I bring these examples up not to talk about them in themselves but to make the point that the controversies over these events can be seen not as made up entirely of logical argument (or, for that matter, unreflecting passion), but as consisting largely of competing narratives. That is, the positions people hold on these things may come from aspects of their identities—national origin, gender, some kind of identification with a relevant group—but even if they do, they are informed and supported by a story. The stories may be about the past that led to the current state of affairs or about assumptions regarding human nature or the nature of the relationship between states and citizens or employers and employees.

I’m thinking today about the importance of stories to the way we see the world (not a new insight, I know) in part because the anniversary of 9/11 is two days from the moment I am writing this. In this morning’s online reading I saw an article about still-classified portions of documents pertaining to the events of that day, documents that might or might not change our understanding of what happened. One congressman is quoted as saying these pages “tell a story that has been completely removed from the 9/11 Report.” The 9/11 Report is the official account of what happened, but it is one story among many, and it is a story informed by other stories about American history, global history, and the nature of armed conflict, just as competing accounts are informed by other, larger stories and smaller personal ones.

This got me thinking about other stories we tell ourselves about those events, stories that are as much about ourselves as anything else. A scheduled event on my campus, an email from my chancellor informs me, will celebrate “Patriot Day,” the term some are using for the anniversary of the events of September 11, 2001. There is a wealth of narrative behind that labeling choice.

I am also thinking about stories now because I am always thinking about stories. It is one of the chief job hazards of teaching and studying fiction. This job has taught me to see narrative everywhere. As Hayden White has argued even history, which at first glance seems about the facts of past events, is shaped by the same tropes and story-forms that shape novels.  It has taught me that the arguments we have about the world around us are at bottom just stories, and that, as Billy Bragg sings in “It Says Here,” “…there are two sides to every story.” Maybe most importantly, it has taught me that there actually more than two sides—that is, that we too often fall into the trap of thinking there are only two choices, two ways to understand a particular event or phenomenon, while the best fiction can show us that the options are never-ending.  It can do this, as Bakhtin argued in his reading of Dostoevsky when a writer embodies opposing viewpoints in different characters and doesn’t pick a winner. It can also do this when it shows how difficult it is to understand the world at all, when it presents characters or narrators with points of view that do not seem to be endorsed by the author but to which the author seems to oppose no “correct” view (which Lukacs claimed is the definition of the modern novel).

My ultimate point here could be seen as another answer to the question answered in a previous entry, “Why I Teach Literature.” Another reason I teach fiction is to offer my students the opportunity to see the competing narratives in the books I assign and in the world around them, to see how these stories are built on other stories, and to see how there are more than two sides to every story. There are ways to teach that encourage these lessons, which any teacher can easily enough apply in their classroom, methods that highlight the opposition, nuance, and ambiguity in fiction and in the stories we tell outside of the pages in books. Helping students to look at things in this way can, in a hoary old humanist formulation I still believe in, help them to better appreciate and understand not only literature but also life, which, to borrow an old concept, is stories all the way down.

My friend with the initial complaint admitted that she tends not to teach much Chaucer in the survey, because she’s at an institution with a great course on Chaucer — and as an early modernist rather than a medievalist, she feels she can’t do The Canterbury Tales the justice it deserves. Instead she teaches other Middle English texts like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and sometimes excerpts of Piers Plowman.  Other people in the conversation admitted to leaving out The Faerie Queene altogether, giving them more time to focus on 17th century works. And others admitted — like most of us — that one of the eras covered by our surveys always gets short shrift. For many of us, it winds up being late 18th century work.

What I found most interesting was the conversation about how people chose the texts that they did, with many opting for relatively thematic courses (focusing, for example, on gender or the construction of the English national identity or on a particular literary pattern). Others — myself included — tend towards a more traditional style of survey course, which means trying to teach students a sense of literary history through the survey.

