Chris, I found that I have already used several of the methods Bean describes in my 101 classes. This was partly encouraging but also partly frustrating. Most of the methods that I have used in classes have been only moderately successful at best. Some of them failed rather miserably. I was sort of hoping that Bean would be able to offer some magical new method that would refresh my pedagogy. Well, that didn't exactly happen. I was, however, reminded of a few methods that I'd heard of (or been on the student end of) but have not yet used. Also, I think Bean helped me to see how my implementation of some of these methods could be changed to make them more successful.

• Writing at the beginning of class to probe a subject: I've used this method fairly frequently in my classes. I've found that it does help to stimulate class discussions about a concept or article.
• Writing during class to refocus a lagging discussion or cool off a heated one: I really like this idea. I haven't had too many of either kind of discussion problem but I'll be keeping this one in mind.
• Writing at the end of class to sum up a lecture or discussion: I like this idea too. I think it might be an interesting exercise to have students first summarize the discussion and speculate where the discussion might continue the next day. Maybe the writing time could be split between summarizing the previous lesson and exploring a question that will be the focus for the next class period.
• Guided Journals: I've used this method (sort of) and it totally did not work for me. Rachael sold me on using Myspace for class journal postings so I tried it last semester. It felt like busy work even to me. I still like the concept of guided journaling, however, so I'm more than willing to try it again. I think my problem with the myspace idea was that I didn't incorporate student's answers into the class discussions the next day. Also, I gave them purely participation credit and didn't judge the quality of their posts at all. I think sampling the postings would maybe provide more motivation to do a good job.
• Contemporary Issues Journals: I've never used this method before but I think it might be interesting for my dream course. I think the different ways death gets talked about in the paper from coverage of war zones to the health section to the obituaries could lead to some really fruitful discussions. Maybe there is not enough there to do a multi-enty journal, but I think there is enough potential for at least a couple assignments.
• Metaphor Games, Extended Analogies: This sounds kind of cheesy but I still like it. I think people have natural tendency to slide into metaphor anyhow, so why not use it?
• Occasional Thought Letters: Nice. I like having something between totally free-writing and formal essays.
• Small Groups: This is the method that I have used with the most success thus far. I'd like to try extending the groups. Most of the group work I have done has been entirely in-class. I think using more in-depth out of class group assignments would be fun.
• Deliver Narrative Lectures that Model the Thinking Process: I was really taken with this idea because it was one of the few that I'd never seen done before. I think it would be a good one to try in composition classes.
• Classroom Debates: One of my favorite activities that I did as a student was a classroom debate (and maybe also a bit of a meeting of the minds panel) in a literary theory class. All the students got really into it and even showed up to the debate in costume as particular schools of literary criticism. The fact that the debate took the place of a midterm essay or exam made it even more fun. I've got to figure out a way to make this work. . .

WLMA Chapters 14 and 17

Chapter 14 - Language and Power

Before getting to the questions about this chapter I just wanted to ask if anyone else found it strange/interesting to include Hamlet in this section on language and power. It seems to me that a common way to read Hamlet is to read it as an example of the impotency of language. Hamlet's soliloquies (his attempt to use language to find clarity and resolve) don't do much. In the end, it is action (i.e. the duel with Laertes, the poisoning of Gertrude, Fortinbras) that has power while language (i.e. Hamlet's soliloquies, even Claudius's ghost who is capable of language but not action) is ineffectual. With the inclusion of Hamlet in this section, I think Michelle's question of "What are the limits of language's power?" becomes a really interesting question that has a lot of potential depth.

Focus Question

• How are language and power (or language-power) socially negotiated?

Additional Texts

• A whirlwind tour of dictionaries: OED, Websters, the Open Dictionary; The Devil's Dictionary, others? I think asking why some dictionaries are 'credible' and others are not would be an interesting discussion.
• Myths about the origins of language might also be an interesting place to start a discussion.

