Date: Mon, 4 Apr 1994 07:34:10 -0400
Subject: JRNL: Historicism and 'Vegetable Literacy'

***T-AMLIT JOURNAL***

Again: When speaking of your own teaching please be specific about your teaching context-- kind of school, mix of students, etc. RB

Instead of framing AmLit as teaching the Issues or teaching the Conflicts, I tend to regard it as teaching the *Questions*--"questions" both as a topic and as a skill/approach. My (freshman/sophomore) students enter class with a view that any Text is inviolable and sacrosanct, a Magic Box containing one Hidden Meaning to which only the worthy are given the Key. Teaching them to ask questions, and to respond to questions that the text or texts pose, is for me a primary goal of a lit course, especially of a lit course teaching their "native" (and thus taken-for-granted) culture.

This is by way of responding to Bruce Stevenson's question about teaching a multivoiced AmLit course without abandoning his formalist organizing principles. I'm not sure that we need to be looking for, say, a black hispanic woman Imagist to teach alongside a white male Imagist. On the other hand, Langston Hughes's poetry can provide an intriguing interrogation of, say, W.C. Williams's poetry. If we know that Williams had options-- lingusitic, topical, formal--that he chose not to incorporate into his own poetics, we can begin to ask why, and what that means for his "school" of artists, and how that refines/expands/dissolves the boundaries of the category in which we are wont to place him. The flipside questions about Hughes are equally interesting, and provide jumping-off-places for discussions about the Literature as well as the History.

Is there only one kind of Realism? As a Toni Morrison character says, Definitions belong to the definers. My own experiences suggest that students are first uneasy but then enthusiastic when I ask them to question--and thereby define--the categories/genres that are standard operating procedure in a lit survey; perhaps surprisingly, they rarely wish to do away with the boundaries altogether, but the process of questioning allows them to take some ownership of the reading experience.

Was that a sermon? I hope not. ;) What I like so much about teaching a diverse group of AmLit texts is that the texts are already talking to one another before the students ever enter the class and join the conversation, already interrogating one another's styles/topics/politics before the first student raises her hand to ask WHAT Depends on a red wheelbarrow for heavenssake.

Shelley Reid
University at Buffalo (SUNY)
V5234YAXB@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu
V524YAXB@ubvms.bitnet

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I am pleased to be able to discuss teaching and learning American Lit with others engaged in the practice. What I am hoping we are able to do is to recast the conversation--so often, it seems, when we talk about our students it is in term of their deficits--what's wrong with them, what they are lacking, what they haven't done or learned previously and thus, what they are unable to do or learn now. In essence, it seems to me, this conversation mainly comes down to the fact they are not US. It seems to me that our conversations about teaching revert to this kind of plaint--a plaint that is not very consistant with the ongoing American dedication to the new. Why would they be like us? Are we trapped in the 'spinach' curriculum--we had to eat it when we were young, because it was good for us, even if we couldn't stand it at the time, and now, by damn, the next generation is going to eat it, and we can spend our time exploring WHY they continue to resist eating spinach--they weren't properly brought up, or they aren't 'vegetable literate' or they came from from families that didn't have a good relationship with the vegetable world. Mainly what we do is out of habit and tradition and the weight of educational decisions made at Harvard years ago; not that we should pitch it all, but we certainly need to rethink what the world is today, who the students ARE (not just who they AREN'T), and to what extent we are willing and ableto invite them as real partipants into the intellectual comunity which creates our literature--a literature which, inescapably includes popular culture and MTV as well as Emerson. LS

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I fully understand Jeff Finlay's concern with wanting Am lit. students to know more of the history in which the texts we teach were produced, particularly in a large (100+) sophomore Survey course in the US, which runs 10 weeks and 400 years of cultural and social production. (Now the course is American Literatures the corollary is histories; if students ever were historically literate it seems a lot to ask today.) Yet, find myself increasingly of two minds about the undertaking.

Starting in teaching in the late-80s and 90s, I have taught lit as cultural production from a commitment to that approach for teaching and research. The issue for me's nit if but how. It's become apparent to me that the discipline of reading I learned as an undergrad in a much more "traditional" department was not just about genres, but *forms of knowledge*. My students know little about the constructedness of history, less about how literature constructs worlds by form, lexicon, p.o.v., etc., but they like knowing the "facts" of history and who the good folk were as a stay against ambiguity and its concurrent requirement that they make interpretations and decisions (as we do) on imperfect knowledge. Now I wonder: How much time do I have for the complexities of history? Is it enough to correct canonization by "exposing" authors' failings, showing the complicity of their writings with policies that we have no trouble seeing as racist or otherwise socially disastrous. This is not what Jeff said or impied, but in my experience it too often *is* the approach acquired by a fair number of students. So, I've become concerned that "history" gives my students a way *not* to engage the text--the last thing they need. When the introduction of history becomes a question of how authors measure up--a matter of, "well, x is a y, and that's my frame for any question about of her/his texts," what began as an attempt to enrich impoverishes, the attempt to articulate predetermines.