I’m in an odd position in that I teach both parts of the British Literature survey.  While different schools divide the course differently, I’ve generally taught in places that use 1798 as the dividing line — so I run into the problem of trying to teach everything pre-1798 in 15 weeks, then everything post-1798 in the next 15.  Oddly (or not) it’s really difficult to pick literature for both of them. Because of my department’s size, I’m also the only person currently in the department to teach all of the British Literature courses (we simply run a course called “Studies in British Literature,” which I will develop each time to cover a different era or topic; I’m also making my “Studies in the Novel” course a British novels course). So basically: I’m responsible for making sure my students have some sense of British Literature from Old English up to contemporary works.

This feels like a lot of pressure some days and my instinct is to look at lesser known writers, to focus on interesting issues of labor and gender through the time periods. But I also feel a responsibility to introduce my students to the traditionally canonical authors. I’m grateful that most anthologies include a wide variety of materials to work with — and I particularly like anthologies that include sections giving context, whether it’s the context of poetic traditions in the 16th century or the context of the laboring classes in the 19th century. Still it’s a tough balancing act, particularly given the span of time and the number of authors I always feel like we ought to be covering.

For me, I think that it boils down to the idea that these are called “surveys” rather than “studies in.” The purpose behind this really is to give the overview of how the literary landscape is shaped.  And the choices that I make are certainly informed by that.

But those choices — and my choice to include a lot of cultural context as well as less canonical authors — is also related to this idea of surveying everything. Alexander Pope (who I teach, most certainly) may have had major influence over the formation of the canon, but I cannot teach him without acknowledging — and having my students read — Mary Wortley Montagu’s work as well. They’re both part of the same landscape.

As I prepared my list of readings for my post-1798 class for the fall, I was reminded of how much I rely on poetry to get me through these courses. We can read multiple authors on these occasions, if the goal is primarily one of exposure to the names and the major movements.  It does lead to some weird mash-up days (we’re reading Derek Wolcott and Seamus Heaney on the same day), but it also allows for students to get a sense of the entire field. For additional coverage, I have students give presentations on texts we’re not reading in class, but which are represented in the textbook — and the explicit goal there is simply to have the exposure to the names.

Perhaps, most importantly, my course outcomes — beyond the sort of standard language about exposure to major figures of major movements — focus on the idea of students being able to articulate the relationship between the author, the text, and the world. I especially want them to do this through working on close reading and analysis.  And perhaps that is why, when it comes down to the moment of guilt about not including this author or that text, I am able to assuage some of my concern.  The real goal, then, is to teach students about the way we can read the work. Once they’re capable of that, they can go out and explore beyond our courses on their own.

So it was a crash course in the short story, provided by Ann Charters’ The Story and its Writer. But because of that experience, I began reading much more world literature in earnest. I’d studied some Kafka as an undergrad; I’d read some Chekhov in my teen years, but never really thought much of it; and certainly I was aware of the weirdness of Borges’ works. But much of what I was doing in the first semester of teaching that course was learning alongside my students.

Because of that initial experience after graduate school, and because I’ve since worked exclusively at small liberal arts colleges with fewer than 1500 students (and with very small English departments), I’ve spent a lot of time teaching outside of my immediate specialties. And this will continue for the foreseeable future.

In my current position, I’m teaching the courses of a woman who taught at the school for more than 40 years (I am not replacing her. She is an institution unto herself, and I certainly am not trying to fill those shoes. I’ve got my own.). The courses I teach range from Shakespeare and the British Literature survey courses to the survey of modern world literature and the novels course. I’m also in the process of creating a 100-level course on literature about nature, because we’re an institution with a large number of environmental science majors – and this seems like a topic that will interest a large portion of our student population. On top of this, I’m already carving out a niche for directing honors projects that cover, in essence, nerd culture.

Some days, it’s overwhelming. And I miss the comfort of being able to speak extensively on a topic without a whole lot of preparation when students have particular questions. But at the same time, there’s something extraordinary to me about being, ultimately, a generalist. I’m pushed to learn more and more every time I teach, and I’m pushed to expand my own literary experiences.