Chapter 17 - Representations of the American West

Focus Question

• What is a frontier? How does having a frontier shape a society's self-image?

Additional Texts

• I think it is really interesting how other 'frontiers' use so much of the same language and imagery as the American West. Specifically, I'm thinking of some science fiction. Think Captain Kirk as cowboy; Space Cowboys (a supremely stupid movie but it does make the point); The Astronaut Farmer. My favorite example, though, and the one I would use for a class has to be Joss Whedon's short-lived but well-loved Firefly. If you are not familiar with the show, it's basically about a bunch of smugglers who fly around in a spaceship, visit saloons, rob trains, and use six-shooters.

WLMA Chapter 15

Where has all the literary criticism gone? Just two chapters ago WLMA covered a few of the myriad of critical approaches to literature, but here in chapter 15 I don't see them being covered. I agree with Caitlin that the questions following the selections are poorly designed. Rather than asking students "What message is conveyed" by the images on a Prozac advertisement, I would prefer to see them doing their own research. Perhaps an interesting assignment would be to have each student bring in a print or television ad for a perscription drug that targets mental illness (not necessarily just depression) and discuss as a class what the ads tell us about our society's view of the menatlly ill.

While the questions bothered me to a degree it was the first section of the chapter on "Bodies and Minds" that I found most distubing. First of all, the section is be grossly misnamed. There is a lot about minds (and by minds I mean mental illness of the most sensationalized kind) and practically nothing about bodies. After reading the section on "The Yellow Wallpaper" and then this one on top of it I started to think that Anderson had a bit of an obession with mental illness. It's too bad the section didn't pan out because I was really interested with the connection between body and selfhood. If I were going to use this section, I would definitely supplement it with a greater focus on bodies.

Maybe a good focus question would be "Where do bodies stop and minds begin?" If I was going to teach this section, then, it might also include watching an episode of Extreme Makeover (the original plastic surgery version not the vastly more popular Home Edition) as well as viewing some images from and talking about the Body Worlds Exhibit. A good theoretical text would be Paul John Eakin's How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves which has a fascinating section on the body as a "register of self." Oliver Sack's The Man Who Mistook his Wife for a Hat could also be an interesting addition.

Also more generally and subjectively I just didn't much care for a lot of the selections. "A Rose for Emily" has always seemed forced and sensationalized to me. The same can be said about "The Lottery." I love Chekhov, but would much rather have seen "The Cherry Orchard" or "The Seagull" than "Misery" which I found predictable and trite. While I think that the goal behind the selections was probably accessibility, to me it read more like literature that leads to easy answers. It's easy to have a conversation about "A Rose for Emily," but it's hard to make it yield surprising insights.

Syllabus Review

I had a very difficult time finding syllabi that I liked. What I have here are a haphazard collection of some of the syllabi for specialty courses I found along with two that address my proposed dream course subject.

A course on Jane Austen : This course made it on my list because it's opening line caught my attention. "Do Jane Austen's novels simply cultivate a small and self-enclosed world?" it asks. Could this qualify as problem posing? Maybe. I think it obviously starts in that direction, but the rest of the course descriptions makes it pretty clear to me that the professor already knows the answer to that question--a very strong no. I would like to think that a genuinely problem posing course would ask a more open ended question.

In terms of theoretical lens, I think this course is working primarily under a New Historicist framework. The inclusion of other primary texts obviously fits in with this concept. Also, I imagine there will be an element of feminist criticism as well. This is Jane Austen after all.

The syllabus design obviously leaves much to be desired. Course goals are missing entirely, as is any real explanation of assessment. Also as a composition-type person his statement on writing ("In general, the instructor appreciates either good writing or a reasonable simulacrum of it. He looks with extreme disfavor upon poorly-written essays. Sloppy writing normally means sloppy thinking.") made me question his ability to give useful and constructive directions for his assignments. If he wants his students to display "good writing" he should probably give a more specific defintion of what he means by good.