At the same time, I find myself wanting to phrase my dilemma a little differently from what I recall as Jeff's phrasing. With Whitman, I would want the time, wisdom, and willing students to discuss what happens to the Jacksonian, Free Soil, Hegelian, Emersonian, etc., in the poems, *not as matters of theme and content, but in the %formal% transformations of his poetic*; I'd want to do the same with novelists and essayists. It's not an appeal for return to the autotelic text, but it is to make the claim that there's a lot of good things not often said in praise of formalisms--for the understanding of form as transforamation. That's a sort of knowledge only offered (when it is) in lit. departments; it's not ahistorical, but for me it is a way to put the literary in history without dissolving it. I realize I've gone on a bit and rather than helping Jeff may have added another level to the problem. But I breathe the same air as Kafka.

Kevin McNamara
Univerzita Palackheo
Olomouc, Czech Republic

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I haven't had the opportunity of teaching any survey courses; however, I do teach specialized courses in science fiction, multicultural literature, and contemporary novel. So most of my students do not have to enroll in my courses. Thus, there oftentimes seems to be more interest in engaging in texts, both in the historical and relevant sense, not to mention the intertextual sense. My students, then, are fairly literate, and do, in fact, read for pleasure in a fairly consistent manner. I'm a lucky guy, right? Well. . . not exactly, for it is what my students read that seems to be the problem, and not that they read at all. Every semester I ask them what they've recently read for pleasure, and always 9 out of 10 are reading romance novels or popular plot-driven novels. As a result, my students lack a certain critical perceptiveness that glaringly shows in their critical essays. In other words, they are great summarizers; they've got the plots down cold, but when it comes to some kind of thematic or structural critique, I'm left frequently responding, "So What?" However, I usually have at least one student who is fairly perceptive; for instance, this semester I have a student who is a Beat fan--he's read nearly everything, including the criticism. This student, in his essays, does not dwell heavily on plot summary but moves quickly to analysis--and he's not an older student, either. So I wonder if what one reads is really more significant or, in other words, students do not yet have a handle on "academic" prose, neither as readers or writers. Gerald Graff, in his book, Beyond the Culture Wars, speaks to this dilemma: It could very well be that students find it difficult to appropriate the language of academe. For my purposes, I encourage them to read literary criticism and, if anything, it does allow them to see that there is more in a text beyond the plot.

Patrick Bjork
English Department
Bismarck State College

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Date: Wed, 6 Apr 1994 20:56:08 -0400
Subject: JRNL: Relevance of Relevance?

***T-AMLIT JRNL***

I have been away for a week and have just come upon the "journal" discussion of teaching American literature, which raises lots of good issues. As a teaching assistant, I've taught the early American survey course to undergraduates at the University of Maryland and encountered incredible resistance to careful reading--my students constantly complained that the language was "archaic" and that they had a hard time understanding the long sentences. So the comments I've read on this journal that we're actually teaching students how to read make sense to me (though I don't think you can separate "reading" from "political" issues). I responded to my students' complaints by cutting some works out of my syllabus, and spending a day or two a week focusing carefully on short passages, as if they were poems, (sections from Jefferson's "Notes" and "Charlotte Temple" worked particularly well). However, I still found the semester frustrating, precisely because my "interests" seemed so irrelevant to my students, who persisted in seeing the "Puritans," along with abolitionists and early feminists, through the lens of twentieth-century stereotypes. (In our discussion of Margaret Fuller, several students rejected Fuller as a man-hater motivated by her own unattractiveness!)

Still pondering the failure of this semester, I recently attended the conference of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in Charleston, and went to a very good panel about "Teaching Eighteenth-Century American Texts to a Twentieth-Century Audience." One panelist, whose name unfortunately escapes me just now, suggested teaching "backwards" for two reasons--both to hook into students' interests, and to avoid imposing an artificially "progressive" shape on the material we teach. For example, she begins her course with a viewing of a recent "noble savage" film like "Last of the Mohicans" or "Dances with Wolves" and then reads a Cooper novel. She asks her students what the filmmakers have changed about (added to or taken away from) the book, and focuses on those differences to get them started thinking about the importance of certain issues at particular historical moments. This approach has the advantage of tapping into students' comfort with video as well. I'm planning to try something like this the next time I teach American literature--it sounds like an excellent way to force students to PAY ATTENTION to their reading, and there are lots of interesting possibilities. I'm especially looking forward to reading the "Scarlet Letter" BEFORE a Puritan conversion narrative, and then focusing on what aspects of Puritanism Hawthorne chose to emphasize and their relevance to his era. I've also been considering comparing some current editions of early American works with the first editions, asking students to point out differences in editorial apparatus and speculate about their significance(s). This could help illuminate the larger topic of the institutional USES of "American literature" in our day and in previous eras. (A great exercise for the nineteenth century would be to discuss Emily Dickinson's fascicle "publication" after examining a twentieth-century edition of Dickinson--perhaps one aimed specifically at children or teenagers). I'm sorry I can't remember the panelist's name--Carla Mulford was also on the panel and gave a good talk about multiculturalism and teaching early American literature. She's published a paper on the same topic in the "Heath Anthology Newsletter," if you can find it.

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The two questions in the journal are certainly thought-provoking and universal enough to be of interest to anyone who loves literature. My comments may not be unified enough to categorize under a single subject heading, probably because my perspective is not as a teacher of American Literature but as a high school Media Specialist, a position that requires seeing the big picture. I have made some subject headings that may be helpful.