And that probably explains why I don’t feel bad that my summer reading has been classical Japanese literature, and not the scholarly articles about non-Shakespearean dramatists that I know I should be reading instead. At the same time, I have these moments of guilt about relying primarily on my Twitter feed for news of what’s happening in my primary field (there are lots of great early modernists on Twitter, incidentally). I wonder if I’m doing this wrong.

But those moments are ultimately pretty fleeting, because I’m coming to accept that I can still do my research in the field, and then turn my attention to the Tale of Genji the rest of the time.

Next week, veteran blogger and literature maven Emily Isaacson will kick off the 2014-2015 school year with a post about teaching outside of your primary field.

I decided that a bit of group writing in class might help.  I built the following exercise around the analysis of symbol and setting in Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, but you could easily adapt it to work with any narrative text.

1. First I divided the class into 8 groups – 2 groups for each act of the play – and gave students topics to work on for their particular act.  Some groups analyzed Chekhov’s use of setting; others worked on the symbols within their given act. (So, basically, the questions were:  “How does setting operate in Act 1?” or “What do the symbols of Act 1 tell the audience about the theme of the play?” and so on for each act).

2. Once the groups had gathered their information – and by this, I mean direct quotations from Chekhov’s play that supported students’ claims– I had them work together to write paragraphs, using in part a model (PIE or Point, Illustrate, Explain) that I learned when I worked for Barclay Barrios at Florida Atlantic University. Basically, my directions were this:

• Make a claim about the topic (i.e. write a topic sentence that explains your main idea about setting or symbols in the play; in the model I learned from Barclay, this is the “Point” part).
• Introduce the context for the quotation.
• Give the quotation (this is the “Illustrate” part).
• Explain the meaning of the quotation..
• Explain how all of this works together to support your topic sentence (this is the “Explain” part).

3. Next, students swapped paragraphs with another group for review.  After they looked at each other’s work, making notes for what needed clarification and elaboration, groups went back to work to revise their paragraphs.

4. When they finished revising, groups read their paragraphs aloud to the whole class.

This exercise succeeded in helping my students with their analytical skills – both in terms of reading a literary text and in reading and responding to their peers’ writing.  While not every student quite got the message that the exercise provided a model for how to write an analytical or interpretive paper, it did give me something to refer back to as I encouraged them to rethink and revise.

What I’m realizing is that these preferences express a set of assumptions about fiction that I often work against in my students. Further, they’re a set of assumptions nobody made me reflect on when I was an undergraduate (not successfully, anyway).  Over the years I’ve done a lot of this reflection myself, with the help of critics who have  convinced me of  some pretty basic truths about fiction, and I’ve internalized them over the years. In retrospect though, I wish somebody had told me these basic truths early in my undergraduate career.

Thing I Wish Somebody Had Told Me #1: Characters Aren’t People.

If you read writers talking about writing, you will come across someone saying that she listens to her characters and lets them determine what they do in her stories. I know what writers mean when they say this, and it may feel this way to them, but it’s not quite true: writers try to create characters who act in a way that is consistent with whatever personality they have tried to give them: they try not to have them do things that seem “out of character” (the fact that people often act “out of character” is a subject for another day). Likewise, if you listen to your students (and I hope you do), you will hear them talking about characters as if they were real people. Often they use a word that has become a bête noir of mine and say that characters are “relatable.” They will talk about whether or not they like characters, they will psychoanalyze them, they will confuse them with their authors.

Why is this important? Because the constant battle is to get students to look at form—to get them to understand how literature is constructed through a series of authorial choices, choices that have calculated effects on readers. That’s why it’s important not to ask students, Why does Character X do this? but rather, Why does Author X choose to have Character X do this? While students aren’t wrong to have feelings about characters, they need to be able to recognize and think about how and why authors make their characters act the way they do.  Students need to remember that characters are made of words.

