Robert Collins
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Collins—1
Robert Collins Prof. Alex Mueller ENGL 611 5/14/2013 Unit Plan — ENGL 3XX: The Novella
I. Rationale
1. Preamble What is it that I need to rationalize? This short1 text will serve a preamble to the lesson plans that follow it, and as such it will lay out the thoughts that seem to pervade or govern these lesson plans. It will establish the context of the course by naming its parts—texts, students, format, and so on. It will also address those things that, though they are important, lie outside the scope of any particular lesson plan. I will settle accounts with some of the pedagogical theory and methodology that I have come across. It will, lastly, serve as a space to explain some of the choices that I've made that seem either to demand explanation or are not readily visible as choices. Without further delay, then, let’s amble into the rationalization.
2. Rationale? I’ve hinted at this already: I like to learn “on the fly,” by which I mean I prefer to see how things unfold and to delay decisions until they are due. In practical terms, this is only to acknowledge that, as Bruns points out, “[w]hat students bring in to a class will necessarily affect what can and will happen in that class” (129). Each group of students is different, that is, and they have a certain sway in how things happen in the classroom. We shouldn’t resist this at all. Rather, we should embrace this fact and try to make our lessons as effective as possible for the disposition of each group and, ideal(istical)ly, each possible student. Though I’ve put it in terms of what “I like” to do, this acknowledgement is part and parcel of the move from teacher-centric to student- centric pedagogy. If you have already decided that you’re going to lecture for fifty minutes for each of the twenty-six meetings this semester, it hardly matters what group of bodies is sitting in front of you. If, however, you are interested in responding to students, in maximizing “uptake” based on
1 I wrote this word (“short”) in earnest, before I got carried away with polemics in section 3. It remains in the final draft for irony’s sake. Collins—2 who is doing the taking-up, in making what happens in the classroom “about them,” then I believe that you must suspend many of the decisions until you know which bodies are in front of you. This reminder will help us to avoid what Slavoj Žižek calls “false activity.” This, he claims, is the “typical strategy of the obsessional neurotic: he is frantically active in order to prevent the real thing from happening,” (27). I do not want to suggest – not at all – that student-centric pedagogical theorists are, unbeknownst to themselves, actually trying to sabotage the possibility of radical change in the classroom.2 I introduce this idea to call into suspicion the desire to take immediate and tangible action once a problem is identified. The problem that’s identified – for Bruns, the problem of teaching from stale theoretical and ideological positions – is precisely a problem of inappropriate action, and the understandable urge is to take action in the opposite direction: to stop doing it wrong, and to start doing it right. What if the problem is our belief in action itself, independent of what that action might be? How can we, I’m asking, decide what we’re going to do before we know who we’re doing it with? When Bruns, for example, says that “the instructor must […] provide students with […] activities and assignments that facilitate discovery,” (128) this assumes that self-determined discovery is the most effective way to induce every student to interact meaningfully with literature, and forecloses on the possibility of other methods being just as or more efficacious.3 In this case, the realization that one needs to be open to what students bring to the table paradoxically leads one to immediately take action such that they become closed again. Ideally, we will want to suspend that action until the last possible (or reasonable) moment. In this vein, I also want a brief Foucaldian4 point that applies to all process-based pedagogy. We need to entertain the possibility that the move from product- to process-based pedagogy is not as liberating as it is often presented. Blau writes: The same confusion that provokes a disciplined process of inquiry and reflection on the part of an experienced interpreter of texts may leave many students feeling lost not merely because they feel confused, but because they have no idea of what steps to take in order to enter into the interpretive process and make their confusion an occasion for learning. The approach I want to present […] is a workshop for students […] that enables them to experience how reading is a process and how much interpretive work they can do
2 Though there is, I must admit, a parable of liberalism at work here: we must make all of the necessary changes to the academy to ensure that the place of the academy in society does not change! This, I think, bears further reflection and is outside the scope of this course, but is interesting nevertheless. 3 Anecdotally, I myself was led to interact meaningfully with literature by auditing lectures. We should not dismiss the lecture format wholesale. If a group of students is precocious enough not to accept lectures dogmatically, but instead to treat them as arguments to be tested and disagreed with, then a lecture can actually generate a good deal of knowledge. In fact, the lecture is one of the main forms of knowledge-generation in our discipline, though it flies under the radar by the name of “talk” and, I’d argue, “book”. All methods, that is, are to be considered and used advisedly. 4 The argument I’m about to make is the mirror image of Foucault’s in the first volume of The History of Sexuality. Collins—3
largely on their own […] without the assistance of an expert teacher as the authoritative reader […], except insofar as the teacher sets the conditions for having students conduct what is framed as an experiment in reading poetry. (32)
The idea here is that Blau is going to show his students the potential for interpretive prowess that they already possess but has been repressed by traditional, teacher-centered pedagogy that ignores the reading process. The way to do this is to have them engage in a highly structured activity that involves (in the first step) reading the poem three times, rating one’s understanding after each reading, writing a reflection on the reading process, and writing any lingering questions (36). This is the interpretive work that the student is doing “largely on their own.” There is a paradox here: process-based pedagogy wants to claim that A. process is more important than product; B. we should therefore teach the process; and C. that process-based pedagogy is student- centered, democratic, and liberatory. The process is the most important thing to understanding a text; you’re doing this on your own; except for the process part, which you have to follow precisely as I have laid out. If we imagine the bad old days, in which students read in order to pass tests and write essays and to listen to lectures, the process was outside the purview of pedagogy (that is, outside of the apparatus of assessment and grading) and the student was therefore free to use whatever process he or she wanted. Process-pedagogy, far from “freeing up” the process and allowing students to do things “on their own,” actually drags all of this formerly “repressed” content into the classroom to be “workshopped” and into the gaze of the teacher. I have to argue, then, that process-based pedagogy is actually an expansion of the domain of the teacher in the writing process. I am not sure how I feel about this. On the one hand, I find much process-based pedagogy useful and effective for inducing students to interact meaningfully with literature, and, although it certainly is not as liberatory in the classroom as it is often described, structured activities like Blau’s above can become liberatory if those structures are eventually examined and peeled away. As we sometimes say about avant-garde artists, one must know the rules before one can break them. On the other hand, this assumes that meaningful interaction with literature is worthwhile in order to construct the syllogism: I. Interaction with literature is valuable. II. This value lies in the process of interaction. Collins—4
