This post originally appeared on August 14, 2013. A few weeks ago, students in my creative nonfiction workshop were discussing a classmate’s essay about her rather eccentric grandmother.  It was a good piece of writing, a solid first draft, and I wanted to get my students talking about what made the piece so successful. It seemed to me that the student had done a good job of blending sensory detail with her reflection, developing scenes and then extrapolating from those scenes her own mixed emotions about loving someone who can be, at times, rather exasperating. “Why do you like this essay?” I asked one student pointedly. “Well,” he replied, “I could… relate to it.” “Why?” “Because… well… we all have grandmothers.” This is true for most of us, I suppose, but I tried to encourage my class to reflect more deeply.  While it’s true we all have grandmothers, it’s not true that we’re all this particular 20-year-old woman writing the essay, with her particular relationship with this particular grandmother.  I had an eccentric grandmother myself, but my Nana’s eccentricity manifested itself in the casual use of racial slurs and sudden angry outbursts that no one could see coming, whereas the grandmother in the essay was inclined to hoard food and drive recklessly. The notion that a successful piece of writing (or film, or probably any art form) should be something we can “relate” to is a little problematic for me.  I agree that I want to be able to find something that I can recognize and understand as “true” when I’m experiencing art, and for that reason I enjoy reading essays that explore the world as I have known it.  But my inability to personally relate to an author or experience described in a piece of nonfiction is not necessarily the author’s fault; nor is it a “flaw” in the writing itself.  I have never suffered through a migraine, but Joan Didion’s description of her own affliction in the essay “In Bed” is still powerful and vivid.  I don’t have the experience of being a southern African American in the middle of the twentieth century, but I can still feel empathetic when Maya Angelou describes the shame and anger she felt when the white politician insulted and degraded his audience when he spoke at her 8 th grade graduation in the chapter of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings that is frequently anthologized as either “Graduation” or “Graduation in Stamps.” I’m not a lesbian, I’ve never seen an analyst, and I don’t really have much tension in my relationship with my mother, but Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother? was still probably the most riveting works of nonfiction I read last year. This is writing that I don’t relate to, but it still resonates with me, largely because these authors provide such vivid details, metaphors, scenes, and reflections.  I don’t personally know how it feels to be Didion, Angelou, or Bechdel, but because of the way they render their essays, I come to know a bit more about how they experience the world.  I walk in their shoes and see through their eyes, at least for a little bit. That, I want my students to understand, is the power of nonfiction.  It makes another person’s experiences and perceptions vividly real to us—so real that, while we’re reading, they begin to feel like our own.  We fool ourselves—or allow ourselves to be fooled—into believing that this point of view is our own.  So this semester, and maybe from now on, I think I’m going to correct students who praise an essay for being “relatable”—and  ask them to think more carefully about how the choices an author makes can allow a total stranger’s personal experience to resonate so deeply within us. ... View more

I don’t think it would be too much to claim that the publication this summer of Harper Lee’s Go Set a Watchman has been the literary event of the year, but it isn’t the novel’s literary value that makes it so significant.  Rather, Lee’s new (old) novel is a cultural signifier of profound importance, and it is as such that I wish to approach it here as a topic for semiotic analysis. Of course I am writing this after much of the dust has already settled on the matter.  It has been widely explained that Go Set a Watchman is not a sequel to To Kill a Mockingbird but is actually an earlier draft.  And it is quite well known that the Atticus Finch who appears in Watchman is hardly the saintly hero of Mockingbird.  In fact, he is someone who is a far more likely representation of mid-twentieth-century small-town southern (white) opinion, especially on racial matters, than is the Atticus that we have come to know and love so well—a nod to realism that might have been applauded by historically-minded reviewers.  But that, of course, hasn’t been the dominant response at all. Instead, the reaction has been one of more or less shocked betrayal.  