Integration

Literature reflects the political, cultural, and historical time in which it is written. Integrate all of these areas rather than separating them. We can't teach literature without teaching history, politics, psychology, science, and sociology. As literature teachers we tend to introduce an era, author, or genre with a "fascinating" lecture in which the teacher explains the relevance of the literature to life, when we really should be enabling our students to draw conclusions and make the connections to history, social problems, human behavior, and culture. We want to make the connections for them because it is easier.

I often tell students that literature is to history as an editorial is to a current event. It is difficult to understand an editorial without knowing the current event that produced that opinion and made it newsworthy enough to be printed. It is equally as difficult to understand literature without knowing the conditions that caused that author to write and a publisher to print. This doesn't mean that a reader can't enjoy a piece without knowing the era that produced it, but a deep appreciation, I believe, requires some background or prior knowledge.

One resource that will help students to make connections and that should be readily available to all students of American literature is American Heritage. The articles are well-researched and well-written and are readable by students of all ages from ninth grade through graduate school and beyond. If the purpose of teaching is to engage the student, then American Heritage is a very effective tool to accomplish this. In a recent posting, Bruce Stevenson used the phrase "read the readers," which is a concise way of saying that we should helping our students not only to make connections to many different areas of life but also to make connections to other readers of literature; to get inside the skins of the first readers of Whitman or Hawthorne or any other author.

Literature Texts

The few teachers who make their own selections often base their choices on personal favorites or titles they have taught before or titles for which supplementary materials are readily available. There is some merit in choosing a personal favorite because enthusiasm is contagious, but our favorite selection will not always become the students' favorite just because we are enthusiastic about it. The Stephen King culture has influenced us to believe that literature must surprise or shock or disgust to make an impact on the reader. If we can enlighten a few students enough for them to fall in love with a writing because of the beauty of the words or the gentleness of the emotion the words create, we will be successful in "teaching literature."

Don't be afraid to include a selection that may have already been taught in a previous grade or in another department. Each of us has our own perspective and can bring something different to the writing. Have you ever re-read a book or poem and enjoyed it more than before or discovered a feeling or an image that you had missed the first time?

Students can make some of their own selections, and most of us will be surprised that they do not always choose "fluff." Students already feel that education is something that is done to them, not something that they have any control over or can participate in for the rest of their lives. Not every student in the class should always read the same selection. Let them choose occasionally and have different experiences.

Learning Theory and Pedagogy

To practice literature we must first read it (with the exception of plays); not watch it on video or read about it in MasterPlots or critical analyses. Practicing literature requires the higher level thinking skills which is one reason it is resisted both by teacher and students alike. Analysis, synthesis, and evaluation are naturals in literature.

Students long for cut/dried, black/white, just-give-me-the-facts type of teaching. They are excellent at memorizing. Analysis, synthesis, and evaluation require much more than memorization. Students want issues that can be resolved, problems with only one correct answer, the questions that will be on the test. Students hate ambiguity. They resist literature. It is our job as teachers to make thinking play. Play is not synonymous with easy, especially if we consider the energy and devotion with which our students are willing to give to football, rock music, or video games. Play is hard work and it involves risks. We must encourage our students to take risks and to demonstrate risk-taking in our teaching.

Much has been written and said about the personal meaning of text almost to the point that we have come to believe that the reader makes the only legitimate meaning. I understand that really great writing (whatever that is) can have multiple meanings across time and nations, but I fear we have gone too far with the pendulum swing. I believe it was Emily Dickinson who said that a poem shouldn't "mean" but "be." The meaning of writing doesn't always have to be personal, but I suspect the experience does.

Does everything that is read as a part of a class have to be personal and relevant to the reader? Part of the value of reading is to expand the reader's world, not contract the world to fit the life of the reader. But everything that is read and becomes a part of the reader must be connected to knowledge or memory that is already filed away in the brain. In order to become a part of our long-term memory, the brain requires that new information must have a chunk of knowledge already stored to be attached to so that it can be retrieved when needed. Mapping or chunking is the brain's method of information storage and retrieval. This emphasizes the necessity of making connections.

Conclusion

Jamae K. Bruton
Media Specialist
Palm Bay High School
#1 Pirate Lane
MELBOURNE FL 32901
407-952-5900 ext 155
407-952-5915 FAX
Internet bruton@sci-ed.fit.edu

"In the midst of winter, I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer." --Albert Camus

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Date: Thu, 7 Apr 1994 22:22:13 -0400
Subject: JRNL: RE: Relevance of Relevance?

***T-AMLIT JOURNAL***

Here are two more contributions to the discussion of student literacy and the relevance of literary studies to their lives. The points that John Slatin raises in the first post largely get back to the idea of literacy that I had in mind when the discussion began. Back then I asked "What kind of literacy are we teaching?" If we are expecting our students to recognize a text as a work of great art--that's one kind of literacy. But if we are asking them to recognize a text as a site for the production of social meaning, the revelation of cultural values, that's another kind of literacy altogether.