III. Therefore, we must teach the process in order to give students access to the value of literature. And maybe we have to assume this first step.5 This means, however, that the student who doesn’t find literature valuable in his or her life is wrong, or, like the student that Blau observed disrupting a class by interjecting “this play sucks!” into the discussion of Julius Caesar (21), simply unaware of how valuable they find literature. There is, even yet, an issue with the question. It’s not simply a matter of asking “Is literature valuable?” Brian Street argues that the concept “literacy” is not “autonomous.” That is, it is not a universal skill set that exists independently of any particular context, but is rather “inextricably linked to cultural and power structures in society” (433). There is no such thing as “literacy” that is always the same – and always desirable – wherever you might find it. Literacy instead always takes a certain form (as opposed to some other form) and is used for a certain purpose. If you still feel a bit of the wooziness of the post-structural revolution, you may say that everything we do is a kind of literacy, and that therefore this argument actually applies to everything. Even if you don’t want to go that far – I wouldn’t blame you – this is certainly true for reading literature. If we want to continue to use these terms, we can say that we are in the business of teaching “narrative literacy”: the ability to comprehend and use narratives for some or another purpose. For example, the argument that carries the day for Bruns is that literature is an object that can be used in transformative space, which blurs the boundaries of self and other, and helps the reader to grow as a person, and this is never far from her mind as she develops her pedagogical methodology. Bruns shows little awareness, however, of the contingency of the value she finds in literature, and an odd refusal to entertain other values, when she writes: “The conception of the use of transitional objects has the potential to provide a rationale for the arts as a whole that is sorely needed in our society” (122). It would seem that the value of art and literature is its ability to be used as a transitional object, and that, if we as a society missed the boat on realizing this, we would simply stop making art because we could not figure out why it was useful—for why else would this rationale be “sorely needed”? At any rate, I’m more than willing to admit that literature
5 This is unfair to Bruns, of course, who spends the better part of Why Literature? wrestling with this claim. Her book is essentially an extended working-out of this syllogism. As we shall see, however, once she finally “breaks through” and “discovers” literature’s use as a transitional object, this concept fills the frame and immediately forecloses on the possibility of any other values and uses of literature, including traditional scholarly approaches. Collins—5 can be used in transitional space – Bruns is very convincing on this point – but I’m also left wondering what other uses we can put literature to. Bruns’ use for literature is as a transitional object. Smith and Wilhelm “know that [they] love literature because it helps [them] think about critical questions” (9). I use literature as a source of historical insight, and as a source of interesting things to say (and, let’s not forget, that I will hopefully and happily be paid to say). This may not be true of my students. In order to teach effectively, that is, I will want to know what use my students have for literature, and try to put literature to work for them in that capacity; or, if they seem to have no use for literature, to help them find one. Bruns, in spite or because of the fact that she has put so much thought and effort into her rationale, is prepared to impose her rationale on her students. For it is surely the case that the process of interaction with literature overlaps with the use that we have for it. They might even be the same thing, as it’s hard to imagine using something without interacting with it via some process or another. The problem that I’ve been trying to develop here is that we often assume that the use that we have for literature is the correct use – that it’s an object that’s used in transitional space – and that therefore the process that we have is the correct process – cycling from immersion to reflection and back to immersion – and hence foreclose on other uses or processes. When we hear about the “use” or the “value” of literature, we should immediately ask: value for whom, to do what? Similarly, we should not ask ourselves as teachers “How should we teach literature?” but instead “To whom should we teach literature and for what?” If it is the case that people are using literature less today than they ever have, it’s because the lives we lead seem to have little use for literature, not because we’ve forgotten how useful it is. Our task as teachers, then, should be answer the question: “How can literature be of use to me?” I try to make this happen in my lessons—see, for example, Syllabus Day, in which I have students create a reading profile. It’s not unusual either for professors to eschew the generic “final paper” that caps each course in favor of a “final project,” with several options that allow students to discuss literature in a way that they can fully engage with, as I’ve done. Though this practice will often — more often than we like to admit, perhaps — result in students choosing the option that seems the “easiest”, I believe that earnest engagement with this kind of assignment is very Collins—6 profitable for students and professors (who wants to grade twenty term papers?) and for this reason I put it to work in my course. Now, at the end of the day, this is a rather large contingency, and it makes it hard to anticipate what, exactly, I’ll be doing on each day of class. It’s hard for me to imagine, sitting here, exactly what use a group of twenty college juniors will have in mind for literature, or whether the use that they have in mind is in need of some tweaking. I don’t think this is necessarily a cop-out, and I’ve tried to avoid this by using forms in which students have wiggle room, like the final project(s) above. It is also, I think, understood that one should prepare to be derailed in even the most meticulously planned class. All the same, I would like to remain open to the pleasant and unpleasant surprises that each group can offer: some groups may participate in group work only doggedly, while others may be plagued with stage-fright and resist the idea of presenting to the class. For this reason – and here you’ll find the slim fruits of this polemical departure – I have tried to make my lesson plans as formalistic as possible and use several different genres of activity. By “formalistic” I mean that I’ve tried to make it so that texts can be dropped into the lesson with only a little modification; 6, 7 by “genres” I mean things like group work, silent reading and writing, class discussion, working in pairs, and so on. If a class seems to get the most out of group work, then I ought to be able to repeat those group work lessons that seemed most effective; in general, I can modify things on the fly. That rationality that unifies my unit plan is, therefore, the rationality of the toolbox.
