March 2012 – Lit Bits

Experiential Literature

I’ve been thinking about multimodal learning lately, and I’ve been drawn to the idea of making literature experiential, almost tangible. I’ve had my students work with the material, physical experience of literature in a couple of different ways – and I’ve been brainstorming other possibilities.

Perhaps the most obvious idea in teaching students to experience literature physically is to have students act out scenes from plays. I don’t mean just having them read the scene aloud; rather, I mean having the students physically act out the play at the front of the classroom. For example, Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl includes a street scene with three separate shops and a group of characters moving among those shops, conversing and sampling the wares. I think that this scene is often quite difficult for students to comprehend on the page, so I have students not only read it aloud, but also follow the stage directions. I draw points on the board where the shops would be located, and recruit students to act the parts; then I have the actors move around the “stage” in the front of the classroom, with one extra student acting as a stage manager to remind people to move if necessary. In this way, the students still sitting in the class can visualize what occurs, and the students acting it feel the almost dizzying experience of moving between these shops. This is particularly useful in a play that’s deeply rooted to the city of London, a space that contemporaneous theater-goers would have known well. Continue reading “Experiential Literature”

Material Realities

Unlike print-based genres—poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction—the dramatic genres, such as playwriting, are allied to certain material realities. By this I mean that what is mentioned in a script is not just for a reader’s mind, but is meant to be concretized before an audience’s eyes. I find myself frequently noting on drafts of student scripts that particular stage directions sound “expensive,” and I don’t mean this as a positive comment. I use this word to discourage writers from including elements that would make staging difficult—for example, impossible special effects and overly frequent scene changes. In a similar vein, I ask student authors to remember that acting is paid labor. Frequently, beginning playwrights will include a character—often a waiter—who does very little. In the professional theatre, the actor playing this character would have to be compensated for his or her work. Therefore, inclusion in the script means an added expense, and if it’s not a meaningful expense, there’s no reason for it. Continue reading “Material Realities”

On Friday Night Lights and Teaching Character

I confess, I’m one of those writers with a deep and abiding love of the much-missed Friday Night Lights, a television show that not only entertained me, but made me think about how I want to live and who I want to be.

Now I admit, I have loved a number of shows of the young adult variety, starting with but not limited to Felicity; Gilmore Girls, seasons 1-5; Veronica Mars, seasons 1 and 2; and—surely you were expecting this—every all-too-short second of the single season of Freaks and Geeks.

I suspect young adult television, much like young adult literature, has such a hold on me because it is often about people building their identities, determining their values, and shaping their characters (as we are wont to do when we are young).

And this is why I mention Friday Night Lights in the context of teaching creative writing. More than any two characters on television, high school football coach Eric Taylor and high school guidance counselor Tami Taylor were working hard every week to shape the values of their daughter, their high-school-age-charges, their no-longer high-school-age-charges, and even themselves. Continue reading “On Friday Night Lights and Teaching Character”

Writing about Setting

Setting is essential to narrative, but it’s something that students often overlook. My experience with teaching literature is that students want to talk about what happens next and often something that’s vaguely like character motivation, but they need help moving beyond plot. Talking and writing about setting forces students to look at the details of the narrative and requires a careful examination of the words on the page.

I often introduce setting by showing students clips from particularly atmospheric movies—The Shining’s opening sequence; Fargo; almost anything by Tim Burton. While watching the brief clips, I have the students make a list of significant (or not-so-significant) details that they notice about the setting. We then talk about how all of these elements and details work together to set the tone of the movie. That long opening sequence of The Shining, for example, intensifies the feeling of dread, and highlights the sheer isolation—both physical and emotional—of the main character.

Moving from movies to literature itself can be a bit complicated. I want students to do more than simply explain how the setting establishes the tone, because setting is more important than simply being part of the atmosphere. To do this, we talk about symbolism, typically within Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House. I have students come up with a list of symbols and have them work through what they might represent in the story. I try to steer discussion towards the physical objects—the items within the setting—as we work our way through the final act of the play. My favorite symbol is the mailbox: it is the way that information from outside of the home enters the Helmers’ apartment, the conduit between the public space and the private space. And only Torvald has the key. We discuss the way that this shows Torvald’s control over information and ultimately over Nora.

On a subsequent day, we read “Hills like White Elephants,” and we talk about the way that Hemingway describes the landscape. Students are pretty good at picking up on the importance of the train station setting – we talk about the difference between a train station and a fork in the road (and we’ve, of course, read Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”). We discuss the relevance of these elements to the characters’ lives. We also discuss the fact that “I’m-so-minimalist-I-don’t-need-speaker-tags”-Hemingway devotes an entire paragraph to describing the scenery of the Ebro valley. Continue reading “Writing about Setting”