In the same vein, the second post mentions that students should be learning how to read mass media and its manipulations. Isn't it possible to imagine teaching that kind of literacy as being the same enterprise as teaching literature? RBass

I found Claire Pettengill's message on the possibilities of teaching 19th c. and colonial lit "backwards" interesting and thoughtful. It's a strategy I've often thought about over the years but never tried, partly because (in all honesty) I've been too lazy to re-think the syllabus in the way such a move would demand, and partly because I've worried that it would amount to little more than replacing a falsely "progressive" movement with an equally falsely teleological one, leaving students with the impression that the whole point of Puritan writing was to make it possible for Hawthorne to write The Scarlet Letter. All the same, I'll be teaching the Am Lit Before 1865 half of the upper division survey this semester (I'm at Texas, Austin)-- don't blink, you'll miss a century!-- so maybe I'll try it.

But I'm troubled by another aspect of the post-- the sense of "failure," the anger at the students that seems to me to emerge in the lines about "FORC[ing]" them to "PAY ATTENTION" (caps in the original), the dismissal of the students' complaints that they find the language "archaic" and the sentences too long and too difficult to comprehend. I've heard the same complaints many times over the past 15 years, and it's finally occurred to me that maybe the students aren't just whining-- maybe they're telling us something about the history of literacy, or at least of reading, and how stylistic norms and rhetorical training have changed in the 350+ years since Winthrop wrote "A Model of Christian Charity" or Bradford his account of the Separatists' landfall on Cape Cod ("For all things stand upon them with a weatherbeaten face"-- a line that still takes my breath away, almost 20 years after I read it for the first time; yes, I'm an old fart). The idea of FORCING students to PAY ATTENTION to those sentences in the way we might like reminds me of a recent incident involving me and my cat, which had infuriated me by using the bathtub as a litterbox AGAIN. Well, you can rub a cat's nose in it and it won't get the message, or at least not the one you mean to send: the message it gets, I suspect, is that you're rubbing its nose in shit.

What if we change the assumptions we make about students under these circumstances? What if we say to ourselves, not that the little bastards are perversely refusing to recognize the value of these ancient texts and so withholding their attention in a reflexive philistinism; what if we say instead that they *would* PAY ATTENTION in our way *if they knew how*? and so took the pedagogical challenge as being to help them train their attention. The kind of attention that we take for granted as equivalent with reading (and by "we" I mean people with a professional commitment to English studies) is by no means self-evident, by no means natural: it's *learned*. And just as we once had to learn to do this (and then have to keep learning, because each new move that comes along insists on a different kind of reading, a different kind of attention), so we have to teach our students to attend in a way that makes sense to us. This way of framing it raises other questions, of course, about the legitimacy of our own ways of reading: what's the source of our authority as readers or of our way of reading?

None of this is to say that I don't share the concern and frustration and occasional astonishment at the conservatism and hostility to change and resistance to any kind of explicitly political/cultural analysis that my students, too, often manifest. But the idea that our job is to FORCE people to pay attention without showing them what that means runs counter to the conception of teaching that I've evolved into over the years. For years, I scribbed BE SPECIFIC in the margin of students' papers, then one day it occurred to me I could do that till I was blue in the face and nothing would change: the students thought they were *being* specific, they giving it their best shot, and it was up to me to change their notions of specificity.

Sorry to go on so long.

John Slatin
University of Texas at Austin

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Claire_PETTENGILL@umail.umd.edu writes:

For example, she begins her course with a viewing of a recent "noble savage" film like "Last of the Mohicans" or "Dances with Wolves" and then read

a Cooper novel. She asks her students what the filmmakers have changed about (added to or taken away from) the book, and focuses on those differences to get them started thinking about the importance of certain issues at particular historical moments. This approach has the advantage of tapping into students' comfort with video as well.

It might be interesting to use the book "Dances with Wolves", available in paperback. The same story as the movie, but with a different emphasis. Then ending, especially, has a completely different impact than the movie, even though the events are the same. I admit to a personal bias towards text, as opposed to movies, and as a parent, I'm concerned at how much class time is taken up with movies made from books instead of the books themselves. But I am more concerned at how schools don't teach kids to be critical of mass media, to be know how to tell good from bad, and, especially, to realize when and how mass media manipulate the audience (not that this is always, bad: any work that evokes a response is manipulating its audience in some respect).

Regarding white response to Native Americans, the movie "Man Called Horse" (was it ever a book?) and the circa 1830 journals of painter George Catlin might also be useful.

--
Bob Rogers Internet: rogers@instrumental.com
Instrumental, Inc. GEnie: R.C.ROGERS
Minneapolis, MN Phone: 612-920-6188

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Date: Wed, 13 Apr 1994 22:49:27 -0400
Subject: JRNL: MAKING CONNECTIONS

***JRNL: T-AMLIT JOURNAL*****

Here is a full-length post by Elise Earthman on some of the JOURNAL issues we've been discussing, especially the idea of engaging students through creative means of making connections. As Elise asks at the end of the post, let's hear from others on ways of making connections. RBass

I've been looking forward to having a moment to jump into this conversation; I'm so delighted to see us have the space to talk about these important issues. To set the context, I teach freshman/sophomore required classes, coming-of-age literature, and autobiography, among other things, at a large, urban state university with a very diverse, multi-everything population.