3. On Mood and ‘tude in the Classroom This may be the most important thing: I want to students to be comfortable in the way they talk about literature, and I want them to enjoy it. I want to ensure that students are comfortable. This is to say I want to create a mood in the classroom that is relaxed, informal, and open. We should be good Marxists here and not let ourselves stray too far from the material conditions of the classroom. It is our good luck that we can take for granted what we think of as necessities: electric light, a comfortable temperature, a stable schedule, desks, books, chalk- and
6 With the signal exception of Lesson 7, The Classroom of Crossed Destinies, which could really only work with Calvino’s novella. 7 I’ll admit that the carriage came before the horse here: you may remember that I used the idea of formalism in my second mini-paper (on Renoir’s essay about cinematography and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight), but without this somewhat lengthy rationale for it. I favor this kind of formalism even more strongly now, but I also distrust myself for this reason. We should always be suspicious when we come out of lengthy meditations believing what we already believe all the more. Collins—7 whiteboards, and a certain minimum of digital technology. All of these things ought to be present in my classroom. Alongside these material “necessities”, however, we can think about the arrangement of desks and tables. Foucault, in an interesting conversation with some French Maoists, argues that the “spatial arrangement” of bodies in the traditional bourgeois courtroom “implies [at the very least] an ideology” (8). The point (for us here and now) is that the way bodies are arranged in space is dialectically related to how those bodies relate to each other: arrangement structures and creates relationships; relationships manifest in certain arrangements. These relations (of knowledge production, let’s say) are precisely what’s entailed by the Marxist notion of materialism, and it’s this that I want to dwell on. How best to arrange bodies in a classroom? It depends, as I’ve tried to argue, on what you want those bodies to do. The arrangement of bodies that I find most suitable for honest and almost-democratic discussion is the circle or semi-circle. Think of the rooms in which our graduate seminars take place. We could call them circles, but, in practice, they seem to invariably take the form of a semi-circle, with the professor at the “open” end by the white board, and with most or all of the discussion being addressed to and mediated through that open end. Students, it seems, rarely talk to each other during discussion, and instead listen while others talk to the professor. This is certainly one way to have a discussion, and it is certainly tied up with the way our bodies are distributed in the room. I’m interested to try arranging desks in a genuine circle, but I’m not sure how to do this without absconding myself from the discussion – as we’ll be doing the day that this assignment is due – and yet without having the conversation be always under my evaluative gaze.8 I haven’t yet got any good solutions to this problem, and so it does not appear in any of my lesson plans. Now, I have not attended a great many undergraduate classes here at UMass Boston. I’ve sat in with several freshman composition classes, and I’ve regularly attended the course for which I’m the TA. In all of these classrooms the desks have been arranged in the traditional forward- facing grid: seven rows of five (or whatever) pointed at the chalkboard and projector screen. This is an appropriate arrangement for a lecture, where there are slides and notes on the chalkboard,
8 To put it like this is a bit jargon-y, but I think this evaluative gaze may be the primary hurdle for student-centric pedagogy, as it’s the locus of both the fetishization of grades (as opposed to the gain in knowledge and skill that they are meant to signify) and that weird modification of desire where students want only to find out what the professor wants from them in a given assignment so that they can give them that. In certain circles we’d call the student a “service top” for this kind of behavior. Collins—8 and you’ve got one person who’s telling everyone else what they need to know in order to pass the exam. However effective lectures may be for certain subjects and lessons — and I truly believe that they are9 — I want to privilege discussion for the better part of my class, and this means that we’ll need to remodel the classroom. The days are gone in which the desks are bolted to the floors; let’s take advantage of this fact! I would like to experiment with circles and semi-circles: if we’re genuinely in a circle, can we avoid the professor-as-mediator phenomenon? Is that desirable? I’m not entirely sure, and I’d like to find out empirically. I do believe, however, that this arrangement will facilitate more enthusiastic discussions. Another facet of “mood” that can be manipulated is language itself. I’d like to promote a level of discourse that does not get too high-falutin. I surely would like students to “try on” academic jargon – primarily in writing – and find out what kinds of insights that it enables them to make. At the same time, however, I suspect — and, as you probably know, try to put to work — that “low” forms of expression (slang, vernacular, idiom, the people’s tongue, even swearing) allow for the expression of certain ideas with a kind of immediacy and accessibility that academic language in- and prohibits. I find it very useful and interesting to talk about complicated ideas in vulgar ways, and to talk about vulgar ideas in sophisticated ways. This, I think, is the source of the wonder I feel when I read writers like David Foster Wallace, Samuel Beckett and Slavoj Žižek: this dialectical union of the high and low — the lofty and the earthen, the angelic and the demonic — seems to me to bring together — perversely, you may say — education and entertainment. And there it is: perhaps what I want is to trick my students into enjoying literature class. This, actually, seems to me to be the cause of “the decline of reading,” if there is such a thing: literary reading doesn’t seem to be as entertaining or as pleasurable as competing forms of entertainment. It seems to be dry and stale work that yields no pleasure. We should not forget that literature has, for a long time, been a form of distraction or entertainment. And for all of the wonderful benefits that we love to enumerate – it teaches critical thinking, it gives us historical insight, it’s a test tube in which philosophical ideas battle it out, it’s an object in transitional space, and so on – we must acknowledge that it needs to be fun in order to compete with other forms of narrative. This doesn’t necessarily mean we should make literature into an apparatus of instant gratification through cheap jokes but we need to find a way to make the payoff of the long hours
9 For all of my formalism I did not put a lengthy lecture lesson plan into this assignment. Given the method of presentation I’ve chosen, this would have been far too lengthy and boring. Know, however, that it’s always in my back pocket. Collins—9 we spend thinking about literature both rewarding and pleasurable. Perhaps, in the same way that I’ve argued that structuring the reading process can be useful so long as we recognize that the structure needs to be stripped away eventually, we can similarly argue that we need to make the process pleasurable until students learn to find the product pleasurable. This is, again, something I’d like to work with empirically, but the most immediate application – again, slim fruits! – is that I don’t mind cracking jokes or speaking outside of the King’s English in the classroom. I’ve tried to make this visible in my lesson plans by presenting them as monologues which, while the gain in the unit plan’s length you may find regrettable, also brings with it certain advantages, which are enumerated below.