Thing I Wish Somebody Had Told Me #2: Realism Is a Trick.

Related to Thing #1, this basic fact is something that everybody knows deep down, but its ramifications are often not realized.  While undergraduates don’t necessarily need to watch you diagram structuralist insights about signification on the board to get this (though I think it’s a great idea), they might benefit from you talking early on about what Barthes called the referential illusion—the false idea that works of literature can actually represent the world faithfully. What writers do—and if you press the point, no student will persist in maintaining that the black squiggles on the page “are” the world—is paint a picture of an idea of the world, with varying degrees of verisimilitude, detailed description, and, in Barthes’ great insight from “The Reality Effect,” the inclusion of insignificant details, which makes the picture seem more real. (A bit of instruction on the history of realism as an ideal in the Western novel—on the way in which it wasn’t the centrally important thing in the prehistory or early life of the novel and only became the default mode in the late nineteenth century—can help too.)

Reading novels and stories with the unexamined assumption that they are representations of the real can keep students from appreciating the artistry writers practice—the way they do things with words that create reading experiences that have effects on readers, that make them feel things and see things. Reading for realism can also make it harder for students to consider the factors that influence a writer’s picture of the world—things such as political beliefs, historical moment, any of the things that make us perceive the world as we do.

Thing I Wish Somebody Had Told Me #3: Stories Don’t Mean Anything.

If I’ve said any one thing in a classroom more than “No, tell me what you think” (or possibly “Please don’t use the word ‘relatable’ in your papers because it causes me physical pain”), it may be “Good fiction doesn’t have a moral.” It’s one of those things that is generally true but will admit exceptions, at least for some people; while Milan Kundera has said that there was nothing George Orwell wrote in his novels that he couldn’t have just as easily said in a pamphlet, most readers will admit that there are a few powerful works whose main aim is to drive home only a single message. Still, the larger point is that part of fiction’s power lies in its ambiguity; it can show us things about the world we may not have seen before, it can push us to consider ideas we’ve not thought much about before, but it doesn’t generally have what less sophisticated forms—fairy tales, parables—have: a moral.

It’s also true that even if writers want to drive home a single point about something, even if they are skilled at their craft, things will get away from them. Whether they are trying to keep two ideas in dialogue without picking a winner, as Bakhtin said is what makes great novels great, or are trying to display a Single Great Truth about the world, language and culture—meaning—is too complicated, too rich, to play along. This is the great frustration of so many students—what do you mean there’s no right answer?—and of many teachers who want to confine a novel to its “theme.”

So I’m going to continue planning this course, and maybe I’ll talk some more here someday soon about the process of text selection—about how I want to be wary of looking for texts with characters like people that capture 1968 in amber and have something to say about what happened then; about how to pick texts that challenge these assumptions about fiction; maybe even about how certain kinds of courses and critical approaches lead to the privileging of these assumptions. For now, I’ll just try to remember to pass on these three Things to undergraduates, who sometimes just Need to Be Told.

And I think that’s true of much of what we’re doing in the classroom. My students need to know why they’re writing the types of things that they’re writing, and why reading literature can help them in other courses. (A side note: I absolutely think appreciation and refinement of taste is important: however, that doesn’t exactly fly with first-year students who view my class as a school subject to suffer through. I think it’s worthwhile to try to persuade students of all of the values of what we do.)

Over time I’ve come to look for metaphors for reading literature and writing about their interpretations that might help put the intellectual work we do in some context. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far:

Writing and reading is like practicing for a game: Athletes have to practice certain moves over and over again. We’re doing the same thing in the literature and writing classrooms. Whether it’s practicing how to write a thesis statement or how to pick apart a poem, we need to practice it alongside someone who has more experience and who can help us improve our technique. (Of course, that’s simply the teacher-as-coach metaphor favored by some educators.)