On the topic of our students' literacy/literature skills--I'm of the opinion that the ability to comprehend and use all this literary stuff is *there*; we just have to be able to tap into it and develop it, and I think many college students come to us without an inkling of how literature works, how the pieces fit together, how it means. It's certainly not that they *can't* see these things--my son is all of 8 years old, and he understands metaphor, irony, imagery, and so on, in books and film, loves Shakespeare, etc. Now, he has the (in my students' opinion) great misfortune of being an English professor's kid, but my point is if an 8-year-old can grasp these kinds of things, joyfully, without being "taught" in a formal sense, there's no reason that they can't be developed in 18 or 19-year-old college students (or younger high school students). But I think we have to get them back to the place where a small kid is--excited about literature, willing to open up to it, willing to have fun with it. I don't think that my standing up front and lecturing on Hurston's use of metaphor in *Their Eyes Were Watching God* is going to do it for them; they've got to discover it themselves.

Others have spoken about helping students see the connections, or connecting what's "old" to what they already know, and I second these sentiments heartily. Since I don't teach AmLit survey courses, I'm not stuck with having to cover a particular place and time, and in my lower-division required classes I like to mix things up, teaching by the themes or ideas rather than another organization. I've found that this helps *enormously* in getting students excited about the literature and the connections they see in it (which I leave for them to discover themselves). While these are not strictly AmLit examples, I've had great success in the past in pairing up *The Member of the Wedding* with *Henry IV, Part I* (there are many parallels), *Sir Gawain and the Green Knight* with *Their Eyes Were Watching God* (both quest stories), using Erdrich's "Fleur" as a lead-in to *Antony and Cleopatra*. I would be all for teaching a survey course backwards, or at least out of chronological order, pairing Marilynne Robinson's *Housekeeping* with Thoreau and Whitman, and so on, so the students can see how the ideas of contemporary writers are clearly shaped by the writing of the past. And I try to set up group or individual assignments that will help students to discover the inner workings of the books themselves.

Do other people have interesting connections to share? I use a number of things from Robert Scholes to bring up the idea of connections--bumper stickers and how they evolve, for example, and I try to illustrate the different kinds of textual connections by using examples from contemporary music that students will know (i.e. the way rap "samples" other music = allusion). I think we could develop a nice set of connections and teaching ideas here--

Elise Earthman
San Francisco State

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Date: Fri, 15 Apr 1994 12:59:50 -0400
Subject: JRNL: More Relevance of Relevance

***T-AMLIT JOURNAL***

Bravo, John Slatin! Since I posed my question a couple of weeks ago, I've been reading these Journal entries and worrying about the same things Slatin does: that our own attitudes (and yes, I include myself) about what we're teaching may well be part of the problem for our stu- dents. We may think we're liberating them from constraining notions of The Great Books, but when our students resist the alternate texts and reading lists we're excited about having discovered, all our old notions about literary value return--just in different form. (I liked the earlier comment about The Spinach Curriculum too.) The class I'm teaching this semester isn't an American Literature course--it's a special topics course called Literature and the University, listed under the general rubric Literature and Culture. When I wrote the course description, I said our text would be the curriculum itself, and that we would ask questions like: What is Literature? What does it mean to "study literature" in college? What does it mean to "teach" it? Frankly, the idea rose out of my own dissatisfactions, my own fears and searchings for value. I HONESTLY COULDN'T ANSWER THOSE QUESTIONS MYSELF. And so we began.

It's been a revelation. What I've learned from "teaching" it (that is, mostly listening) has been so valuable to me that I can hardly explain it here. I think the students have found it valuable too. Some days we just talk, and I worry that I am not being "rigorous" enough, that I should be assigning more reading, setting structured writing assignments. But amazing things happen. One day, for in- stance, we read a poem together, just to watch ourselves reading, and to talk about how it was different reading this poem in this context and reading it in a *regular* lit class. It was amazing. These students had been talking all semester long about how much they feared poetry, were intimidated by it, angered by teachers' and classmates' interpretations, alienated. But we sat down with this poem, which none of us had read, and they talked about it, willingly, openly, intelligently, and with such a sense of them- selves as readers that I simply sat and took notes, writing down what they said and then reading it back to them at the end.

I probably sound delirious. But I guess I'm just testifying. Those of you who may feel defeated, depressed, dismayed--I rec- ommend this kind of therapy: LISTENING to students (is this another Prozac moment?) can be a wonderful cure for what ails us. They may not, as Helen Vendler hoped, "love what we have loved," but neither do we necessarily love what our professors loved. Still, they have a great hunger for what is found in literature, and in literature classrooms, where, they tell me, teachers care about THEM, about what THEY have to say.

By the way, I've told the students about this list, and I've downloaded all our journal entries, hoping that one of them, for their individual project, would be interested in analyzing, from the student's point of view, this conversation among teachers. I think there must be other students out there listening in on this conversation. How about it? Will you join us? We need to hear from you!

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Date: Tue, 19 Apr 1994 17:03:16 -0400
Subject: JRNL: MAKING CONNECTIONS

***********
TWO contributions to the JOURNAL discussion follow. The first describes an approach to teaching literature and regionalism - and considers the extent to which a "region" is defined by geography, gender, or race. The second is a response to an earlier posting by Elise Earthman.

