Emily Isaacson – Page 5

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”

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”

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”

What Do You Envision?

Adapted from “Draw the Argument” by Barclay Barrios of Florida Atlantic University.

When I have my class read Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias,” I begin discussion by telling the students to form groups of four and draw the poem together. Often, this is met with a bit of surprise and confusion; but eventually students sit together, read the poem, and draw a picture. Once the groups have finished, I ask one member of each group to re-create the picture on the board. We evaluate the pictures and then return to the poem for further discussion.

While this exercise may seem like a simplistic way to approach the poem, I think it’s a valuable way to bring students into the discussion – and to highlight their ability to actually interpret poetry – because:

Drawing the poem encourages students to re-read the poem. So often students read poems quickly and don’t spend time deciphering the imagery and the figurative language. If they don’t get it immediately, they give up. My students tell me that poetry is “too hard” and that they’re not good at “reading between the lines.” This exercise can disabuse students of that notion: While drawing, my students are able to make sense of much of the poem without my intervention. Continue reading “What Do You Envision?”

Student-directed Questioning

One of our challenges as teachers of literature is to encourage students to move from simply answering questions we ask to formulating their own questions. To get at this, I have students write two discussion questions every day we meet as a class and e-mail them to me no later than 30 minutes before the class begins. From there, I take the questions, group them according to common themes and lead a seminar-style discussion. (This format works better in upper division courses, but this is easily adapted in larger first year courses by imposing earlier deadlines).

Students need to learn how to ask discussion questions, because too frequently they simply ask questions that focus on plot points or basic facts. While it’s important, certainly, to make sure that everyone knows what exactly happens, that focus doesn’t get at the interpretive work that makes literary studies enjoyably challenging. And it doesn’t encourage critical thinking.

So I give the students time to practice. For the second day of class I assign the students a brief reading (usually a few poems). In class, I pair them up and give them direction about how to ask questions; they work together to develop questions, put them on the board and then evaluate the quality of the questions; we collectively brainstorm ways to improve the questions that don’t open up discussion.

To get them started on writing the questions I provide two frameworks: one based on Bloom’s Taxonomy, and another based on the critical thinking paradigm developed by Richard Paul and Linda Elder*. With this latter option, I provide the students with templates of questions, which I’ll reproduce here: Continue reading “Student-directed Questioning”