Gregory Peck, Peck’s own son has intimated, may just be rolling in his grave. The question for cultural semiotics, however, is not why Lee changed the character of Atticus Finch so much between drafts (though this is a fascinating question for literary history, possibly involving the emergence of another Maxwell Perkins); the cultural semiotic question is, why is the change so important?  Why have so many readers been so shaken? In answering such questions I can refer back to a blog I wrote here a few years ago in which I noted that, lovely and heartwarming as To Kill a Mockingbird is, there is an uncomfortable hitch in it which lies in the way that the novel basically shifted the responsibility for southern bigotry away from the upper and middle classes onto the shoulders of the lower classes, the “white trash” to which such clans as the Ewells belong.  Living the life of a modest middle-class lawyer (who is actually descended from an old plantation family), Mockingbird’s Atticus Finch joins his middle-class neighbors and colleagues (the town Sheriff, the local Judge) in resisting the lynch mob mentality of people who are clearly identified as “red neck” troublemakers.   While it is true that Atticus Finch’s sister, who still lives on the family plantation at Finch’s landing (but who does not appear in the movie), is also no paragon of racial tolerance, it is the patently evil Bob Ewell that readers are going to remember as the face of southern bigotry. Thus, Atticus Finch performed a service for white middle-class Americans when he first appeared in the midst of the turmoil of the Civil Rights era.  While images of identifiably middle-class southerners could be seen on TV screaming in the faces of black school children being escorted by federal marshals onto the grounds of newly desegregated school campuses, the upright figure of Atticus Finch, who was a southerner to boot, stood as a reassuring symbol of a fundamental human decency.  No nobler man has appeared in American fiction, and when that man is portrayed by Gregory Peck, one of Hollywood’s most magnificent specimens of manhood and character, you have the makings of a really profound cultural icon with extraordinary powers of healing. But now, at a time of intense racial uneasiness, the prospect of Atticus Finch falling off his pedestal threatens to undo all that. I suspect, however, that America really can’t afford to lose the good Atticus, and so will protect him from his earlier avatar through the simple device of isolating him within the confines of the work of art called To Kill a Mockingbird, leaving the Atticus of that rather inferior work of art called Go Set a Watchman to literary historians, set aside as an aesthetic curiosity but not taken as a credible threat to a fictive man that Americans continue to need to be real. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community (it’s free, quick, and easy) to get involved! ... View more

This blog was originally posted on April 9, 2013. Franz Kafka (1883-1924), author of “A Hunger Artist.” Photo by Atelier Jacobi, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935), author of “The Yellow Wallpaper.” Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress and Wikimedia Commons I had an epiphany while grading some Intro to Lit papers recently: Students do not trust their ability to make connections. This is by no means an original observation.  But while grading those papers – and thinking about this post – I finally understood my undergraduate advisor’s admonition that I needed to learn to trust my intuition more. I always took it to mean a distrust of reason, a distrust of analysis.  And I was totally unfair to my advisor, because that’s not at all what she meant. What she meant was that I wasn’t trusting myself when I saw connections. I recognize this problem in my own students’ writing.  For the current paper my students are working on, I’ve instructed them to write about the importance of setting in two pieces that we’ve read so far in class.  One piece of advice that I give on the assignment sheet is that students be deliberate in their choice of texts: They shouldn’t simply select pieces because they like them. The pieces need to connect somehow. As I read a number of their draft papers, I saw that my students had picked short stories that work together – but that many were not quite sure of why and how the stories connect.  A number admitted in their introductions that they simply picked two pieces that they liked – or two pieces that “spoke to them” somehow. From my point of view, I could see the connections.  I found them obvious.  For example, one student wrote about “A Hunger Artist” and “The Yellow Wallpaper.”  She wasn’t quite sure why she paired these stories, and couldn’t say more beyond: “I found them interesting.”  I see the connection between the trapped artists.  It’s there – though it’s not necessarily a connection I would have made immediately or without that student’s impulse to pair the two. This student isn’t yet seeing that connection, or at least isn’t quite able to articulate the connection. In my comments on the drafts I asked a lot of questions, as I always do, most notably about the relationship between the chosen pieces; I wanted students to get beyond: “I like these.”  