Sandi
**************

Well, in tomorrow afternoon's EN 283 class in Bennett 327, we're going to move from Sui Sin Far's "Mrs. Spring Fragrance" and "The Inferior Woman" to Zitkala-Sa's "Impressions of an Indian Childhood" & "The School Days of an Indian Girl" to Jack London's oh-so manly *John Barleycorn or, Alcoholic Memoirs.* In part because I'm assuming that all three of these writers will be new to my Penn students (or, if they *have* read London before, it probably wasn't *this* one), I'll begin with a fairly obvious observation: that Ameri- can women regionalists often come pretty close to writing autobiography. (Conversely, Y-chromosomers like Stephen Crane & Henry James experiment with narrative disappearance. Crane on[Ace said to an editor that "I cannot help vanishing and disappearing and dissolving. It is my foremost trait." To which that poor editor must have had the late 19th-century version of a conniption fit. Anyway. . .) At this early point in the class I'm sneaking toward Jack London and an autobiography by a male writer; his nonstop bravado is obviously very different from Sui Sin Far's, as are the sorts of social pressures & cultural conflicts he describes.

But we're not quite ready to spring this difference yet. First, we need to talk about why Sui Sin Far makes jokes about Alfred, Lord Tennyson: Mrs Spring Fragrance quotes from "a beautiful American poem written by a noble American named Tennyson." Stealing gleefully from Elizabeth Ammons, I will focus on how the joke shifts; first, it's on the Spring Fragrances, since she thinks the hirsute one's an American and he doesn't get the lines. But, as the story develops, so too do questions about what such distinctions as "AmLit" and "BritLit" signify, anyway, to a Chinese-Am POV.

To cut to the chase, we'll talk about how regionalists, far from being quaint, passive, sentimental, nostalgic old maids, in fact make (often subversive, almost always revisionist) arguments about, in part, the silliness of relying on binary oppositions like "insider"/"outsider" and "inferior"/"superior" and the like. After discussing Zitkala-Sa's questioning of such polarizations -- she critiques the ironclad, mechanical routine of the "paleface day," yet studies violin at the NE Conservatory of Music, becomes estranged from her Lakota mother, etc. -- I will at long last pop the question:

*John Barleycorn* is autobiographical, politically-motivated (it argues, believe it or not, for Prohibition), very evoca- tive of particular U.S. regions, very interesting on the ways physical & psychological environments play off of each other, etc. -- Sounds like Jack London was an American woman region- alist! What, after all, differentiates London's regions from the women regionalists' regions?

Well, all this is still coming together in my mind, and of course you never know where it'll end up. My Penn students are wonderful/jrnlidx2.html#2:8">[Return to Index]

This is a reply to Elise Earthman's request on the connections that high school students might be able to make with formerly "uncool" literature. As I am unsure how these Journals are posted, I did not send this to all recipients but sw.georgetown.edu/tamlit/journal/jrnlidx2.html#2:9">[Return to Index]

Libby,
your course sounds great and it's an inspiration to me, as I do my student teaching in an 11th grade class. There are days that I feel like I am talking into the Grand Canyon, and I'm the only one who hears my paltry echo. The times I reveal something about my own concerns or frustrations with teaching (brief, of course) they are all ears and eyes. They seem to want to hear this, if not only to discover how it might affect them, their grade. I'm not ready to discuss canon with them, but it's something that could have the kind of breakthroughs you describe.

Carole Hamilton
UVA
clh6w@virginia.edu

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Date: Fri, 22 Apr 1994 17:35:40 -0400
Subject: JRNL: More Relevance of Relevance

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ONE more contribution to the discussion of literature's relevance follows.

Sandi
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This is both an introduction and a response. I teach at Conception Seminary College in NW Missouri, a Catholic seminary/liberal arts college with a very small, all-male student body. While my specialty in graduate school was 19th C. British Literature, I have an abiding interest in Am. Lit. Since I am also, for all intents and purposes, THE English Department at Conception, I teach EVERYTHING. I have been teaching an American Lit. survey this semester and have a response to the Relevance of Relevance discussion, although I just signed up to this list and am coming into it late, so I don't have the advantage of seeing the earlier entries.

I had an experience in class yesterday teaching the middle chapters of Faulkner's *As I Lay Dying*, a good canonical text, but one which gives students a lot of trouble simply with reading. I kept remembering my own experience as an undergraduate with this text--I hated it the first time I tried to read it. My students had been having somewhat the same experience this week. The class is small--six students altogether--so there is opportunity to try out various approaches, and usually I'm sitting *with* them, in a chair at the seminar table that we sit around together.

Yesterday I was talking to them about the whole idea of the Journey in the novel, and its relevance. But I decided to get them thinking about it from the point of view of the other farmers, etc., of Frenchman's Bend who are neighbors to the Bundren's--their reactions, criticisms, irritations, at the preposterous obstinance of Anse and the other members of the family. I asked the students how these people felt about the Bundrens. They answered as expected. Then I asked them how THEY felt. We then got into a discussion of not only the frustrations about reading the text, but what Faulkner was trying to do, and expecially his contrast between community and individual, or in this case, a particular family. But in listening to students, in starting from the point of their actual experience with the text--canonical or non-canonical--one can gain fruitful ground in the classroom. I found it to be important in this case to try to demonstrate to them that Faulkner did know what he was doing, but also allow them to hate the book, if that makes any sense. It's a novel to *fight* with.

