April 2012 – Lit Bits

What’s the point?

For the final writing assignment in my Introduction to Literature course, I want students to think about the implications of what we’ve been doing all semester, to think about the larger picture of why literature is a part of our culture. To do this, I give them a list of six concepts we’ve been working with: love, war, identity, family, death, power, and the following question:

How do the ways that various literary texts define [concept X] suggest the role of literature in creating a broader (cultural) understanding of that concept?

This question works with any number of broader concepts or themes in a literature course: I simply choose those six because they’re the ones that we’ve focused on, and they’re the ones we focus on in our final reading, Hamlet.

I like to have the students think about this question because it allows them to do a number of things. First and foremost, it allows the students broad range in what they talk about. In their previous assignments, I’ve dictated which texts they can select and even limited the maximum number of texts they can write about – an attempt to encourage careful, close reading. For this assignment, I give students a minimum number of texts (three) to discuss, no maximum number, and free range over anything in the anthology. Doing this encourages students to explore their potential sources, cull the most relevant material, and develop an argument beyond summary. These are important skills in any academic paper. Continue reading “What’s the point?”

Reading and the Material World

Several years ago, I had the privilege of participating in a Folger seminar entitled “Accessorizing the Renaissance,” and since then I’ve been thinking a lot about the material culture of the early modern period, my primary field. I’ve also been thinking about how to teach students about the material world in relation to reading – and about why it’s important and relevant to the study of literature.

I wish that I had impressive sewing skills or cooking skills so that I could make things for my students to try on and try out; and I wish I wasn’t short on money, so I could take my students to London to actually see the material space of the city. We have a number of places in the area that I would like to take advantage of: the outer banks and Roanoke Island, St. Luke’s Church in Smithfield, Virginia, and the Harriet Jacobs sites in Edenton, North Carolina. As of now, I’ve yet to find the time to prepare such a trip, and I don’t always have the relevant literature to teach in my classes. And – like many of us – my workload outpaces my imagination. But in my most recent Introduction to Literary Studies classes, I hit upon a plan to make the material world relevant to my students, a plan that took advantage of the resources in our small, historic town: We met one day in the local historic cemetery.

We prepared for this trip by talking about how we can read material objects much the way that we can read texts: material objects, particularly ornamental ones, can show us a lot about the attitudes and lives of the people who lived with them. We can do this with clothing – I’ve used changes in women’s dress to introduce new periods of literature. We can do this with architecture – I often show students Baroque and Rococo architecture when we talk about eighteenth-century literature. And we can do this with tombstones.

I asked the students to read a tombstone from the nineteenth century against an Emily Dickinson poem to show nineteenth-century attitudes about death. It was a difficult project, because while the students wanted to talk about what the tombs said about life and what they said about the families that erected them, the assignment also forced them to stretch their idea of what reading is and what the material world shows us. Continue reading “Reading and the Material World”

Photographic Memories: Using Photos to Prompt Writing

At some point while he was running, the kid’s batting helmet must have fallen off, because you can see his light blond hair—still short from the disastrous haircut his father gave him before his First Communion—practically glowing under the California sun. He’s in the second grade and his t-ball team is the Reds. Inexplicably, their t-shirt (the only “uniform” t-ballers get) is orange. He is sliding, kicking up dirt, but he has already passed home plate. Afraid that he’ll wind up short, he always waits until he has already tagged up to begin his slide. Sliding is his favorite part of the game—that, and the free snow cones they get after they play.

Obviously, this young athlete is me, and this is my wife’s favorite picture of me when I was a kid. I loved to play t-ball, though I obviously wasn’t very good at it. In t-ball—at least in our league—there were no strike outs, probably because swinging at and missing a stationary ball mounted on a tee wasn’t the sort of thing that tended to happen. It did to me, though. All the time. I would approach the tee confidently, bring my bat back, and then twist my entire body into that swing, to the point that my eye left the ball long before the bat in my hand woooooshed right over it. The grown-ups would let me do it over. Eventually, I’d wind up on a base. Continue reading “Photographic Memories: Using Photos to Prompt Writing”

Seeing Molly Sweeney

I decided to read Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney just before I went to see the Irish Repertory Theatre’s recent production. This is not something I always do. Often, of course, I would have read or sometimes even have seen a classic play, but usually not immediately before seeing it again. I was concerned that my emotional response wouldn’t be as immediate with the lines so fresh in my mind. Molly Sweeney is a young woman, blind for forty years, just about to experience an operation that would give her sight. It is a profoundly emotional time in Molly’s life and in her husband, Frank’s, life.

I read the play knowing John Millington Synge’s The Well of the Saints (1905), on a similar theme, and also knowing that Friel had been moved by Oliver Sacks’s “To See and Not to See,” which is about sight and knowledge. All of these influences were here, but they were dwarfed by the power of actors Simone Kirby (Molly), Jonathan Hogan (Dr. Rice), and Ciaran O’Reilly (Frank). Molly’s first speech caught me immediately. Kirby’s delivery of the lines was so direct, so innocent, so filled with the ambiguity of fear and joy that I felt a rush of emotion. If anything, reading the play immediately before seeing it intensified my pleasure and my response—even as I anticipated the lines I remembered best.

Everything depends on how the actors deliver their lines because this is a play with little overt action. I’m sure some theatergoers might doubt that it is a drama at all. In the tradition of Friel’s own Faith Healer, the actors stand and speak one after the other to the audience, telling them their very distinct view of the same story. This may seem undramatic—and in the hands of a lesser writer it almost certainly would be. But Molly Sweeney is riveting in part because the story is surprising and the actors are moving. Storytelling in Molly Sweeney, especially from three points of view, constitutes significant drama.

Being able to bring your students to the theater after reading a play is usually regarded as a good idea. I can see the reasoning behind it, and in this case I wasn’t sorry I’d read before, but I don’t always feel it’s the best idea. What do you think? What have your experiences been, taking students to the theater just after reading a play?