I made suggestions in my final note to the student writing about the Kafka and Gilman stories—suggesting the idea of cages and the idea of the artist as a possible connection.  And I made similar notes on a number of other papers, where students seemed to have some intuition about connections but weren’t quite articulating them. In the end, this gets me thinking that what we’re doing in Intro to Lit, inherently, is dealing with creative thinking – and not just critical thinking or analytical writing.  Pushing students to see the connections that they already sense helps them build on their own creative abilities.  And part of that is a willingness to trust instinct. This is not to suggest that any intuitive connection that someone sees is going to be right.  That’s part of the critical and analytical work we do in class.  We look for what’s most plausible, what’s most persuasive. This sort of ambiguity, this creative thinking, is essential in any field.  My friends who are scientists are creative people – they make observations and see connections.  My friends who are musicians do the same thing.  It’s a matter of knowing what we’re actually looking at. That, if nothing else, is what I want to convey to my students in my Intro to Lit class.  That’s what the class is good for. ... View more

I recently spent a joyous day with colleagues and students at Appalachian State, where the first-year writing curriculum focuses on argument. We had fun exploring various definitions of argument and especially student understandings of the term. (One father of a one-year-old and a three-year-old corroborated what Tom Newkirk has often said: that the first form of discourse children acquire and practice—with gusto—is argument. His older child, he said, has already figured out how to offer his parents two choices, both completely acceptable to him, rather than make a single demand!) We agreed that the pervasive view of argument in our culture is still of agonistic contention, noting the 2016 campaign “debates” already under way. We also agreed, however, that this is an impoverished definition and view of argument, one that puts obstacles in the way of any possibility of coming to agreement or compromise. We spent some time remarking on how deeply the tradition of agonistic argument and winning is ingrained in our language. We make war on drugs, poverty, cancer. We deliver stinging rebukes; we demolish opponents. And we could easily trace the history of such attitudes back to ancient times. But we spent even more time exploring contemporary alternatives to agonistic argument, especially the invitational approach developed by Sonja Foss and Cindy Griffin. The goal of this approach is not winning at all cost or vanquishing an interlocutor, but understanding. It is based on deep respect for others and on an openness to varying points of view. And it calls for listening—the kind of rhetorical listening so clearly articulated in the work of Krista Ratcliff: in invitational settings, the rhetor is not the center of attention but a member of a group, a listener as well as a speaker. We worked through some hypothetical arguments, including one put forward by a six-year-old Chinese lad, to see how different approaches to argument—from Classical to Toulmin to Rogerian to Invitational—could yield different forms of analysis and different ways of engaging others. And we concluded that our students need to understand all these approaches, and others, and be able to use them ethically and effectively. Toward the end of our time together, I described an assignment I like to use early in a term’s work, perhaps in the second week. After we’ve worked at broadening our definition and understanding of argument, I bring in several “found arguments,” and we ask what makes them arguments and just how they work. I’ve brought in old sneakers, Monsanto seed catalogs, Gumby, Cheerios, and even a sign I saw in a bathroom at the British Museum that read “Please do not eat the urinal cakes” (!). And we analyze the arguments such objects make or have the potential to make. The fun really begins when we start our “found argument collection,” to which everyone contributes throughout the term. In my experience, students outdo themselves, coming up with amazingly thought-provoking found arguments. By term’s end, we put up an exhibit and invite friends to join us for a celebration of the range of arguments we’ve discovered. I find that this little exercise does more to help them come to a deeper and more expansive understanding of the pervasive (and often constructive) role that argument plays in our lives. Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community (it’s free, quick, and easy) to get involved! ... View more

