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.
I also do this because I think it’s important to have an open dialogue with students about why they have to do what we say they have to do. A great number of college students are required to take some kind of literature course – whether it’s combined with a composition course like my institution’s, or whether it’s a sophomore level survey course – and non-majors sometimes bristle at having to take it. I’ve had many a non-major insist to me that 1) he or she cannot write and 2) he or she can’t possibly interpret literature. I think that these assertions come from a sense that literature is somehow too esoteric and irrelevant to what they want to do with their careers.
One thing I point out to students is that literature is one of the few subjects they study that involves serious intellectual engagement with material that was created as entertainment. (I’ll grant this of fine arts in general, but students aren’t always required to take art history or music history.) While we may have fun learning about other things – the study of history is enjoyable to my historian friends; the same is true of biology for my biologist friends – literature was generally created as something that’s meant to be enjoyed, whether it’s through the entertainment of watching something onstage, or the pleasure of reading a macabre tale, or the stimulation and emotional engagement of reading a sad poem. The point is that literature is something created to stir our emotions, and students don’t always see why they need to study it at all.
So this assignment addresses that. I want students to think about the role literature (and, by extension, other forms of entertainment that begin with attention to language) plays in our larger culture and in our own lives. It’s really about the big picture – the implications of study, of participating in culture. And really, that’s an important transferrable skill for any major: the ability to see beyond the local and think about the larger network of ideas that one studies.
How do you encourage students to think about the bigger picture?