Literature of Hunger : First things first, this is a pretty funky course idea. I like a lot of things about it. For example, the teacher has her students look at whole lot of different texts ranging from promotional material from the National Beef Council to Orwell's essays to supermarket design. I think the service learning aspects are also really cool.

I think, generally, this is fitting under a poststructural/postmodern lens. The explosion of the word 'text' to apply to just about everything is my first clue. Also, talking about the social construction of 'hunger' is rather postmodern/cultural studies.

As a syllabus, it leaves out a lot. Course goals, assignments, a coherent version of a calendar, etc. . .

Death and Dying; Life and Living : This course focuses on the same subject matter as my dream course, but certainly not in the same way. I see this course as part academic inquiry, part caretaker training, part therapy group, and part diversity training. I could see myself emulating some of the elements, like the comparison of different models of the grieving process, but others I would shy away from. The personal essay about experiences with loss, for example, runs the risk of becoming far too confessional. I like personal essays, but they are a very tricky genre to assign.

The theoretical perspective for this course is difficult to pinpoint. I think it employes a sort of pop-culture, feel-good version of multiculturalism. I am also tempted to say that there is a bit of psychological criticism coupled with reader-response (again in its pop culture form) implied in the language of the course description and the course goals.

Medicine, Aging, and Literature: I find this course interesting because it approaches the literature of aging not from a literature deparment but from a department of "Medical Humanities." From what I can gather, most if not all of the students taking the course are med students. The professor's overarching goal of the course is "Simply put, I believe we need to balance the "negative" views of old age and aging with some of the "positives". Young people, especially physicians-to-be, ought to be exposed to non-pejorative stories of and by old people." In some ways, I see this goal as related to my own goal for a course on the literature of death and dying. Where this course's goal is to replace one view of aging with another, however, my goal is more to open up students reading of the cultural text of death to many interpretations.

I'm not quite sure how to characterize the theoretical approach of this course. Perhaps cultural studies, though it feels a little too Dr. Phil for that.

Note: Sorry I didn't get to a fifth syllabus. I'm taking my exams this weekend. (What will I do when that excuse is gone?)

Dream Course: The Literature of Death and Dying

February 24, 2008

Possible Focus Questions

• What factors influence the ways we view the process of dying?
• How do different societies, cultures, and subcultures view dying and death differently?
• How does our understanding of death influence our understanding of life?

Possible "Literature" Texts

• Everyman
• The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch
• Wit by Margaret Edson (there is also a film version of this play starring Emma Thompson that I might show in class)
• Otherwise: New and Selected Poems by Jane Kenyon (Kenyon died from leukemia while she was editing this volume. I probably wouldn't assign the whole book.)
• Without by Donald Hall (Hall, Kenyon's husband, wrote this volume after her death. I thought it might be interesting to pair Kenyon's dying book with Hall's mourning book.)
• As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner
• Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach

Possible Theoretical Texts (I haven't read these yet. I'm just investigating.)

• Illness as Metaphor and AIDS and Its Metaphors by Susan Sontag
• Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning and American Affinity by Christopher Peterson
• American Way of Death by Jessica Mitford

Cultural Artifacts

• Dead Like Me A darkly comic show about wage-slave grim reapers.
• Six Feet Under TragiComedy about a family running a funeral home.
• Body Worlds Museum exhibit of real human corpses.

February 9, 2008

Just trying to get some ideas for potential courses down before I forget them.

1. The literature of death and dying

Morbid, I know. I came up with this idea after watching a preview for "The Bucket List" and after talking to my good friend at the University of Chicago who is writing her thesis on the American funeral. I think there are some rich possibilities here.

My basic premise: Death is physical reality. Dying, however, along with mourning and funerals and obituaries and hospice and "the deathbed" and all the trappings of death are socially constructed practices. These practices. . .do something. I need to do some more thinking on that. My initial responses would be that they teach us how to die or give meaning to death but, like I said, I need to think on that some more. My central question for the course would be something along these lines. Maybe "How is dying constructed through the literature of death and dying?" or "How do we die in contemporary America?" I'm still working on it.