This post first appeared May 25, 2013. I confess that I spend far too much time on social media.  I like Facebook to connect with far-flung friends and family members.  I use Twitter to interact with other early modern scholars (and I’ve developed a number of professional contacts because of my use of the site).  Last fall, on the recommendation of a couple of friends, I began to use Pinterest to start collecting (“pinning”) items that interested me – especially, like a huge number of users, crafts that I’ll never actually attempt and recipes I might try when I’m feeling particularly ambitious.  I joined tumblr over my winter break, mostly to figure out what it’s all about – and I’ve discovered it’s both a place to aggregate things that inspire me and a place to post some of my own creative work,in particular, my photography. From my tumblr for my Renaissance Literature course. I’ve also been looking at these as opportunities to connect with my students.  I’m really not trying to be a hip professor (I’m pretty far from that). I’m just trying to encourage my students to engage with materials outside of class – and beyond our textbook. For a number of years, I’ve kept a Facebook page for the English majors at my institution.  And I’ve also made a half-hearted attempt to engage my students on twitter by including a suggested hashtag in the syllabus.  But that’s something that I’ve not really been able to keep up – by the second week of the semester, I’m struggling to come up with appropriate things to say about the readings or about the classes. But I’ve found a different use in tumblr and pinterest.  If you’re not familiar with either site, you might take some time to just look around at the blogs (tumblr) and the boards (pinterest) – and one of the advantages is that you can look at things without necessarily having a membership to the site. I’ve found them useful because both can serve as aggregators of information.  Both are visually oriented – and both make it very easy to link to off-site material.  Tumblr pages look and behave primarily like the blogs we’re all familiar with, though it is more visual than textual, typically.  Pinterest boards act like virtual bulletin boards, where we can simply collect information to sort through later.  I think the metaphor of pinterest appeals to me more as I collect information. From my Pinterest board for my Renaissance Literature course. I don’t know how much my students have made use of the boards, but I’ve encouraged them to look at them repeatedly.  I link from our Blackboard site.  I use them in class to pull up specific, relevant information. What’s most important, though, is that maintaining these sites has not been particularly time consuming: I have buttons on my bookmarks bar on my browser that allow me to quickly add something.  And I’m looking at quite a lot of the same things anyway, so why not take the moment to share it with my students? ... View more

This post originally appeared on March 26, 2013. I spent last weekend watching documentaries. This may not sound at first hearing like the most exciting weekend a person could have, but every year at this time I spend all of my money and time to go see more documentary films than a person should see in four days at True/False, a documentary film festival in its tenth year that is a highlight of the year for me and my little town. Directors and producers and writers and fans descend on the city and turn it into temporary mecca for (mostly) nonfiction narrative cinema (and for hoodies, which for some reason go with documentaries like Botox goes with Hollywood), and normal residents like me get to forget our day jobs and immerse ourselves in a vibrant and inventive art form. Emerging bleary-eyed and wrung out (maybe that explains the hoodies) on the other end of my sixteen-film weekend, I’ve been thinking about documentaries, especially in light of what I do, which is study and teach fiction. This isn’t so paradoxical—nonfictional and fictional narrative share more than most people think, and have a lot to teach us about each other. The most important thing they share, of course, is that they’re narrative. While I am more in the theory of the novel camp than the narrative theory camp because the latter looks for the keys to all narrative while the former keeps its eye on genre, it is important to recognize the specific shared goals and forms of nonfictional and fictional films and prose. In plainer words, it is correct to say that one genre is true and the other is false, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t both used to tell stories (and that both are not both true and false). Through these genres, writers and filmmakers tell stories with certain effects in mind, using a toolbox of techniques to achieve those effects. One film I saw, Dirty Wars, follows reporter Jeremy Scahill’s investigation of covert military operations in Afghanistan and elsewhere. The structure of the film is dictated by Scahill’s activity—the filmmakers follow the trail of the reporter’s story, watching over his shoulder as he tracks the activities of the Joint Special Operations Command