Tag: Fiction

Teaching the Fiction of 9/11: Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

This is the second entry in a series on teaching the literature of 9/11. Dr. Erin Templeton, Assistant Professor of English and the Anne Morrison Chapman Distinguished Chair of International Study at Converse College, answered a few questions about her experiences teaching 9/11 fiction.

Hetland: What 9/11 texts do you teach?

Templeton: I teach both Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (ELIC) by Jonathan Safran Foer and selections from an American literature anthology.

Hetland: What classes do you use the texts in?

Templeton: ELIC is part of an upper-level contemporary American novels course; the anthology pieces are for the second half of our American Literature survey (1865-Present; 9/11 is as close as we get to the Present).

Hetland: Why have you chosen to teach Safran Foer’s novel?

Templeton: Because 1) it is a terrific novel and teaches well, and 2) because it also presents us with other issues that jive well with other books on the syllabus, specifically with issues of textual materiality and form, narrative perspective, and relationships between past and present and between older and younger generations. Continue reading “Teaching the Fiction of 9/11: Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close”

Pedagogy Papers: Gone But Not Forgotten

This year, AWP (the Association of Writers & Writing Programs) is doing away with its pedagogy forums, a staple at its national conference for a number of years. An unfortunate effect of this decision is that there will be no more “pedagogy papers,” those one-page creative writing exercises written by instructors at all levels, from first-year grad students to full professors. Each year, AWP made available on its website a PDF file of thirty or so “Best of” papers, selected from all that got submitted.

No more.

If you’ve never perused these files, they’re worth a look. The papers cover all genres and are sure to spark ideas in the classroom. The good news is that the PDF files from past years are still available on AWP’s website. The bad news—actually, it’s just a bit inconvenient—is that you’ll have to hunt a little for them. On AWP’s main page, awpwriter.org, just type “pedagogy papers” (in quotes) into the search box. Each result takes you to a page where, with a little scrolling, you’ll find the PDF file labeled either “Exemplary Pedagogy Papers” or “Best of the Pedagogy Papers.” Download those files and you’ll be staring at several hundred useful, tested exercises for the creative writing classroom at all levels.

What do you think of the AWP’s cancellation of pedagogy forums?

The Icky and the Weird: 2 Assignments

Earlier, I wrote about the value of students tapping into their own areas of expertise as the basis for their writing. Yet I also mentioned that I often steer students away from writing slightly fictionalized accounts of their own lives. Here are two exercises, one each in poetry and fiction, that require students to look beyond their own lives and communities.

Poetry: The “Weird News” poem. There are many sources of “weird news.” Simply Google “weird news,” and marvel at the results. The assignment is to find a recent news article that A) is weird, and B) the writer feels some connection to, and then to write a poem that builds on the article in some way. The poem should tap into the article’s deeper implications, or spin off in some entirely new direction—anything, really, as long as the poem goes beyond the facts presented in the article. The “weird news” poem can also be combined with a formal assignment, so that the student would be writing a “weird news” sonnet, sestina, etc.

One student of mine wrote a terrific poem based on the story of a Japanese clothing designer who, in response to increased street violence against women in Tokyo, created a woman’s dress that allowed the woman to disguise herself as a vending machine. If she were ever in a situation where she was being followed, she could simply pull up the dress and camouflage herself amid the urban landscape. The student’s poem explored the strangeness of protecting oneself by becoming a commodity, and in one stanza addressed the clothing designer directly. It was the sort of wonderfully idiosyncratic poem that the student wouldn’t have written in the absence of an assignment that had her looking beyond her own life and community. Continue reading “The Icky and the Weird: 2 Assignments”