4. The Course Playlist An idea that I have toyed with incorporating into my unit — though it won’t show up in any lesson plan — is the course playlist. I take this idea from my recent experience as a student. This semester in the days that followed each meeting of our seminar on British modernism, my colleague Dan Metzger circulated among a few classmates a list of songs that were in some way related to whatever film or novel we had discussed. “Anarchy in the UK” for Conrad’s The Secret Agent (which is about anarchists, in the UK) and the Beastie Boys’ “Sabotage” for Hitchcock’s adaptation of that novel (called Sabotage) spring immediately to mind as examples of the – admittedly superficial – connections that we made to popular music. However, as the semester rolled on it became a class-sanctioned activity, as we were asked by our professor to have a few songs ready to play during that short time before class when students begin to trickle in. Our decisions and connections, then, would have to be made while in the process of reading, rather than from reflection on our extended seminar discussions. I found myself reading Dubliners, for example, with an eye and an ear for what songs might rhyme with certain passages and stories — The Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go” for “Eveline,” Devo’s “Whip It” for “An Encounter” and “Counterparts,” or Billy Bragg & Wilco’s “At My Window Sad and Lonely” for fully a third of the stories in the collection. I am also reminded, as I write this, of a professor from my undergraduate days playing the video for R.E.M.’s “Losing My Religion” the day we discussed Marquez’s “A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” because a good deal of the imagery of the former is derived from the latter. Collins—10
Is this a productive mode of reading? This isn’t entirely clear to me. It didn’t seem to be detrimental, at least, and for this reason I think it’s worth trying out as a semester-long exercise. We might speculate that it generates interest by connecting course readings to something the student is already interested in and familiar with; perhaps it will show the student other participants in the thematic conversation at work in our readings (cf. Smith & Wilhelm 9); this might function as a thermometer for me, the professor, to indicate what students found noteworthy in the text (windows in Dubliners, for example, seem noteworthy); and it’s certain that this exercise will generate a loose and relaxed mood in the classroom, which, as I’ve said, I am quite interested in generating. These are all reasons that the course playlist could be effective, so we feel authorized to give it the old college try. Now, how to implement this? I take it for granted that the classroom will have the technology to facilitate this, whether it’s plugging in an iPod or playing YouTube clips or playing a CD. In the time between classes, when the reading is (we hope) being done, I might ask students to email me their ideas, from which I would select three or four to play before class. This would commit me to being in the classroom early every day, which, eager though I am now, might be asking too much. Another option, one that would seem more appetizing in an especially motivated and precocious class, is to have one or two students organize it on their own: they would be in charge of generating most of the ideas as well as fielding suggestions from classmates and sorting through them. This certainly gels with the idea of the “specialist” some writers have advocated for (see, e.g. Bruns). It may take time to get off of the ground, however, as I would want to assess the dynamic of the classroom and ensure that the cohesion necessary to organize outside of class was available. It seems to me that this exercise will work itself out and perfect itself in real time — at which time I’ll be more than happy to issue a full report and methodology — but we must know where to begin, and so here I’ve laid out a few thoughts about implementation.
5. Technology and Its Lack There is little engagement with technology in my unit plan. On these pages I don’t even fire up the projector. I’m not ready to cite a lack of creativity for this: rather, it seems to me that most of the pedagogical uses of technology in circulation these days happen outside of the classroom. Socialbook, for example, although a fascinating exercise in collective reading and one I’d like to incorporate into my teaching, is hard to get “on the page” in a lesson plan that only covers the fifty Collins—11 minutes that students are in class. And when technology is used in the classroom, it’s to do something that we were already doing without it (the leap from transparencies and projectors to digital projectors, for example, or the move from whiteboard to powerpoint). I’m selling technology rather short here (and, knowing your disposition, you probably think I’m a kind of luddite): this is about the same as saying that a laptop and a typewriter are effectively interchangeable. But it’s also true that I didn’t feel its lack as I was composing, and it’s only now as I’m wrapping up that I’ve noticed that my students and I are still in the age of ink and paper. This may be a subtle conservatism within me, but I am open to (as always) changing my ways after empirical observation.
6. The Course All of this now being said, we can now lay bare the details of the course I plan to teach. The course that I’m imagining is for three credits, and will meet for fifty minutes every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.
I. The Topic The course will treat “The Novella.” Most, but not all, of our readings (see below) will be narratives of roughly 100 pages, most written in what we might call the “long twentieth century.” The novella, I think, will be a fecund and unique topic for a literature class. Few novellas are “canonized,” and when something novella-esque is canonized, it is often poled off as either a short story (Heart of Darkness is a staple of short story anthologies) or a novel (Nabokov’s first publication, Mary, or Beckett’s Mercier and Camier – each roughly 100 pages – come to mind). I’d like to reclaim some middle ground for the novella as a form, and without deigning to engage in my own generic imperialism. Melville House’s series of publications, The Art of the Novella (which is, in its own way, responsible for my choice of topic), wants to claim Mrs. Dalloway as a novella, which is, I think, pushing it. Qu’est-ce que la novella? 100 pages seems to be the nice, round number around which this genrification oscillates. This is awfully arbitrary, of course, but the commonsense alternative – longer than a short story, shorter than a novel – seems just as unsatisfactory. Whatever the case may be, length is certainly the primary criterion. If whatever number we put on it seems arbitrary, we can live with that—so long as it’s understood that “the novella” names that awkward middle- ground where prose fiction fails to be a short story and fails to be a novel: 100 pages is simply the Collins—12 convenient round number where this seems to happen. We’ll be engaging the question “what else is a novella?” in the class, and I’d like to remain as open as possible about what this form obliges and what it precludes. I think we can say with some validity, though, that one reason for the novella’s denigration as a genre is that it’s hard to publish them: they seem too short to publish as a standalone narrative, but once they’re put into a story collection they become a short story. If the class gets to the point of critiquing the publishing industry, all the better. But we’ll be wondering primarily if there seem to be any thematic patterns emerging.