through small villages and along the banks of the Potomac. As they do so, they mix genres, using the tricks of straightforward investigative journalism alongside those of the diary, the personal essay, and the travelogue, taking advantage of the power of identification to tell a haunting story and make a strong argument. The Act of Killing, my favorite of the weekend, looks back at Indonesian death squads active after the 1965 military coup. It is a strange and powerful film (the presence on the Executive Producers roster of Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, two masters of strange and powerful films, is unsurprising in this regard) in which former members of one such squad proudly recreate scenes of torture and murder from the past. These scenes become part of the film, are presented as they are made, and are accompanied by interviews of the players.  The filmmakers follow the squad members as they confront (and fail to confront) their memories, and show the reactions of the rest of the nation—the victims and those who still celebrate the nominally anti-communist purge. It is an incredibly inventive and even (to use an overused word) surreal film, one that rides the line between nonfiction and fiction in the service of an unfortunately true story. It is an excellent example of the ways in which narratives can bend themselves to accommodate experiences so traumatic that straightforward storytelling forms seem unable to capture. On a lighter note (these documentary festivals can be murder), I saw a film, Village at the End of the World, that visits a tiny fishing village in Greenland as it faces change. It is not formally radical, nor does anyone but some fish and a polar bear die in it. However, in the way it takes viewers to a remote, foreign, frozen place— accessible only by helicopter and storytelling— it is a model for what narrative can do. Telling the story of the village as it deals with historical change and the individual stories of a few of its residents, including that of a teenage boy as he figures out and steps into his future, the documentarians invoke old generic standbys such as the wilderness story and the bildungsroman to make viewers experience a way of life that is very different from their own. I am unsure just how all this will translate into the classroom. I want to help students studying fiction to better see how fiction works by looking at its techniques at work in nonfiction (and to see nonfiction’s techniques at work in it). And I want them to think about the shared goals of fiction and nonfiction—to move an audience, to make people think, to show them something about the world. That may mean bringing some examples into class, or assigning these films as they reach wider distribution (if they do). I welcome suggestions. It just seems that the examples of what narrative can do are so powerful and plentiful in documentary film that it would be a shame if I can’t use them somehow. ... View more

This blog was originally posted on March 15, 2013. I don’t know about anyone of you out there, but at a certain point in the semester I feel an exhausted relief when I look at the scheduled readings and see that I’ve been smart enough to assign texts that I’ve read before, that I’ve taught before.  I have that moment when I think, “I don’t necessarily have to re-read this – I’ve done this before.  I’ll just do what I did last time.” It’s not a good habit, but it’s an understandable one, I think.  And I suspect that most of us give in to the temptation from time to time. But last week, I was reminded once again why it is that I need to re-read for class – and not just because I need to be sure that I’m completely prepared. I was preparing to teach “A Rose for Emily” (and Faulkner happens to be one of my favorite authors) – and it’s something that I’ve taught at least once a year since 2006.  So I’m pretty familiar with the story.  But I re-read it anyway. Because we’re focusing on setting in my course right now, I tried to pay particular attention to the details of setting, as described by the narrators.  Many are the details  I’ve always paid attention to in class (Miss Emily’s house as “an eyesore among eyesores” and the dust and stagnant air throughout the story); but this time, one small detail jumped out at me at the very beginning of the story. As the narrators describe Miss Emily, they say that she “had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery.” The cedar-bemused cemetery. What an extraordinary description – and one that I’ve probably read (and perhaps even noted) in the past.  But this time, I was reading a clean copy (we just switched editions, so my book has no annotations yet) – and so this simply struck me. And that’s the point.  While it is important to re-read in order to prepare for class, it’s also important to re-read to simply recharge.  I know that I get caught up in the frustrations of the semester and the general exhaustions of life, but I also know that when it comes down to it, I actually love the stuff that we do in literary studies.  Cheesy? Sure.  But honest? Absolutely. And that energy and enjoyment is infectious – and students will notice it. ... View more

