Month: June 2012

Teaching Difficult Texts

I recently taught Franz Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist” to my summer school students.  It is a difficult text, if only because students’ responses tend to be simply that it’s very weird (it is, and that’s why I love it).  In truth, the story is difficult because it is so dense and because it’s so far from anything most first year college students expect in a story.  While the prose is matter-of-fact, the story itself is not.  My students are not particularly attuned to the idea that a short story might be a parable – and because students in introduction to literature courses generally do not read slowly and deliberately, they will frequently miss important details that help illuminate meaning.

In addition to teaching this story, I also decided that it was time to begin working on getting my students to interact with one another.  So far, they have been willing to respond to my questions, but they haven’t quite made the move to discussing the texts with one another.  They’ll talk to one another while I’m not in the room (I’ve sometimes left the room for this very reason), but not necessarily while I’m there.  Those interactions are a bit more hesitant.

To begin to work on this, I assigned each student a set of questions about “A Hunger Artist,” questions simply drawn from an instructor’s manual.  Each student had to first briefly summarize the plot of the story, then answer two more complex, interpretive questions that required delving into the material carefully.  I gave them ten minutes to do this. Continue reading “Teaching Difficult Texts”

Ensnared by Memory

The recent announcement that the University of Missouri is closing its academic press has led me to revisit some of the books published by the press over the years.  This morning, I’m re-reading parts of Joe David Bellamy’s excellent book Literary Luxuries: American Writing at the End of the Millennium.   Bellamy was one of my very first creative writing professors—he taught a fiction workshop at St. Lawrence University.  Every Wednesday night from 7 until 10, a group of 12 to 15 students would get together to discuss craft with a man who had once directed the literature program of the National Endowment for the Arts.  I’m not sure I recognized what a unique opportunity this was while I was experiencing it.

At the time, I believe Bellamy was most well-known for his fiction, but Literary Luxuries is a great nonfiction book that I think any writer—regardless of genre—would do well to check out.  It is equal parts memoir, personal essay, craft guide, and survey of the literary landscape of the late twentieth century.

One of the chapters in the book—a craft essay titled “The Autobiographical Trap”—should be of particular interest to nonfiction writers.  The essay’s target audience is fiction writers, but I think the lessons he imparts are important for nonfiction writers to hear as well.

“When one writes from life and memory,” Bellamy writes, “there is always a tendency to become so involved emotionally with the material that the work becomes ‘too thin’ or anorexic.  The least suggestion (the slimmest outline or reminder) of the traumatic events you wish to write about causes the floodgates of emotion to open up for you … So it is not difficult at all to persuade yourself that the floodgates will open up for the reader as well.”  There’s danger in making such an assumption, though—our readers don’t have our experiences, haven’t perceived the world as we have, and those suggestions, outlines, and reminders that resonate so much with us need to be developed and described in more detail if they are to resonate with the reader.  As Bellamy explains, “This means a careful and full rendering of the action, the motivations, and the expository details that are so familiar to the writer that they are easy to overlook.” Continue reading “Ensnared by Memory”

Pop Culture and Teaching Shakespeare

When I teach literature – any of it really, but Shakespeare in particular – I have a tendency to use references to popular culture to help my students make sense of the texts they read, and in particular, the characters that populate them.

For example, I’ve pointed out to students that there’s a certain Cartman (of South Park)-esque “Respect my authoritah” attitude in much of Richard III’s interactions with other characters (other Cartman catch-phrases work equally well with Richard II, incidentally).  I’ve also taken great advantage of YouTube clips to draw students into an understanding of the cultural relevance of Shakespeare: we’ve watched a video of Peter Sellers reciting The Beatles’ “Hard Day’s Night” in the style of Laurence Olivier’s Richard III, and we’ve compared the President’s speech in Independence Day to Olivier’s rendition of the St. Crispin’s Day speech.

These aren’t simply gimmicks to encourage student interest; aside from my own appreciation for pop culture, I have a larger purpose in introducing these comparisons, a purpose based in my own educational training.  Taking its cues from cognitive psychology, constructivist educational philosophy* suggests that we organize all of our experiences and all of our knowledge in “cognitive schema.”  Essentially, we build information on already existing knowledge and attempt to make sense of new information based on those structures of understanding.  In order to facilitate significant learning and thinking, educators need to create a sense of cognitive dissonance – a point where the student must grapple with information that does not fit within his or her cognitive schemata.  From this point of dissonance, individuals construct their own understanding of information. Continue reading “Pop Culture and Teaching Shakespeare”