II. The Audience I’ve made the course putatively junior-level (English 3XX), but this should be enforced by prerequisite. Students will need to have taken the university’s basic literature survey (Six American or Five British Authors at UMass Boston, I think) in order to enroll. I ask for this so that my students will have some experience in a literature classroom, so that they will have an idea of what novels and short stories look like, so that they will have some background knowledge in literary history, and so that they’ll be used to the goings-on in both a literature classroom and in a college classroom in general.
III. The Texts I plan on using nine primary texts for the course, though I won’t have a lesson on each of them in the unit plan. There will also be some non-novella secondary sources sprinkled in. I plan on teaching, in roughly this order, these novellas: Competition 1. The Duel by Joseph Conrad (1908) 2. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson (1886) 3. Cactus Thorn by Mary Austin (1923) Pursuit 4. Lady Susan by Jane Austen (ca. 1794) 5. The Dead by James Joyce (1914) 6. The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon (1966) Alienation 7. Notes from Underground by Fyodor Dostoevski (1864) 8. The Castle of Crossed Destinies by Italo Calvino (1973) Collins—13
9. Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way by David Foster Wallace (1989)
I take from Smith and Wilhelm the impetus to “embed [my] instruction in inquiry units that focus on essential questions,” with the exception that my units are organized not by questions but by topics (9). These topics could be easily recast as several productive questions: with whom do we compete? Can competition be productive? Can it be destructive? What do we get out of competition? For just this reason I think it’s worthwhile to, again, avoid false activity by leaving the questions open, so that I don’t unnecessarily privilege one question over another. And while I admit that it is certainly the case that I’m foreclosing on certain possibilities by assigning even a topic – the first group could just as easily fall categorized as “The Double,” which doesn’t necessarily connote competition – but, at the end of the day, there must be some kind of organization, and this seems to be a middle ground between coaching students on proper reading posture on the one hand and sitting comatose, head-on-desk at the front of the classroom while students decide on their own what they want to think about these texts on the other. This seems like a large number of texts to me, but if I give three days (one week) to each novella, which is reasonable, I’m left with around four weeks of class time to play around with. From these extra twelve meetings we can take the first day of class, extra time spent on more complicated texts, time to workshop projects, perhaps a week for some kind of presentation, and time to dedicate to secondary sources. These moments – those not spent teaching a certain text but are rather in some kind of supporting role – are, I think, just as important as the time spent teaching the texts, and so I’ve tried to represent many of them in my lesson plans: I’ve got a lesson plan for the first day of class, which I think is the crucial day for creating the right mood in the classroom; I’ve got a day dedicated to workshopping projects; I’ve spent half of a lesson plan on mid-semester evaluation. This is yet another way in which I’ve tried to suspend the decision of how to teach: by spending time on those things that we must do that are not quite teaching but, in this last case, learning how to teach the students in the classroom.
IV. Objectives Throughout the semester, I want my students: To learn (or continue) to enjoy the fruits of earnest and thoughtful engagement with literature and earnest discussion about literature. Collins—14
To consider what, if anything, distinguishes a novella from other prose forms. To practice discussing – that is, speaking conversationally under the pressure of time – literature in large and small groups. To practice writing – that is, creating utterance without time pressure, and therefore time to polish – about literature in various genres. To grow (or continue) to enjoy the rewards of careful thinking about literature. To be able to compare and contrast different texts in categories like form, theme, and genre. To learn how to assess the thoughts of other people in a way that is empathetic, sympathetic, and at the same time critical. Put another way, to think critically without hostility. As Alain de Botton put it in a recent tweet (heaven help me): “Honest evaluation never has to involve meanness: nastiness and criticism are logically entirely distinct.”
V. Assessment I struggled with the problem of assessment, and I’m not sure that I’ve come cleanly out of that struggle. I had little problem naming the qualities that I’ll be looking for: I want my students to participate earnestly in discussions and activities. This is, I think, in the assessment of every single lesson plan below. It’s hard for me to pin down exactly what I mean by “earnestness.” I surely don’t want to conflate it with “seriousness.” Maybe it’s “sincerity” that comes closest (Žižek will argue that today what we’re most sincere about must be said under the cloak of ironic detachment, and hence will appear not-at-all serious). Perhaps I just want them to be involved as though they wanted to be involved, as though they weren’t obliged to be. This amounts to simply forgetting that they’re obliged to be involved for, try as I might, I can’t dismantle the whole apparatus by which I’m the Grand Obliger of the classroom. So let’s say by earnestness I mean something like sincere, self-motivated engagement. This is what I want first and foremost, but the problem is that it’s hard to assess in a way that’s “objective” or quantitative. I think I’ll factor this into the grade as “Participation” and simply try to quantify it as a percentage at the end of the semester. In order to minimize the effect of bias or subjectivity I’d want to make it no more than 15% of the final grade. There will be some mid-semester project not represented here—perhaps a short project, or a week for short presentations. I’ve also presented here the prompts and rubrics for a final project, in which I give students room to maneuver and write in a way that they find Collins—15 useful and stimulating. The rubrics by which I’ll be assessing these projects are attached below as artifacts. Because I’ll be spending so much time on workshopping these projects (represented in part here), I feel comfortable making this a large portion of their grade, something like 35%. There are some gaps in the percentage points that will need to be filled. Depending on how much I’d like weigh the mid semester project, I may fill this in with attendance. If we make the midterm something like 25%, this leaves 15% unaccounted for. A sociology course I took long ago10 had an attendance system that rewarded perfect attendance with bonus points, and punished lax attendance by penalizing students’ grades after a certain point. The way I could incorporate this idea is the following: Perfect attendance = 30 percentage points toward the student’s final grade (i.e. 15 bonus points) One absence = 25 percentage points Two absences = 20 percentage points Three absences = 15 points (i.e. the student “breaks even”) … Six absences = 0 percentage points, and the best you can do is an 85%. The feasibility of this plan depends on the policies of the department and the university by which I’m employed, of course, but it seems sound in principle.
