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.