Writing about literature is like writing a lab report: Analysis is taking something apart.  In science, we work in the lab to take things apart and to figure out how they work together (whether it’s a chemical reaction or the internal organs of the frog), then we figure out what it all means in our lab report. When studying literature, we’re doing much the same thing: dissecting the work in front of us. The words on the page are like the data we collect. The work that we do in interpreting those words – and in writing that essay about our interpretation – is like the lab report, because we’re explaining our thought process in a way that is clear to another reader.

Of course, reading literature isn’t quite the same as a scientific experiment, because we have different ideas about the value of ambiguity, which leads me to anther metaphor that might be useful:

Interpreting a piece of literature means making some of the same moves a musician does: This one might be more of a stretch, but hang with me: the pianist, the tenor, and the violinist all make choices about how to play the piece of music. But those choices are dictated by what’s on the page – the musical notes and notations on things like tempo and volume. When we read a piece of literature, we have to stick with what’s on the page – there’s no evidence of zombie activity in, say, A Doll’s House.  Or space aliens of “Ivan Illych.” But we don’t all read a passage quite the same way.  And even our own individual interpretation of a given passage will change upon repeated readings.

We can also learn a lot about the intellectual activities we need to engage in while we interpret literature—and while we write about literature—from other disciplines besides music. I think most important to keep in mind is the idea of the scientist who has to throw out huge amounts of data because an experiment failed. Or the failure of the code that the computer scientist writes.  Or the engineer who designs carefully and pays attention to very small details. While we may embrace ambiguity—and eschew a definitive interpretation of a text—we can certainly accept that some of our ideas fail. And most importantly, that sometimes our writing fails.

All of this leads us to an opportunity to talk about why some readings of a text might not work—and in turn, we help our students strengthen their interpretations. If we can encourage our students to recognize where an initial interpretation to a piece of literature goes somewhat awry, we can help them learn to return to the information—the text—and find new, better evidence; we can help students go back through the steps of their thought processes, and find better, more logical links among their ideas. That way, we help students develop more focused, plausible interpretations of literature, but also more focused, critical thinking and writing skills.

In future blog posts, I hope to share some revision exercises, which I think are frequently overlooked when we talk about teaching creative writing (although I’d like to point out that some of the contributors to the recently-released text, Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Writing Flash Nonfiction offer  some really cool exercises designed to help the writer who has already started to refine her writing—and many of these ideas can apply to nonfiction of any length, not just the short-short stuff).  First, though, I have to come up with some of these exercises.

Today, though, I thought I’d tell you about a class I’m teaching for the first time this semester.  I call it “The Contemporary Essay”—although I had wanted to call it “The 21^st Century Essay” at first, until I realized that a few of the pieces I wanted to teach were first published in the late 90s.  In my head, I still call it “The 21^st Century Essay,” historical publication facts be damned.

I began to think of this class several years ago, as it became apparent to me that, over the past few decades, we’ve slowly begun to build a canon of great essays, memoirs, and works of literary journalism. I’d become quite comfortable teaching the works of Joan Didion, George Orwell, James Baldwin, E.B. White, Annie Dillard, Phillip Lopate, Maya Angelou, Tobias Wolff, et al.  Comfortable to the point of complacency, I feared. Sure, I could occasionally sneak an essay by the likes of Eula Biss or Ander Monson onto the syllabus, to give my students a sense of where nonfiction seems to be headed, but I felt like I couldn’t really focus on where this genre was going until the students got an idea of where it has been.

This year, though, I’m fortunate enough to be teaching at St. Lawrence University, which has about half a dozen faculty members in the English Department with really strong backgrounds in nonfiction forms, and who teach these forms to undergraduate students in workshops that always seem to be filled to maximum capacity. I figured, “If I’m ever going to be working with students strong enough in the history of this genre to teach this class, that time is now.” So, with the enthusiastic blessing of my chair, I began to design the course.