What we would read: Characters die all the time in literature (unless the author is too much of a pussy to kill them off) but I would want to focus on literature that deals with the processes of dying, mourning, eulogizing, etc. . . more explicitly. I also want to span a pretty big swathe of time with my main focus lying on contemporary literature. Some possibilities that I can think of include. . .

• Everyman
• The Undertaking by Thomas Lynch
• Wit by Margaret Edson (there is also a film version of this play starring Emma Thompson that I might show in class)
• Otherwise: New and Selected Poems by Jane Kenyon (Kenyon died from leukemia while she was editing this volume. I probably wouldn't assign the whole book.)
• Without by Donald Hall (Hall, Kenyon's husband, wrote this volume after her death. I thought it might be interesting to pair Kenyon's dying book with Hall's mourning book.)

These are the ones that I know for sure I would want to use. There are lots of other books, plays, films, etc. . . that I could choose from. Do any of you have some suggestions? In particular, I'd like to find a few counter-narratives. In nearly all the works I've listed above, dying is meaningful in some way. I'd like to include something that constructs dying as unfair, meaningless, funny, etc. . . as a counterpoint. In addition to traditional works of literature, I'd like to include films, television, and other print sources. I could see, for example, asking students to read the obituaries to look for patterns in how we choose to remember the dead. Or maybe, I could bring in brochures from funeral parlors, hospice care providers, and maybe even a few sympahty cards and ask students to do a rhetorical analysis of them.

Theoretical Approach: I think that postmodernism fits pretty well because we are dealing primarily with a master narrative about death. Maybe some cultural studies as well. Any suggestions of how to approach the theoretical side? Do you know of any good critical texts I could use?

Idea 2: The Invention of Childhood

This idea occurred to me in class on Monday. Barbara mentioned something about the fact that childhood is a fairly new concept. I'd heard this before, but for some reason it stuck in my mind this time around. I thought it could be a pretty cool focus for a course.

My basic premise: This is a new idea for me and I need to do a lot more research for it but I think a good central question would be, "How is the concept of 'childhood' invented and promoted in early children's literature?"

What we would read: Again, I need to do a lot more research on this. I would like to focus on early children's literature. I found a few syllabi for courses on the 'golden age' of children's literature. It usually falls into the Victorian time period and is decidedly British. I would be interested to see if any tradition of children's literature existed before then or outside of the British Empire but I would need to do a little more work on that. Some basic texts (or at least the ones I can think of off the top of my head) are:

• Peter Pan
• Alice in Wonderland
• The Princess and the Goblin by George MacDonald
• Little Women
• The Wizard of Oz

I obviously need to do more research on this.

Theoretical Approach: I think New Historicism, cultural studies, and maybe some textual studies fit well with this idea. Any comments or suggestions?

3 Readers Respond to "The Princess and the Pea" or An Exercise in RRT

Since Reader Response Theory is all about the centrality of the reader and variations in reader's interpretations, I thought it only right to include multiple readings of this fairy tale. The link to the original version is here.

Reader Profile: John
John is a 19 year old American college student. In his spare time, John likes to play guitar hero and eat top ramen. He read this story on Wikipedia to avoid writing a paper for his English class.

John’s response: So, it was pretty late when I read this story and I was really tired and my brain felt kind of like it was full of cotton so I was reading real slowly. Maybe that’s why I noticed all the weird twists in it. Like, for example, I was reading the beginning where it says “there was a prince who wanted to marry a princess” and I was like, “Cool. Dude wants to marry a princess. Got it.” But then I kept reading and it said, “but she would have to be. . .” So now I’m thinking, “She’s got to be what, man? Rich? Hot? Well mannered? What?” and then I finished the sentence. “There was a prince who wanted to marry a princess; but she would have to be a real princess.” So now, I’m like, “Woah! I had that ‘he wanted to marry a princess’ already in my head. I mean, I’d kind of adjusted to the idea. Then, at the end of the freaking sentence the dude springs this ‘real princess’ thing on me and I’ve got to, like, go back and adjust my expectations[1] about the dude and his princess. His real princess I mean. Whatever.