--Paul Johnson

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Date: Fri, 22 Apr 1994 17:51:07 -0400
Subject: JRNL: MAKING CONNECTIONS

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ONE response to Lance Newman's posting follows.

Sandi
*****

My best advice to Mr. Newman is to resign his position ifg therte's more to his post than liberal guilt. If he finds well-read students such a burden and Truth residing only in the Oppressed, he should move out of arcadia to an inner-city school--and learn some attitudes toward students more appropriate than thinly-veiled contempt.

I found his plattitudes no more palatable than the platitudes of those who blindly worship Art, but think that in the hands of a good teacher both make excellent springboards for examination and reevaulation. Alas, that won't happen with regard to lit in his classes as long as his intention is to run it out of the room and replace it with recent theory and old cookbooks.

I'm sorry he was once told that poets are his friends, sorrier still that he seems not to have recovered from it and figured out what to do with poetry, but I'd urge him to think about what good poetry and fiction do that other forms of discourse can't (I've spoken about it in an earlier posting) and teach that. Part of it IS PLEASURE. Part of it IS AESTHETIC POWER. Part of it is KNOWLEDGE. But if you're not teaching it all, you're not teaching.

The suggestion that writers have been fooled for years into thinking they were engaged in a discipline that doesn't exist because we no longer want to teach it is a pretty specious foundation on which to build a curriculum.

As far as teaching the conflicts, I strongly recommend Margery Sabin's essay on same in the most recent (or next most recent) Raritan.

Kevin R. McNamara
English and American Studies
Palacky University
Olomouc, Czech Republic

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Date: Tue, 26 Apr 1994 12:03:37 -0400
Subject: JRNL: MAKING CONNECTIONS

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ONE message which discusses connections between literature and popular culture follows.

Sandi
*****

Hi, I'm writing from my home in Panama on an archaic E-Mail system (there is a 6-section delay between touching a key and seeing it on the screen and losing the connection is routine), but I wanted to add my strategy of teaching Huck. Finn and Miami Vice. I began using the two while I was teaching for a year at Hampshire College, in a course I created called "Images of the American Individual." My strategy is to teach Literature (cap L) as a culture's favorite stories about itself, which show up in homogenized versions in popular culture. White-guy--dark-guy out in the wilderness,from Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook to Huck and Jim to Sonny and Tubbs to Eddie Murphy and oh whats that actor's name? This system is totally discouraging. I can neither upload nor download files, so I have to go at a snail's pace, editing totally out of the question.

AT Princeton, Medea and Cry in the Dark. Many examples, but the point is to help students think about why we tell stories, why we tell the same stories over and over and how the particular historical moment spawns particular versions of old favorites. My never finished dissertation was attempting to focus on the spawning of mutations rather than mere versions -- e.g., Morrison's Beloved as a mutation of the Medea-old story of murderous mamas. In Panama I am teaching at an international high school (HOW do high school teachers keep teaching year after year -- the teaching is great but the hours and the work and the lack of respect is horrible) -- anyway the strategy seems to work well at all levels.

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Date: Thu, 28 Apr 1994 09:00:27 -0400
Subject: JRNL: RELEVANCE AND FAULKNER

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ONE message which discusses an approach to teaching Faulkner follows.

Sandi
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Paul Johnson's comments on teaching As I Lay Dyingsparked a few thoughts and memories for me. I studied Faulkner intitially as an undergraduate and also "hated" him--this despite the fact that my professor at the University of Toronto in 1972 was a significant Faulknerian scholar: Michael Millgate. I came away from the classes *knowing* how important a novelist Faulkner was, but still (to my covert shame) disliking him.

In graduate school, I met Faulkner again and it was love at second sight. I immediately began devouring his works, including those not on the syllabus and have reread and taught him ever since. What happened? Obviously, I had matured as a reader, but I think there is more to it than that. The grad school instruction was more interactive and engaging--perhaps because I had reached a level where Faulkner appealed to my more sophisticated reading skills. My pedagogical problem since then has been how to teach Faulkner to undergraduates and the solution is very similar (if not identical) to teaching students to "fight" Faulkner. I use the analogy of weight-lifting. The purpose of weight-lifting is not simply to raise and lower weights, but to develop muscle; you do that by progressively lifting heavier and heavier weights. I introduce Faulkner as a "heavy weight" in literature that students can work against to develop their literary and reading "muscles." I allow them to dislike him (usually they dislike the difficulty, not the subject matter) but push them to understand the technical reasons behind his prose style. In short, I try to engage them in the text and simultaneously show that a joy of reading can be the sustained effort of mental activity.

This may be a long-winded way of saying two things:

1. We should take the undergrads' experience into account when teaching them and not expect them to love and appreciate what we love and appreciate. 2. When the skills are sufficiently developed, appreciation will follow.