Welcome back! I can’t believe it’s fall already.  It never ceases to amaze me how quickly the summer goes. At my school we’re already halfway through the second week in the semester.  Wow! This year I’ll be focusing this blog on strategies for teaching the various readings in Emerging.  I hope to offer some insight on what works well with what, both within the text and also with things happening out in the world.  With the presidential election starting to gear up, it’s a particularly good time to connect the readings in the book to the lives of students in ways that will help them think about how to make a difference in the world around them. The third edition will be coming out some time late this fall, so I’ll also be giving you all a detailed rundown of some of the new features and readings.  It’s going to be a very exciting edition, and I want to provide you a good sense of what you can do with it before it hits your desk.  We have some great new readings and a couple of awesome new features.  I look forward to sharing it all with you. I’m so thrilled that the book has moved into another edition and so grateful to all of you and everyone at Bedford for helping to make that happen.  It’s already a bustling semester but I am hoping you all have a wonderful start to the year… Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community to get involved (it’s free, quick, and easy)! ... View more

This post first appeared on March 19, 2013. Textbook discussions of figurative language tend to insist that similes and metaphors deepen a reader’s understanding of what they are describing.  But if you look at how most writers employ similes and metaphors, they don’t so much deepen the meaning of what is being described as they change it.  Much like you wouldn’t use an adjective or an adverb unless it changed the meaning of a given noun or verb, you wouldn’t use figurative language to say the same thing your literal language is saying. Instead, figurative language is one of the best tools for writers who want to add emotional connotations, tone, and atmosphere, to a thing that might not otherwise have these features. Take Michael Ondaatje’s poem “Sweet Like a Crow.” We understand that his niece’s voice does not literally sound “like a scorpion being pushed through a glass tube” or “like 8 sharks being carried on the back of a bicycle”.  But this long list of humorous and horrific imaginary sounds sets the tone for the poem, a comedy right up until the pay-off of the lovely final simile “like the sound I heard when having an afternoon sleep/and someone walked through my room in ankle bracelets.”  If readers took similes literally, the poem couldn’t work—this list of contradictory sounds could not all illustrate the same sound.  But in this case, the figurative language sets a tone for the poem and then skillfully changes it, so that the reader understands the literal image (his eight-year-old niece Hetti Corea’s voice) differently by the end of the poem. Likewise, in “The Staying Freight,” the amazing opening story to his collection, Volt, Alan Heathcock employs figurative language to describe a young boy’s dead body–not because it creates a better picture of what the boy literally looks like, but because it changes how the reader sees his death:           “Dusk burned the ridgeline and dust churned from the tiller discs set a fog over the field. He blinked, could not stop blinking. There was not a clean part on him with which to wipe his eyes. Tomorrow he’d reserved for the sowing of winter wheat and so much was yet to be done. Thirty-eight and well respected, always brought dry grain to store, as sure a thing as a farmer could be. This was Winslow Nettles.           “Winslow simply didn’t see his boy running across the field. He didn’t see Rodney climb onto the back of the tractor, hands filled with meatloaf and sweet corn wrapped in foil. Didn’t see Rodney’s boot slide off the hitch.           “Winslow dabbed his eyes with a filthy handkerchief. The tiller discs hopped. He whirled to see what he’d plowed, and back there lay a boy like something fallen from the sky.” (You can read more of Heathcock’s story at The Nervous Breakdown. ) Try to imagine writing that moment with literal language—a man looking at the body of his son, who he has just accidentally killed.  It’s hard to figure how one could do it without melodrama or sentimentality.  Or simply too much gore.  And so Heathcock turns to simile, and while the simile in no way gives the reader a clear picture of what the boy’s body looks like, it attaches an emotion to the sight, it changes the tone of the event entirely. Winslow’s son becomes a fallen bird, a tragic and yet somehow beautiful sight.  With, inevitably, a dose of Icarus thrown in. This is a useful trick in creative nonfiction as well.  