I've been reading prewriting activities for my two literature classes this week. I always have them do a formal prewriting just to get a sense of whether they're even on the right track. It saves time for them if they don't spend a lot of effort writing themselves into a corner.
Most of them are fine. They have a good starting point, and they seem to know what they might be saying in their rough draft (which is due next week). However, I have some students who seem to be at a complete loss for where to turn when it comes to writing about a literary work. One of them in my American literature class, for example, plans to demonstrate that Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night deals with morphine addiction. This isn't something that needs to be argued, is it? Doesn't everyone who reads or watches a performance of this play realize that Mary Tyrone is a morphine addict? How do I (gently) tell this student that he is trying to show something that is not really open to interpretation (unless he's planning to do some elaborate deconstructionist argument--which seems highly unlikely, by the way)?
Most of these students in that same American literature class have not taken a course in how to write an essay about literature. We do offer such a class at my college, and students who have taken it (particularly English majors) tend to write better essays in later classes as a result. Perhaps we should grit our teeth and make it a prerequisite course for literature classes. I have to cover the scope of American literature since 1865 in this class; I don't have time to devote to teaching how to write about a poem or the various elements of fiction or what to examine when reading a play too. That's not even on the course outline for me to do. I'm supposed to be introducing students to the richness of the American literary landscape since the Civil War.
Perhaps part of the problem is that they're just not reading. I'm getting blank quizzes each day, a sure sign that other issues are more important than reading for my class. I'm not so egotistical to think that my class is the center of the universe, but we were meant to discuss William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying on Tuesday. I had been gone the previous week, giving them what I thought was ample time to read the book (only about 100 pages in our anthology). Yet I got lots of blank quizzes back anyway. It's very frustrating. How can you teach a work few people have read (or, perhaps, not yet finished--I'm feeling generous)? How can we have a class discussion if I'm the only one familiar with the text? If I have to lecture, they're going to become bored quickly. If I try to involve them in a discussion, they can't perform.
The lack of reading has led to some interesting answers on the quizzes when people try to guess, though. Today's quiz covered two short stories: Ernest Hemingway's "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" and Kay Boyle's "The White Horses of Vienna." One of the questions I asked was why the older doctor's wife in Boyle's story (published in 1935) was concerned upon the arrival of her husband's replacement. The answer was he was Jewish and this was in Austria between the two world wars, a time of rising anti-Semitism in Europe. I would have accepted "he's Jewish" as an answer to the question. One of them, trying to be clever, wrote that the replacement doctor was "Vietnamese." Sigh. Did you note that the title of the story is "The White Horses of VIENNA"? Just how many Vietnamese people were in Austria between the wars?
This semester's American literature class is just not as strong as ones I've had in the past. There are only three or four students who are doing particularly well, and only one who is truly a star. I can't quite decide if it's because we're teaching it "out of sequence" (offering what is normally a spring semester class in the fall semester) or if there's something else going on. Either way, I'm feeling frustrated and I'm starting to feel glad that we're more than halfway done.
2 comments:
What I wouldn't give to be in this class with you. ;)
This is just what I needed to read: I just came from a Modern British Lit midterm, and somehow I misread the directions for the essay portion of the test, and instead of choosing between two options, I spaced and wrote both essays. The last two midterms I took made us write two essays, so I didn't even read the directions. Oh, how I wish instead I was spending seventy five minutes with you deconstructing the last 150 years of American Literature.
I have realized that taking so much on this semester has caused life; wonderful, beautiful, heartbreakingly fragile, butterfly wing tipped life; to seem like a dusty load of half burnt bricks saddled on a Mexican donkey making its way down the Grand Canyon on a cloudless and windless day in August. It sits heavy on me, and seems so pointless sometimes.
Oh my, to get to discuss As I Lay Dying with you -- sounds like a dream. As long as you don't make us connect the story to the Fisher King or the Wasteland. Let's stick to Addie and theories of conventional masculinity and femininity. I'll write two in-depth in-class essays. With quotes. In under 45 minutes. Take that you jerks who aren't reading! Who aren't reading Faulkner! That's so disappointing.
We didn't talk at all about the Fisher King or the Kingfisher (although I did discuss those with my 104 class when we read Updike's "A&P") or The Wasteland (which we had already discussed on an earlier day).
I don't know why they didn't want to read Faulkner. He's too long? He's too weird? It's too morbid? It's too Southern? It's just too...?
We did (or, rather, I did, mostly) talk about the different characters and what each one might represent. We did a little bit of psychoanalyzing of all of the children and their various motives. We talked about Anse and Addie's relationship and about Addie's relationship with the Rev. Whitfield. I had a good time, overall, but I'm not sure I converted anyone to a love of Faulkner. More's the pity.
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