There may be room for a new metaphor here: instead of the teacher as "translator," we can have the teacher as (mental/weight) "trainer."

Blair Hemstock
Keyano College

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Date: Fri, 29 Apr 1994 17:31:54 -0400
Subject: JRNL: MAKING CONNECTIONS

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TWO messages follow. The first suggests futher reading on the reception of Gerald Graff's Beyond the Culture Wars. The second is a response to Kevin McNamara's posting.

Sandi

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Regarding recent references to Graff's model of teaching the conflicts:

For those interested in some differing views on Graff's proposals (in, for example, BEYOND THE CULTURE WARS), see the discussions in

TEACHING THE CONFLICTS: GERALD GRAFF, CURRICULAR REFORM, AND THE CULTURE WARS. Volume 2 of Wellesley Studies in Critical Theory, Literary History, and Culture. Ed. William E. Cain. NY and London: Garland, 1994.

Mas'ud Zavaradeh and Donald Morton. THEORY AS RESISTANCE: POLITICS AND CULTURE AFTER (POST)STRUCTURALISM. NY and London: Guilford Press, 1994.

Steve Mailloux

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Dear Kevin McNamara,

So now we know why they are called FIGHTING Irish? Are there lots of them in Czech territories, or just a one-man band? I wonder whether you think poetry is just poetry is just poetry, or whether you suspect it may vary considerably according to who is reading and teaching it? When for instance I look at the Anglo-Norman recipes copied into one booklet of British Library MS. Royal 12.C.xii, and notice that a translation of those is found in Friar William Herebert's personal anthology of mainly devotional and didactic materials in French, Latin and English that is now BL ADD MS 46919 (I think--wd have to check that ref), I realize that the reasons for including these recipes are relevant to the collections of lyrics in each of those MSS. In that way, trying to reconstruct the history and audience and reasons for copying the lyrics involves me in the consideration of old cookbooks. I soon notice that the recipes are pretty luxurious, and begin to wonder about Friar Herebert's mortification of the flesh, as well as whether the Royal MS's copyist and owner might have been of the aristocracy or under aristocratic patronage--and if he was, he collected the lyrics for a perhaps quite different audience than if he had been of the local Ludlow burgess group to which scriveners like the manuscript's copyist seemed mostly to belong. And since the Middle English lyrics copied by this man are indeed the best extant single collection of Middle English secular lovesongs, satiric and devotional poems, and so on--I now am referring to what are called the HARLEY LYRICS, copied by this same Royal 12.C.xii scribe into his other anthology, BL MS Harley 2253--it follows that old cookbooks may be highly relevant as a bit of evidence on the class membership, tastes (culinary and aesthetic), and hobbies perhaps, of the anthologist and perhaps of the audiences for his work. (He was, I hasten to add, certainly a legal scrivener, probably a literary copyist, most likely a parish chaplain at Richard's Castle just south of Ludlow, where I have located some 41 charters written in his hand. So as not to be misunderstood I must clarify that last sentence: the 41 charters, with dating clauses that assign them to the years 1314 into 1349, are dated from Ludlow and nearby places, one charter from Richard's Castle itself.

So where does this leave the relationship between cookbooks and lyric poetry, in your estimation?

And for that matter, are you by any chance teaching any American Indian literature over in Palacky? I was just talking with a former student as we called up your e-mail assault on bookcookers, and the student happened to be of Czech background, grew up speaking Czech with his folks, and he will be over in Prague again this summer visiting relatives. He told me he thinks Palacky is in the Moravian area--is he right? There used to be lots of Moravian missionaries to Indians--do you think we should return the compliment? If so, I am ready to come over and convert them--as you surely know, my tribal background is Osage Indian and I could explain that it is better to give than to receive, but I am willing to receive if they are Christian enough to give, particularly in return for some Osage Indian theological points, though I would not want to push this upon anyone, and would be happy to confine my mission to teaching poetry. Do you all happen to have in your library there books like the Beaty/Hunter NEW WORLDS OF LITERATURE (Norton, 2nd ed 1994), or Alan Velie's AMERICAN INDIAN LITERATURE (U of Oklahoma 2nd ed 1990 or so), or Kenneth Rosen's VOICES OF THE RAINBOW (Viking 1975)? If so you may notice poems by C. Revard which would surely go over well in Palacky. Very multicultural indeed.

So anyhow, best of luck with your teaching of poetry.

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Date: Fri, 29 Apr 1994 17:38:57 -0400
Subject: JRNL:LITERATURE AND REGIONALISM

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ONE suggestion for a regional text follows.

Sandi
*****

When the time comes that you need the most teachable (and enjoyable) example of regional lit for your classroom, do NOT fail to check Brown, Loren G., Totch. It's a WONDERFUL autobiography of a man who has lived in The Everglades through its regression from pure, untouched wilderness to its present endangered condition. It is as delightful a book as you'll read. Get a copy from the library and post any contradictory remarks. My wager is there won't be any.

Murph

Dale W. Mur4phy
(The four is silent)
dmurphy@rhs.brevard.k12.fl.us

1047 Lee
Rockledge, FL 32955
407-636-8043

Rockledge High School
Rockledge, FL 32955
407-636-3711

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