One other thing, too. At the very end of the story, the writer/narrator guy does this weird thing. He says, “The pea was put in the museum, where it may still be seen, if no one has stolen it.” I read that and I was like, “Dude, I can’t go see this pea in a museum.” And that made me wonder who this guy was writing to. Like, who does this narrator want me to be?[2] Like, is he writing to people who can go see the pea in a museum? Or is he trying to get me to play along, to pretend that I believe the story actually happened? I was trying to figure it out when I looked up at the clock. It was 4 in the morning and there I was thinking about peas in museums. It was pretty sad. So I made some top ramen, played guitar hero for a little while and then went to bed. I slept right through English class the next morning. Stupid story.

Reader Profile: Sharon
Sharon is a 32 year-old stay at home mom. She has three children under the age of five. In an attempt to stave off insanity, Sharon joined a book group which is where she read this story.

Sharon’s response: Well, when I saw this story on the list I was a little annoyed. I joined this group so that I could have a conversation that didn’t involve breaking up a fight, or bribing someone to eat their carrots, or debating the merits of Dora the Explorer as opposed to The Backyardigans. The last thing I wanted to do was read a kids story. I actually kind of liked it, though. My initial response[3] was mainly how nice it sounded to lie down on all those mattresses and feather quilts. It was a nice story and I was happy for the princess who got to come in out of the rain and marry a prince.

After I went to my book group[4], though, I sort of changed my mind about it. One of the women in my group, Julia, is kind of a feminist. I’m usually not into that kind of thing, but she was talking about how the story sets up this ideal of womanhood that is all about being delicate and soft and how that was unfair and that kind of thing. And there I was with disintegrated teething biscuit caked onto my jeans and no make-up and diaper’s stuffed in my purse and I know that if I was given twenty mattresses to sleep on, they could be on top of a boulder and I still wouldn’t wake up. Anyway, I started to think Julia had a good point. I still like the story, but I think it means something different than I thought at first.

Reader Profile: Martha
Martha is a 23 year old creative writing student. She writes rhyming poetry and is, consequently, something of a social outcast in the creative writing program. Martha read “The Princess and the Pea” on a snowy afternoon for no real reason. She bought the book of collected fairy tales it was in because it had an old real leather binding and smelled musty and mysterious.

Martha’s Response: I had a pretty good idea of what the story was going to be like before I read it. It’s a fairy tale after all, so I knew what to expect.[5] I’d just never realized what a complex work of art it is before. Take this, for example. Andersen writes “There were princesses enough, but it was difficult to find out whether they were real ones. There was always something about them that was not as it should be.” I was reading that, and I started wondering what it was about these ‘princesses’ that wasn’t right. The text doesn’t tell us. It’s as if there’s this big gap[6] right in the middle of the story and we have to fill it in.

And I’ve been taking all these literary theory classes recently and I realized that feminist and Marxist, and postcolonial[7] theorists could all get a different meaning from the story depending on how they filled in that gap. But all those interpretations can be supported because they all come from the same gap. Hmm. I don’t feel like I’m explaining myself very well. It was a pretty cool realization though.



