February 2012 – Lit Bits

First Person Point of View and the Act of Storytelling

I’ve been thinking a lot about first person point of view lately, partly because I’ve been reading this new book of contemporary persona poems, A Face to Meet the Faces, and partly because I’ve become addicted to New York magazine’s hilarious recaps of American Idol, a show I can no longer bear to watch.

These recaps, which are one writer’s narrative of watching the program, make clear that there is the story (in this case the show itself).

And then there is the way that the story is told. Continue reading “First Person Point of View and the Act of Storytelling”

What Do You Envision?

Adapted from “Draw the Argument” by Barclay Barrios of Florida Atlantic University.

When I have my class read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” I begin discussion by telling the students to form groups of four and draw the poem together. Often, this is met with a bit of surprise and confusion; but eventually students sit together, read the poem, and draw a picture. Once the groups have finished, I ask one member of each group to re-create the picture on the board. We evaluate the pictures and then return to the poem for further discussion.

While this exercise may seem like a simplistic way to approach the poem, I think it’s a valuable way to bring students into the discussion – and to highlight their ability to actually interpret poetry – because:

Drawing the poem encourages students to re-read the poem. So often students read poems quickly and don’t spend time deciphering the imagery and the figurative language. If they don’t get it immediately, they give up. My students tell me that poetry is “too hard” and that they’re not good at “reading between the lines.” This exercise can disabuse students of that notion: While drawing, my students are able to make sense of much of the poem without my intervention. Continue reading “What Do You Envision?”

On the Pleasure of Teaching “On the Pleasure of Hating”

When I first started studying, writing, and teaching creative nonfiction, I generally found myself attracted to contemporary American authors—Tobias Wolff, Phillip Lopate, Joan Didion, and others. They wrote in a language I immediately understood and made references to figures and events that were at least somewhat familiar. Even if I didn’t actually watch The Mickey Mouse Club or had never lived in New York City, I was aware that such things existed, and they weren’t all that far away from me. I had a little more trouble with older writers, because of that tired undergraduate complaint “I just couldn’t relate.” Yes, dear reader, your humble blogger was once one of those students who felt like his inability to immediately “get it” was always the fault of the writer—that the reader had no obligation to do any work himself.

I’m much less stupid now, of course, and as a result, I’m now able to really enjoy the opportunity to teach William Hazlitt’s “On the Pleasure of Hating,” an essay I just couldn’t appreciate the first time I read it in my early twenties, but find I enjoy—and “relate to”—more and more as I’m dragged, kicking and screaming, towards middle age. And I’ve been developing ways to get my own students to appreciate—and perhaps even “relate to”—Hazlitt’s 19^th century text.

First of all, what’s not to love about an essay called “On the Pleasures of Hating”? As far as awesome titles go, this one’s only approached by Phillip Lopate’s “Against Joie de Vivre.” As a reader, when you see a title like that, all you can really do is blink, raise your eyebrows quizzically, then shrug and say, “Well, okay. I’m listening.” It’s like if someone said to you, “You know what I hate? Orgasms.” You’re pretty sure you’ll disagree with this person, but you’re dying to hear the reasoning behind such an outrageous position. Continue reading “On the Pleasure of Teaching “On the Pleasure of Hating””

Student-directed Questioning

One of our challenges as teachers of literature is to encourage students to move from simply answering questions we ask to formulating their own questions. To get at this, I have students write two discussion questions every day we meet as a class and e-mail them to me no later than 30 minutes before the class begins. From there, I take the questions, group them according to common themes and lead a seminar-style discussion. (This format works better in upper division courses, but this is easily adapted in larger first year courses by imposing earlier deadlines).

Students need to learn how to ask discussion questions, because too frequently they simply ask questions that focus on plot points or basic facts. While it’s important, certainly, to make sure that everyone knows what exactly happens, that focus doesn’t get at the interpretive work that makes literary studies enjoyably challenging. And it doesn’t encourage critical thinking.

So I give the students time to practice. For the second day of class I assign the students a brief reading (usually a few poems). In class, I pair them up and give them direction about how to ask questions; they work together to develop questions, put them on the board and then evaluate the quality of the questions; we collectively brainstorm ways to improve the questions that don’t open up discussion.

To get them started on writing the questions I provide two frameworks: one based on Bloom’s Taxonomy, and another based on the critical thinking paradigm developed by Richard Paul and Linda Elder*. With this latter option, I provide the students with templates of questions, which I’ll reproduce here: Continue reading “Student-directed Questioning”

And what shoulder…

Today’s guest blogger is Eric Selinger, Associate Professor of English at DePaul University, where he teaches courses on poetry, pedagogy, and popular culture. He received his B.A. from Harvard University and his Ph.D. from UCLA, and is the author of What Is It Then Between Us? Traditions of Love in American Poetry (Cornell UP, 1998) and the co-editor of several books, including Jewish American Poetry: Poems, Commentary, and Reflections (UPNE / Brandeis, 2000) and Ronald Johnson: Life and Works (National Poetry Foundation, 2008); his essays and reviews have appeared in many journals, notably Parnassus: Poetry in Review. He has written lesson plans and pedagogical materials for Poetry Out Loud, the Poetry Foundation, and WGBH-Boston, and has been awarded five grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities to lead summer seminars and school-year workshops on “teaching the pleasures of poetry.”