I cheated a little bit—we spent the second week of class (the class meets for three hours every Wednesday evening) discussing some of that canonical stuff I said I wasn’t going to teach—Orwell, White, Didion, and Lopate’s introduction  to The Art of the Personal Essay. I decided, in the end, that I wasn’t comfortable starting with the present until we’d talked a little bit about the past. But beginning with the third class—last night’s class, to be precise—we’re focusing on the current scene entirely.

So, how did it go?

We wound up discussing work by Cheryl Strayed, Bob Cowser Jr., Pam Houston, Jill Talbot, and Eula Biss. The Strayed piece—“The Love of My Life”—seemed to be a particular favorite, as she writes about grief and sex in just brutally honest ways (if you’re offended by brutally honest depictions of unpleasant sex written by talented writers—and I know some people who are—don’t click on that link; otherwise, read it. It’s amazing). We also spent a long time discussing Talbot’s observations about the construction of self in the age of social media: “Everyone now,” Talbot writes, “not just writers, creates a written, published persona on a daily (hourly) basis.  Artifice abounds.”  We even wound up relating these ideas to Renaissance scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s idea of self-fashioning during the early modern period

How did it go? It was awesome.

I imagine we’ve all had those moments in the classroom where the discussion went so well, where all participants seemed so engaged, that the time flew by and you felt like the discussion should really go on over beers or coffee. It was 10 p.m., and I had to be up to teach at 8:30 the other day, and I don’t drink coffee, and I don’t drink with students, but… well, it was that kind of night.  It was the kind of class that makes one glad to do this for a living.

Will we be able to keep up this type of intense engagement?  It’s hard to say, of course—I can’t predict the future. All I can tell you is what’s on the syllabus—Steven Church.  Jenny Boully.  Ira Sukrungruang.  Ryan Van Meter.  Kristen Iversen.  Akhim Yuseff Cabey.  E.J. Levy.  John D’Agata and Jim Fingal. And lots of other thought-provoking practitioners of this form.

I can’t say for sure that this class is going to be a roaring success based on how well things went last night, of course, but my feeling is that our students want to know more about the contemporary nonfiction scene. I walked into class worried that I might have trouble filling three hours; I walked out regretting that we didn’t have five hours to devote to discussing these authors and their work. So, as I usually am in pretty much all things, I find myself cautiously optimistic.

I’ll keep you updated with how things go with this class, and what I learn along the way.  In the meantime, I’ll try to think of some revision exercises. If you have some, please leave a comment.  For that matter, if you can think of an essay or writer I ought to include on the reading list for a contemporary/ 21^st century essay class, let me know in a comment.

The recent Berkeley Repertory Theatre’s production of Anton Chekhov’s Three Sisters, which Sara Ruhl helped to translate with Elise Thoron and Natalya Paramonova and Kristin Johnsen-Neshati, concentrates on the text. Ruhl’s decision to produce a translation as close as possible to the rhythms of Chekhov led her to make some choices that resulted in a few awkwardnesses in English. For example, she often left out pronouns supplied by earlier translators and left in literal translations that were peculiarly Russian and more oblique than English equivalents. And because of Ruhl’s interpretation of the sisters, Olga, Masha, and Irina, she presents them much more as looking forward to their uncertain futures outside their home rather than looking backward to a time when their father provided security and an orderly life.

As a result, the play itself, with its frequent discussions of what “life would be like in two hundred years,” becomes in the Berkeley production very much about how the world will change, while asserting life for the individual might not change very much at all. When the Baron Tuzenbach is killed in a duel (clearly fought over Irina) at the end of the play, Chebutykin the doctor simply says, “There’s no difference. It’s all the same.” For him, all life is a dream.  For the rest, there is suffering.  The constant meditations on the meaning or lack of meaning of life are emphasized in the production and become central to its impact.