10 Taught by Professor Jerome Koch at Texas Tech University. Collins—16
II. Lesson Plans My lessons will take the form of dramatic monologues. o Monologues because I do not wish to speculate about what students will say in response to what I say. Taking on the student's voice always comes off as a little strained and inauthentic. o I will report in plain prose (no quotation marks or speaker identification) on what I can imagine myself saying in order to get students doing the activities I've designed. o Actions, explanations, and other supplementary information will be enclosed by brackets. o Some of my lesson plans will be a bit lengthier for this reporting method, but, as I’ve argued about the reading process in the rationale, what you’re doing is inseparable from how you’re doing it: what you want your students to do is necessarily founded on how you get them to do it. o This is by no means a script from which I would be reading in class, but is rather mean to convey the ideas that I would want to get across and, just as importantly, the way in which they are said. o I’ve argued for a loose and informal mood in the classroom, and that one way – perhaps the best and only way – to create that mood is in the way the professor addresses the class. These lesson plans are meant to demonstrate that mode of address. o It’s my hope that there’s no great loss of clarity for this mode of reportage, but if there is I need to know about it: this is what the students will be hearing, and it’s crucial that they have a clear idea of what they are meant to do. Most of the lessons have 3-4 minutes set aside at the beginning for “housekeeping”. By this I mean things like taking roll, addressing any general questions that are in the air, giving reminders about assignments that loom, and arranging the desks into a semi-circle. When artifacts come up that are present in the lesson plan, I’ve made hyperlinks to that portion of my text. Collins—17
In the “Context” section I set the scene for the lesson, and where necessary provide a small rationale. Collins—18
Lesson 1: Syllabus Day
Context: This is the first day of class. Some students may hope for a short session in which we simply gloss the important sections of the syllabus and go on our way, but this will not be the case.
Objectives: Students should walk out the door... · ...knowing the the expectations and trajectory of the course. · ...a bit more familiar with their professor and classmates than when they walked in. · ...with heightened awareness of how reading works in their life, how it could work, and how they would like it to work.
Materials: Syllabi; reading profile handouts; knowledge of your own self.
Lesson: [Getting situated—2-3 minutes] Is it time? Alright, I think it's time, so let's get started. The first thing I want to do is to have us circle-up. I like to have the desks in a semi-circle so that we’re all sort of looking at each other, and we'll probably be doing this every class, so why don't we get some practice in. Let’s give it a shot. We’ve got about sixteen people here, so why don’t we start [point] here and end [point] here and make a kind of arc in between. [Joke about English majors’ aversion to math and geometry]. [Students REARRANGE DESKS, compliantly.] [Name game—5-10 minutes]11 Not bad. We’ll get better as the semester progresses. OK, so we’re going to be talking to each other a lot in this class, so it’s important that we know each other’s names. This is also how
11 The source of this exercise is not clear to me, but I do recall hearing of it – or something very similar – somewhere. I feel like the person who told me about it saw it in Sari Edelstein’s class. This is also a slight variant of an activity you (Alex Mueller) demonstrated at the beginning of the semester. The first entry in my notes for this course, you may be interested to know, is “Learn the fuckin’ names!” Collins—19
I’ll take attendance for today. What’s going to happen is this: I will tell everyone my name, and where I’m from, and what I study. Then you [POINT to someone at one end of the semi-circle] will repeat my name and then tell us your own name – the one that you prefer to go by – where you’re from, and your major. The next person down the line [POINT at them if you like] we then repeat my name, your name [POINT to first person again], give us their information; and so on, so that you [POINT to the person at the other end of the semi-circle], poor soul, will have to try to rattle off everyone else’s names by the time it comes to you. At which time it’ll come back to me and I’ll try to get everyone’s name right. Also, if someone gets your name wrong you should definitely mention that, but not, like, scornfully, if you can help it. Everyone clear on this? Great, I’ll start. My name is Robert Collins – call me Professor Collins for now – and I am originally from Texas. I studied literature, of course, and I got my bachelor of arts from Texas Tech University – college football fans will probably know that one – I got my masters from the University of Massachusetts Boston, and my Ph.D. from ______. Alright [TURN to FACE the next speaker], no pressure. Who are you? [As the activity makes its way around, PAY ATTENTION to who’s speaking, FIND them on the attendance sheet, and MARK them as present. If they go by a different name on the roll sheet, CONFIRM that it’s them, and WRITE the preferred name next to the given name. When the circle is completed, try your best to GET EVERYONE’S NAME RIGHT but don’t beat yourself up if you mess up.] [Syllabus—10-15 minutes] Of course, that activity is meant to help me as much as it is you all, as there’s nothing quite as embarrassing as calling someone named “Jason” “Jared” for an entire semester. If I do something like that, please correct me. Please. I’m going to send this around now, the moment you’ve all been waiting for. [DISTRIBUTE syllabi around the semi-circle.] This is the syllabus of this course, English 3XX, The Novella. We’re going to read some novellas. What’s a novella? Well, that’s something we’ll be asking ourselves throughout the semester. For the purpose of choosing the texts for this class – which I had to do before I could get your input, sorry – I thought of a novella as a piece of prose fiction