Twitter in the Literature Classroom? Part 1

Twitter lends itself to discussion. It’s quick, easy, and—with its strict structure and economy of space—forces writers to condense their thoughts while maintaining coherence. Unlike other social networking sites, Twitter does not require you to follow (or “friend”) others in order to see their posts; Twitter allows you to read the conversations of anyone you’d like, mitigating some (though, not all) of the privacy issues that might lead us away from using social media sites in the classroom. There has been a considerable amount of discussion on various sites and academic blogs about using Twitter in academic settings (see the Profhacker blog: here, here, or most recently, here), Bill Wolff’s blog, the site, Emerging EdTech or here at Bedford Bits and Lit Bits. Some bloggers have discussed how to use Twitter for research and engagement among academics, while others have examined how and why to use Twitter as a classroom tool. Over at Kelli Marshall’s blog is a candid and detailed post on using Twitter as a discussion tool in some of the film courses Marshall has taught. She explains that while some students have resisted using the site, they have generally produced great comments about the course’s content and have participated in thoughtful conversations, even beyond the classroom. As Marshall also teaches literature courses, I asked her a few questions about her experience using Twitter and how it might be applied to a literature classroom.

Hetland:  How might Twitter benefit our classroom / students / student discussion?

Marshall: Giving shyer students a voice. Continuing in-class discussion outside the classroom. Forcing students to get to the “meat” of their argument/opinion (i.e., the 140 character limit). Encouraging students to interact with others online, i.e., classmates, me (!), students in other parts of the US/world, celebrities, film directors, etc.

Hetland:  How could Twitter be used in a literature classroom?

Continue reading “Twitter in the Literature Classroom? Part 1”

Teaching the Literature of 9/11

Don DeLillo’s novel Falling Man (Scribner, 2007) begins with the main character, Keith Neudecker, walking out from the rubble of the World Trade Center. Dazed and slightly injured, Keith first appears to the reader emerging from the ashes of the terrorist attack, moving away from the destruction. But, DeLillo explains, as Keith moves away from the carnage of the World Trade Center he also enters into an entirely new world: a world created in the trauma and by the trauma of September 11, 2001.

DeLillo begins his novel by invoking the way in which 9/11 is collectively discussed in popular culture and media: as a day that we emerged from, changed; as a day we moved into a changed world. Like Keith, we’re told that we are moving away from the trauma and into a world colored by the political, social, and cultural aftereffects of that day. This emergent movement is detailed in DeLillo’s novel, and also in a growing body of literature that either directly or indirectly takes up the events of 9/11. These works of fiction, including Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and Ken Kalfus’ A Disorder Peculiar to the Country, are increasingly being taught in literature classrooms across the country and are encouraging critical discussions about the pre- and post-9/11 world.

With the ten-year anniversary of 9/11taking place this semester, I would like to devote some space in this column to an ongoing conversation with those of you who have taught or who are teaching works of fiction that deal with 9/11. If you have experiences or thoughts on teaching a 9/11 text and would like to share them with your colleagues and peers, please post a comment or contact me via email (timhetland@gmail.com) or through Twitter (@timhetland).

How Should We Choose Texts?

As the fall is upon us and most universities and colleges have just started classes, I thought it appropriate to consider something central to the planning of a literature course: choosing what texts to read in a class.

Of course, there are many reasons that we might decide to have our class read a certain text: the text meets departmental requirements, it’s important to a particular field of study, it’s a part of a traditional canon or it’s distinctly outside of a traditional cannon, it’s trendy (though would we admit that?), it’s a personal favorite, or it reinforces one of the goals of the class. But these reasons, no matter how important, only indirectly consider the primary members of the class: the students.

So, the question is: how much influence do/should the students of a class have on text selection?

During the recent barrage of posts appearing on my social media feeds these past few weeks relating to crafting new syllabi for the upcoming academic year, one particular message really stood out and spoke to this question. The message was sent out by Donna Campbell, a professor of American literature at Washington State University; in it Campbell wrote that after seeing that her class was composed of a variety of students from all academic levels and majors, she decided to cancel a particular Henry James text.

I was curious about her decision to nix the text from her syllabus just days before class, based on preliminary information about her students, so I asked Dr. Campbell about her choice. Her reply?  A striking example of student-centric pedagogy. She said, “I substituted another text because it seemed to me that with students at so many levels of preparation, beginning with an author as complex as James might tend to discourage some of them. We’d usually have some time to build up to James, but in this particular course he would have been nearly the first author they encountered, and I wanted them to have a more positive experience.” Continue reading “How Should We Choose Texts?”