The nonfiction writer is tied to the truth of what has really happened, and yet often the truth of what has happened doesn’t adequately convey the emotional truth of what happened. Being able to employ figurative language that moves beyond describing the literal to applying an emotional atmosphere can go a long way toward achieving greater truth. When student writers first start using figurative language they tend to make one of two mistakes: they apply metaphors and similes too randomly or they use clichés.  Pointing out that figurative language is often more an act of point of view than an act of description—that it is grounded in the language and world of the narrator and brings in the feelings of that narrator—can lead them away from those mistakes. ... View more

This post originally appeared on February 22, 2013. Yesterday I wrote a course description for next semester. It was due only a week ago, so I’m feeling pretty good about getting it done. I’m thinking about the course today, which I’ve titled “1968” and which will be on that historic year in arts and letters, in part because I haven’t chosen the texts yet (use comments section to suggest texts! There’s too much to choose from!). I have some idea of other texts I want to include, but kicking around ideas for possible fiction has gotten me thinking about the criteria I’m using for choosing course material. I’ve been looking for fiction that has characters that feel real, through whom my students can feel what it was like to be alive in 1968. I’ve been looking for fiction that paints a realistic picture, that captures 1968 in amber. And I’ve been looking for fiction that has something meaningful to say about 1968. 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. ... View more

This post originally appeared on February 19, 2013. I’m always looking for ways to explain to students how reading and writing about literature is relevant to what they’re doing in their other classes—while I might think it’s obvious that reading carefully and writing clearly about a poem is of enormous benefit, many of my students need a bit more persuasion. I need to be more direct about what it is that we’re actually doing.  My thoughts on this come in part because the longer that I’ve taught and the more students I’ve encountered, I’ve found myself persuaded by Gerald Graff and Cathy Birkenstein’s argument in They Say, I Say: while good students will intuit the moves the academic writers make, most students will not. 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. ... View more

Writing on the Edge is a new conference taking place on September 19th at College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn campus.  Macmillan/Bedford is one of the sponsors of this event, and I only wish I could be there.  It's so important for adjunct faculty to have opportunities for professional development and connection with colleagues around issues important to the adjunct community.  The program looks great, and I hope lots of people attend.  Kudos to the organizers for getting this started! For conference information and registration, visit http://www.writingontheedge.org/ ... View more

This blog was originally posted on February 15, 2013. Most of my LitBits blog posts have been focused on exercises or discussions aimed at motivating or inspiring the beginning writer. I’ve written craft exercises designed to help students mine their memories and interrogate their own lives. I’ve talked about helping student writers get over “writer’s block” and figure out just what they might write about. What I haven’t focused on, so much, is the intermediate or advanced nonfiction writer—the student who already has ideas and knows the basics of the genre, and who is ready to move on from “just getting started.” 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. ... View more

What if we experienced every classroom, and every moment spent in that classroom, as holding the potential for transformational teaching and learning? I try to remember this question at the beginning of every semester, and to revisit the question in challenging times. Last semester, pigeons built a nest underneath the sunshade blades in the window well of our classroom.  All spring, we watched the parents nesting, observed the mother sitting on the eggs, witnessed the arrival of the baby birds, and reveled as the entire family spent time together. The semester ended before the babies tried to fly on their own, but the lesson reinforced the work of the classroom: take notice of the details. Pay attention to transformational moments. This year, as I revised the Basic Writing Practicum course, I considered how to create a literacy autobiography assignment that would prove meaningful for teachers of Basic Writing.  