that’s about 100 pages in length. Our shortest text will be just over 60 pages, the longest about 160. The novella, without troubling ourselves about the numbers, occupies that weird space in which it’s too long to be a short story, but too short to be a novel. Since it’s neither of those things, but it’s got Collins—20 to be something – you know, we like to know what things are – why don’t we just call it a novella? I’m not certain that there’s anything more to a novella than that: this is my first time teaching this course, and so we’ll be co-enquirers, and we’ll try to find out if there’s anything else we can definitely say about the novella whenever we finish up in three and a half months. We’ll ask ourselves – and all of this is on the syllabus – we’ll ask: how would this story be different if it were shorter or longer? And it’s not exactly about what we might call “story time”: most of these novellas tell stories that take place over a week or two; some happen on single day; a couple will last for years and years; and one exists in a weird sort of timeless place, or a couple of timeless spaces. We’ll see about that later. We’ll be wondering for each of these texts, though, why is this story a novella? But we’ll also be reading these stories as, simply, stories that are interesting. We’ll ask ourselves if they were worth reading, if we’d recommend them to others to read; if we know anything for having read them. We’ll talk about themes, and plots, and characters, and “meanings”, and all of that stuff, and we’ll wonder if we can learn anything about history from these novellas, and we’ll hopefully have a good time with it. [GO OVER the schedule and texts and all that. TELL students that they need to get The Duel, at least, like immediately if they haven’t already. TELL them the attendance policy (see the rationale for that)] The last thing we’ll talk about from the syllabus – there’s stuff after this, but it’s the standard stuff (don’t plagiarize, where you should go for disability accommodation or if you need to observe a religious holiday) that, while I certainly believe in it and you should take note of it, is on every syllabus and I assume you know it by now. But the last thing we’ll talk about is the level of discussion we’ll be having. It’s on page ___ of the syllabus, under the heading DISCUSSION. This is important to me, so we’re going to go over it really quickly. [READ or GLOSS this section aloud]. Does that make sense to everyone? I want to underline the fact that this doesn’t mean that we won’t be doing some serious thinking and deliberating in the class. One thing I’m trying to undermine, I’ll show you my card right now, is the idea that people don’t think well or at all just because they don’t speak like people who we assume are doing all of the good thinking. I want you guys to talk, and to be comfortable and confident enough to tell us what you think, and I suspect that we’re most comfortable and confident and do our best thinking when we’re speaking naturally. [Reading Profile—Time Remaining] Collins—21
The corollary to this is the fact that the way you talk about literature has almost everything to do with what you want to do with literature and who you want to do it with. If you want to be sort of where I’m at, in the community of academics and professors, then you’ll need to know how to speak and write in academic English, and you’ll need to get to the point where you can do it “naturally” so it doesn’t get in the way of what you’re thinking. If that’s what you want to do, we’ll work on that. If you simply want to read in order get, like the title of one of Gary Cooper’s old movies, a Design for Living, then you really have need of being able to write like that. What we’ll want for you then is to be able to read these novellas and pull some insights out, and to be able to articulate these insights in such a way that they’re intelligible to you. The best way to do that, I think, is to make them intelligible to other people; and so this isn’t like a way to cop-out of discussion and writing. This is a long way of saying that I want to know what it is you want to do with literature, what use you think you’ll get out of reading these novellas, so that I can help you get that use. In order to facilitate this, I’ve designed a short reading profile that I want you guys to fill out [PASS it around] that will let me know your background of readers, the kinds of things that you read and like to read, and where you’d like to be in the future. This is certainly not for a grade, and no one will see it but me. Please note that there is stuff on the back of the page. It’s a little cramped, and I apologize for that: just be creative with your use of speace. [Students FILL OUT profiles. If time runs out they can TAKE THEM HOME and BRING THEM BACK next time. Be sure to put the desks back in order.]
Assessment: No formal or quantitative assessment. There is, of course, assessment of the reading profiles in order to ascertain what the group on your hands is like. This will be done by reading the completed reading profiles. Collins—22
Lesson 2: The Duel – Day One. Free Interpretation. Free Writing. Passage Analysis.
Context: This is the first day of “class”. Students will have read the first half of Conrad’s The Duel – that is, up to page 53. The novella is certainly identifiable as Conrad’s: two officers in Napoleon’s army have an absurd duel in the garden of a house in an occupied town (because there’s nowhere else to do it) because one officer, Lieutenant D’Hubert, interrupted the other, Lieutenant Feraud, with official business from a superior while Feraud was in the salon of a lady about town. This first duel is inconclusive, and they end up dueling over and over again for decades for no reason whatever. This is apparently a “true” story, to an extent.
Objectives: Students will walk out of the room… …with what they find most intriguing about The Duel set down in writing. …more familiar with the dispositions of their classmates. …with knowledge of what others found most intriguing about The Duel. …better understanding the motivation of Lieutenant D’Hubert. ….knowing how to pronounce “D’Hubert” and “Feraud”.
Materials: Whiteboard; handouts with passages from The Duel and questions.