But even more central is the remarkable emphasis on work.  Tuzenbach, a Lieutenant, longs for the day he leaves the army and will go to work. The word “work” seems repeated more often in this production than it is in other translations. The family Prozorov is part of a class that avoids work, as we are told in the opening moments, but Chekhov knows in the future this class must work and his characters end the play with Olga as a headmistress; Tuzenbach in the brickworks (had he lived); Kulygin in his school; Andrei, the brother, in the Common Council; and Irina hoping to become a teacher. Masha, having lost Vershinin, looks forward to a life of boredom with Kulygin. Moscow, where the three sisters were born and raised, remains an ideal throughout the play, and at the end it is unrealizable.

One curious irony in this production is that with all the emphasis on work, the demand and need for work, all I could think is how many people in the audience and in the streets outside must also cry for work in an environment in which there are few jobs. This point alone helps to suggest an interpretation of the play that might have had nothing to do with Chekhov’s vision of Three Sisters.

Herman Melville, a few years before the 1953 publication of “Bartleby, The Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street.”

I’ve been thinking a great deal about how to approach the concept of character in my introduction to literature courses. I’ve traditionally begun each semester by talking about characters and introducing my students to some of the basic terms that are important in reading characters (i.e. protagonist, antagonist, flat, round, static, dynamic).  This semester, I’m not entirely satisfied with the approach, particularly because my intro to lit class is comprised entirely of non-majors. This has gotten me thinking about why and how we talk about characters. In my experience, students enjoy discussing characters —especially the ones they strongly identify with. But while my students may identify with a character, they don’t always know why they do. Even more importantly, they often don’t know what to do with characters they do not identify with:  Characters with backgrounds that are unfamiliar.  Characters who are different.  Characters who are, in all honesty, weird. I’ve also been thinking about how I introduce students to the careful analysis of literature.  So often, when talking about characters or plots, students want to speak in very broad and uncritical terms. To handle both of these tasks— dealing with strange characters and working on critical analysis—I decided that we would look at how characters in a text describe one another.

I recently tried this with my class in our discussion of “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” because who is more remote from students’ experience than the morose 19^th-century copyist? First, we needed to establish what we knew about everyone else who appears in the story.  We began class as I always do with “Bartleby”: We made lists of the details that we knew about the narrator, Turkey, Nippers, and Ginger Nut.  I made sure that the description the narrator gives of himself, that he was “an eminently safe man,” was part of our discussion.  From there, we moved to Bartleby.  After talking about Bartleby’s initial appearance at the lawyer’s door, “pallidly neat, pitiably respectable, incurably forlorn,” we spoke specifically about what each word means.Next, I put students in charge of careful analysis. To do this I had them form pairs, and I assigned each a different paragraph from the story where the characters (mostly the narrator) describe Bartleby or interact with him. I asked students to read their assigned passages carefully, alert to Melville’s choices, especially word choices, in his presentation of Bartleby. In their pairs, students then answered these questions:

1. Where in the story does the passage appear? What is the context for it?
2. What is said about Bartleby in this passage, and which character says it?
3. At this point, how does this character perceive Bartleby?
4. How do you know this? That is, what specific words in the passage suggest this to you?
5. In the passage, how does the character’s description of Bartleby compare with descriptions of Bartleby elsewhere in the story?

After  I’d given students time to work on this— and they certainly worked on it— I went  through the story chronologically, having them report back to the class about the discussion they had in answering these questions.  This led us to talking about the language that the narrator uses in telling his story, the various descriptions of Bartleby, and, most importantly, the way that the narrator changes as he describes his perceptions of Bartleby.  Bartleby really does not change all that much, but the narrator does.  And the narrator’s response to him tells us everything. In truth, this approach is primarily a matter of reframing basic questions: Who is Bartleby and why does he matter? Rather than simply asking students to respond to Melville’s character and story, I’m offering them tools and a set of questions to apply.  By looking at Bartleby through the point of view of other characters and the story’s narrator, my students could step of their own responses and, potentially, see the humanity they share with Bartleby.