Perhaps as teachers of Basic Writing, we can easily point to those moments in our personal histories that led us to become teachers. But what happens when the teaching honeymoon ends? What causes us to stick with our careers, especially under the difficult labor conditions of engendered by economic austerity—low pay, limited or non-existent benefits, crowded classrooms, and too many duties within those classrooms seemingly unrelated to the teaching of writing? How do we avoid burnout? Throughout the many years I have spent in classrooms across the United States, those transformational moments have helped me to stay focused.  In writing about such moments, I find that the deep concentration on specific details helps me to tease out the larger lessons from everyday circumstances. Indeed, in charting the progress of the pigeon family last spring, I remembered again the awe I felt at each separate stage, especially that moment so late in the term when we realized that the babies had arrived.  Suddenly the wonders of the natural world became visible up high in the window well, and the mood in the classroom brightened. That memory, germinating throughout the summer, has inspired a new version of an older assignment in my teacher education toolkit. The new version is copied below. I look forward to reading the response. ASSIGNMENT Literacy autobiography: Transformative learning experience with implications for BW pedagogy (theory and/or practice) RATIONALE: The literature of writing studies pedagogy offers many accounts of “teachable moments”—epiphanies that led the teacher/writer to a deeper understanding of pedagogy (theory and/or practice). Such moments fall outside the category of “lore,” which concentrates mostly on the “how to” and may present the teacher as hero or savior. Instead, transformational moments connect to the larger systemic and historical contexts of teaching and learning, and are more accurately described as epiphanies—transformational moments that lead to a change in theory and/or practice. Examples of transformational moments are offered below. Here are the details: TASK: Describe a transformational moment and/or learning experience in your life as a teacher that caused you to reflect more deeply on theories and practices of teaching writing. This piece should include references or hyperlinks that demonstrate the systemic and/or historical contexts of this moment. AUDIENCE: Imagine that you are writing a piece for submission to the “Instructional Notes” section of Teaching English in the Two-Year College, a guest blog for Bedford Bits, or another venue that publishes narratives of theory/practice. PURPOSE: To become more mindful of the exigencies of teaching and learning, to foster deeper awareness of the student-centered classroom as a site for developing theory/practice, and to add to the pedagogical literature in writing studies. FOCUS: For a central focus, your piece could concentrate on: 1.       A specific writing assignment; Fairness and Rights: Basic Writing and the Oil Boom 2.      A specific reading assignment; "Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You": Self-Disclosure and Lesbian and Gay Identity in the ESL Writing Classroom” Teaching Developmental Writing 3.      A specific class discussion; The Nice White Lady Tells a Thanksgiving Story 4.      An outside-of-class moment; “Harlem, Art, and Literacy “Fear and Resilience: For Trayvon Martin” 5.      Or some combination of the above. “Wounded Healing: Forming a Storytelling Community in Hip-Hop Lit” TDW 4e “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future Life of Willie Jordan” TDW 4e “Raw Material” TDW 4e Want to offer feedback, comments, and suggestions on this post? Join the Macmillan Community (it’s free, quick, and easy) to get involved! ... View more

This blog was originally posted on February 1, 2013. I’ve written before about linking the material world with literature, because it’s something I’m interested in as a scholar.  But it’s also something that, I think, often helps students delineate time periods of literature. I’ve used this idea when introducing students to different eras of British literature, especially when one of my course goals is to help students identify differences between those eras.  When I taught a survey of British literature after 1800, I spent time on the first day of each era showing students images of popular women’s fashions.  I simply pull up pictures (thank goodness for Google’s image search!), and together we examine the lines of the dresses and the accessories. This becomes most effective when we’re  moving from one time period to the next.  For example, when we began the Victorian era, I pulled up a couple of pictures we’d look at for the earlier part of the 19 th century (here are some Regency fashions) and then a large number of Victorian-style dresses and men’s fashions.  We were able to make some broad generalizations about some of the changes on mores, as suggested by the changes in styles of dress.  In addition to offering some general fun, the activity engaged the students visually and reminded them that as literature scholars, we can read all sorts of things—hats, vests, corsets, and bustles—as texts. ... View more