This morning, William Blake’s “The Tyger” is running through my mind—and through my shoulders. Four beats per line, four lines per stanza: that’s sixteen push-ups every quatrain. I’m gunning for a hundred, but I’m not there yet. Poetry helps.

I started this poetry/fitness kick last summer, when my wife introduced me to Steve Speirs’ book 7 Weeks to 100 Push-Ups. The first week or two went fine, but as the numbers in the final sets grew longer, I could only hit the target if I found something to focus on other than the aches in my delts and triceps. Metrical poems did the trick. Line by line, beat by beat, they held my attention, even as they let me calculate how far I’d gotten. Continue reading “And what shoulder…”

Writing as Revenge

I read Lorraine Berry’s recent Salon article “Dear Female Students: Stop Writing about Men” with great interest. I think she gives good advice that all college students—women and men– ought to hear: You’re not defined by your relationships; you are more than who you choose to date; someone else breaking up with you is not the most significant or interesting thing that has ever happened to you. But I was surprised to see her focus her essay on female students, and to learn that, in her experience, “The females in the class tend to write about a romantic relationship, and the males do not.” I found this interesting, because I have had almost the exact opposite experience. I can only recall one female student ever writing about her own romantic troubles, but I feel like I’ve read—as either a student or a teacher– the “guy’s break-up narrative” easily a dozen times.

To be sure, I don’t think I’m talking about the male equivalent of the type of essay Berry is talking about. She writes that “only once or twice in the nine years I’ve been teaching these courses has a guy expressed his need to understand why a relationship has fallen apart.” I haven’t really read that essay either. The type of relationship essay I’ve read from male writers tends—more often than not– to be more angry than reflective.

I first encountered this type of narrative during my senior year of college, in a workshop where a fellow student ended his own end-of-the-affair narrative with the triumphant line, “I was sick of playing that bitch’s games.” Even typing that line now, fifteen years later, I cringe both for her and for him—she was, after all, a fellow student on a campus of just over two thousand, and he certainly had no idea how committing such a line to the page and handing out photocopies to the class made him seem… well, less than gentlemanly. I came upon my second such narrative in the same class, where another student writer decried his ex-girlfriend as “promiscuous,” but only after lavishing attention on her “large-yet-firm” breasts as he lost his virginity in the front seat of a car. Continue reading “Writing as Revenge”

Reviving Patmore’s Angel in the House

Years ago at my grandmother’s house, I stumbled on a little Victorian quatrain titled “Constancy Rewarded,” by Coventry Patmore. It’s a tiny piece of Patmore’s book The Angel in the House, which was something of a bestseller back in the days when books of poetry could actually be bestsellers. I loved the quatrain at sight, and teach it often.

We hear of Patmore’s volume now mostly thanks to Virginia Woolf, who noted as late as 1931 that “Killing the Angel in the House was part of the occupation of a woman writer.” The book itself, however, is long, self-divided, and much more interesting than the caricature that Woolf killed off. The quatrain from Canto XI Book II isn’t stuffy, repressive, or patriarchal. Quite the contrary; it’s positively frisky, if you read it right.

Here’s the poem:

I vow’d unvarying faith, and she,
To whom in full I pay that vow,
Rewards me with variety
Which men who change can never know.

Four lines, one sentence: how do you bring it to life? Continue reading “Reviving Patmore’s Angel in the House”

Group Plot Exercises

Because student writers are often suspicious of plot structure, believing it to be too mathematical or too cliché, it’s helpful to teach plotting as mechanics rather than invention, as usage rather than creation. Students should learn to exercise their “plotting muscles,” and with practice they can become confident in their abilities to build solid plot structure.

In class, I use a sequence of out-loud group storytelling exercises. By emphasizing quickness and collaboration, these exercises urge students to see plot as a skill to be practiced, rather than as a unique art object to be labored over. By working quickly, students learn that plot can be generated without unnecessary headaches. And by attending carefully to what comes before and trying to adapt to the developing plot, students work toward what Aristotle would call a “unity of action.”

Here’s how the exercises work:

STEP ONE. The class tells a story one word at a time, going around the room two or three times. This step serves largely as a warm-up, but it also demonstrates that plot balances individuality and utility — sometimes a student is lucky enough to get a noun or verb; other times, an article or preposition is required. This step can be repeated until students are comfortable. Continue reading “Group Plot Exercises”

Change of Style, Change of Subject: A Reading Strategy

“A change of style,” says Wallace Stevens, “is a change of subject.”

I quote that line to students all the time because it sums up one of the keys to saying interesting things about almost any poem. Teach this concept—really teach it, so that it becomes “truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole, / reflex action,” as Robert Hayden says—and you’ve given your students a powerful way to attend to any piece of writing.

As Stevens reminds us, whenever a poem’s mood or idea changes, so will its style, with some kind of shift, no matter how slight, in its rhythm, diction, phrasing, sound, or ratio of sentence to line. By extension, anywhere you spot a change of style, you’ve spotted a shift in substance, even if the ideas seem, at first glance, the same.

To introduce this reading strategy, I like to use Langston Hughes’s “Theme for English B.” The poem’s scenario is familiar, and spelled out clearly enough to be accessible even to wary readers:

The instructor said,

Go home and write

a page tonight.

And let that page come out of you—

Then, it will be true. Continue reading “Change of Style, Change of Subject: A Reading Strategy”