[1] Stanley Fish argues that readers are forced to adjust their expectations of the text even within single sentences. The reader is thus held in suspense through the act of reading.
[2] Narratologist Gerald Prince argues that we should pay attention not only to the kind of narrator in a literary text (omniscient, fallible, etc.) but also to the narratee. This is just like the rhetorical concept of an invoked audience. The text asks us to be a certain kind of reader.
[3] David Bleich differentiates between a reader’s ‘response’ and the ‘meaning’ the reader assigns to the text. Meaning is open to negotiation and can be adjusted by teachers, other readers, etc. The initial response, however, never disappears entirely, but influences and informs the meaning.
[4] The concept of ‘interpretive communities’ (Fish) keeps reading from being a total free for all. We never read as unaffiliated individuals but as part of communities that determine what kinds of reading strategies and what kinds of interpretations will be valued or even recognized.
[5] Hans Robert Jauss argued for the concept of ‘horizon of expectations’ to describe the preconceived ideas and criteria about different forms of writing that readers bring to a text. These vary across time, so we can explain the difference between the, say, our readings of Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and the interpretations of the play from the 17th century because of the different expectations the readers bring to the text.
[6] Wolfgang Iser argues that all literary works contain gaps. Readers are required to fill in these gaps with their own interpretations. This process actually creates ‘meaning.’
[7] All other critical lenses fit within reader response theory as distinct communities of readers.

Eyeballs, Critical Lenses, and Cutting Onions

Like Caitlin, my earliest introduction to literary criticism also made use of the lens metaphor. Looking at a piece of literature through a specific critical lens allowed a reader to see things that were otherwise obscured. I find the metaphor helpful, but, as Caitlin pointed out with her comments on using multiple lenses, it does raise some false expectations about the nature of literary criticism. First, and I think most obviously, it gives the impression that before you put on a critical lens it is just you and your naked eyeballs encountering a text. Of course this is ridiculous. We are never unlensed readers. We always approach literature with some sort of interpretive framework. When we introduce our students to literary criticism I think that an ideal place to start is to talk about the critical lenses they already use when they approach a piece of literature. When you approach critical lenses with the understanding that we all are already wearing them, it becomes obvious that our critical lenses are always layered. If I put on a postmodern lens to look at a piece of literature I am really seeing it through both my own personal lens and through postmodernism.

Do any of you remember those “secret code” puzzles with the different colored letters? They used to be on the backs of cereal boxes. If you look at them with just your eyes it looks like a meaningless bunch of blue and red letters. When you put on the included red-lensed glasses, however, the red letters disappear and the blue letters turn into words. Critical lenses do the same thing. They let you see one element more clearly. What we don’t often recognize is that they clarify one element at the expense of another. There is too much going on in literature for us to notice it all at once. By noticing one element we are forced to ignore others. That’s why there are different schools of literary criticism: to draw attention to what other views are filtering out. When our students worry that “approaching literature with too critical an eye can ruin our appreciation of it” I think that they have a legitimate point (Anderson 346). If their appreciation of literature relies on noticing the red and we ask them to focus on the blue, of course that will change their enjoyment. A critical approach offers its own kind of enjoyment and some scholars are able to separate their criticism of literature from their enjoyment, but putting on a critical lens is not always strictly a matter of will and, as in “Grad Student Deconstructs Take-Out Menu” once on, a critical lens can be hard to take off again.

Which brings me to The Onion and what is so funny. As I read through the articles, I tried (in between the pain and laughter) to see patterns in the satire. I think a common thread is found in the disconnect between the values of students and the values of teachers and academics. They don’t speak the same languages. They don’t notice and value the same things in literature. The literature people are interested in themes of humanity and grammatical correctness and seeing cultural oppression in Burrito Bandito menus. Students are interested in burritos and steamy sex scenes and a quick emotional pay off and the grade. When a teacher tries to speak the student’s language as in “Shakespeare was, like, the ultimate rapper” or the student tries to speak the teacher’s language as in “Hilarious Hamlet Essay Circulated in Teacher’s Lounge” they fail miserably and face ridicule.

I don’t know quite how to respond to The Onion articles other than despair. After all, I not so secretly have thought some of the same things about the Academy and the discipline of literature in particular. It’s insular, jargony, designed to impress a very small in-crowd, and way to concerned with the minutia of language. Despite all these criticisms (which have some validity) I can’t dismiss literature or bring myself to say that it is irrelevant. It’s been incredibly relevant to me.