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.

I’ve also worked with this idea of literature made physical when talking about meter in poetry, particularly in sonnets.  I found a wonderful lesson on the Folger Library’s lesson plan site called “‘I am a pirate with a wooden leg’: Stomping Iambic Pentameter.” While Gregory Taylor of Hillside Junior High designed this for a middle school classroom, I think the activity is great for the college classroom, too.  I used this with my English majors last semester: we got up, we stomped around, practicing iambic pentameter, and we had a good laugh about it.  More importantly, my students came away from the experience knowing what meter in poetry is, and how it feels throughout the body.  They may not have entirely mastered the art of scanning poetry, but they’re able to associate the fact of meter with a physical feeling.

I’ve also thought of having my students act out various portions of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.”  While much of what’s on the page is about the visual sense, and the increasingly delusional descriptions of the wallpaper, the story itself expresses a physical experience.  And that last scene of creeping around the room manifests itself in such a substantially physical way, that when I teach it, I come very close to getting down on the ground and crawling around.  But I think that the students might come away with an even better understanding of the scene if I asked them to crawl around the room.

I’m often surprised by how serious we can sometimes be about literature – and I’m certainly serious and formal when I write for a formal audience.  But I think that literature should be something that we experience in ways both emotional and physical.  Sometimes those physical experiences might seem a bit silly – but I find that as long as I’m also a willing participant, my students are generally game for the work.

I think there are any number of texts we might have students incorporate movement into.  What comes to mind for you?