Lesson: [Housekeeping—3-4 Minutes] OK, why don’t we circle up again like last time. I’m going to call roll. In order to make sure your names “stick”, however, I’ll ask that, when I say your name, you don’t raise your hand and instead let me try to point you out. [Take roll, ask if anyone has questions re: the syllabus, and so on.] [Free Interpretation—5-7 minutes] The first thing we’re going to do today is an exercise I’m quite fond of. I call it “Free Interpretation”. It’s a close-reading exercise. I’m going to write a short passage on the board [you can write it before class if you want to]. Today it’ll be from The Duel, but in the future we may do a pop song, or a short poem, or an advertising jingle, or a photo, or whatever. It won’t always be Collins—23 related to what we’re reading. Your job will then be to say interesting things about the passage: using what knowledge you have, you can say whatever you want about it. Maybe you see some allusion to some other text, maybe there’s an interesting word choice, maybe it’s racist in some way that’s not immediately apparent. Who knows. You’ll basically be asking yourself why it says X instead of Y, and what it means that it says X. Yeah? We’ll give it a shot. [“He proposed to himself to return presently in a more regular manner and beg forgiveness for interrupting the interesting conversation… A bare arm was extended towards him with gracious nonchalance even before he had finished speaking. He pressed the hand respectfully to his lips, and made the mental remark that it was bony. Madame de Lionne was a blonde, with too fine skin and a long face. ‘C’est ca!’ she said, with an ethereal smile, disclosing a set of large teeth. ‘Come this evening to plead for your forgiveness.’ ‘I will not fail, madame.’”] OK, so there it is. Does anything leap out to anybody as interesting? [Try your best to stay quiet and let them talk. Things to point to, if they’re quiet: “C’est ca!” = that’s it. What’s it? What is she responding to? What’s with Madame de Lionne’s bones that they’re so interesting? Why is she “a blonde” and not simply “blonde”? Why does Lieutenant D’Hubert propose “to himself” to return? Why is it necessary to say that? A few minutes of discussion as a warm up is all that’s required. If things seem juicy, ride it for a while, but no more than 10 minutes.] [Free Write12 and Discussion—10-15 minutes] OK, that was good, thanks. Now we’re going to do some writing. First, though, a quick primer on French pronunciation. There are, you’ve noticed, several short French phrases sprinkled throughout the novella, which makes a kind of sense since it takes place in France. Since we’ll be talking and reading aloud a lot, I think we ought to know how to pronounce the names of our main characters. Any Francophones in the class? How does one pronounce the names of our lieutenants? [doo-BEAR, fair-OWE]. Yes, the French language has a nasty habit of totally
12 I’ve taken this activity from you, of course. Collins—24
neglecting the consonants that come at the end of words unless they simply have to pronounce them. That out of the way, I want to do a quick free write. We’ll be doing this from time to time throughout the semester. I’m going to write a question on the board, and you get to write whatever you want in response to it. I’ll never ask for you to turn them in, but I may ask for you volunteers to read or summarize what they’ve written. So here’s what I want you to write about. It’s a widely held belief among us academics that a great piece of literature will always have a strong and interesting opening passage. We’re going to put that to the test. Let’s open our books to the first paragraph of The Duel. [Napoleon I, whose career had the quality of a duel against the whole of Europe, disliked duelling between the officers of his army. The great military emperor was not a swashbuckler, and had little respect for the tradition.”] It’s two sentences, can someone read those sentences? [Get someone to READ them. WRITE on the board: “Why does Napoleon’s opinion of dueling matter to the story?”] I’m going to give you, say, four or five minutes to write everything you can in response to this question. Let it take you where you will. Go. [The students WRITE. You keep time. When time is up, ask for volunteers to read their freewrite aloud. Restate what they wrote in other words, find some topic that it fits into, and ask if anyone wrote on the same topic, and if they would read what they have. Find similarities and differences in their responses. Ask if anyone wrote on something completely different, and so on. Discuss for 9-10 minutes.] [Passage Analysis—Remainder of Period] For the rest of the time now we’re going to get into three groups. [COUNT out students 1-2- 3, 1-2-3, etc.] Go ahead and move into your groups now, move the desks as you see fit. Ones here, twos here, threes here. We’re going to move from the big picture – Napoleon dueling against the whole of Europe – to the small picture – Feraud dueling D’Hubert. The question we’re going to be asking ourselves is: why? Why are they dueling? We’re going to be asking right now from the perspective of D’Hubert, and I’ve chosen three passages where we may get some insight into this. [Give each group a sheet with their passage on it. See Artifact Number 3. Walk around and monitor discussion as it unfolds. Field questions that arise. If time allows, move into an answer-sharing discussion. Note the similarities and the differences found in D’Hubert’s motivation. Note that the Collins—25 first two passages are from the first duel, and the last is from the second. How does D’Hubert’s thinking change from the first to the second?]
Assessment: I’ll be looking for students who to say things that are both reasonable and non-obvious about the passages we talk about. I’ll want them to participate earnestly in group discussion, to be able to work out disagreements or know when to let them ride and move on, and to be able to disagree with civility. I’ll want them to be able to respond to each other, and not do the thing where you say “Well, going off of what s/he said…” and then say something completely unrelated to the thing that s/he said. This assessment will all happen by monitoring the discussion as it takes place. Collins—26
Lesson 3: Reading Criticism—Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Context: We’ve finished and had our own discussions about what’s going in in Jekyll and Hyde. Students ought to have a clear idea of what happens in the text, what they think it means, and how they would evaluate it. Now we’re going to introduce an authoritative voice and evaluate it: in this instance, we’ll be reading Vladimir Nabokov’s – an authoritative voice if ever there was one – lecture on Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde13 from his Lectures on Literature.
Objectives: Students will walk out of the classroom… …understanding with specificity and precision Nabokov’s thoughts about Jekyll and Hyde. …understanding how this relates to their own thoughts about JH. … having boldly disagreed with Famous Author and Pretty Smart Guy Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov on at least one point. …with at least one strategy for approaching and evaluating claims about literature made by others in print. … having both “learned” and “acquired” competence with the use of evidentiary reasons (see Assessment).
Materials: Double-Entry Argument Tracker Handout (DEATH [to opposing critics]) handout; Sample Thesis Handout; whiteboard.
13 Of course, this isn’t exactly “real criticism” that we’d use to write a paper—a source like this lies in the murky middle ground between primary and secondary source. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen anyone use Nabokov’s lectures for anything but Nabokovian criticism, but then I’m not very well-read in the secondary material on any of the texts that he treats in his lectures. At any rate, the activity will work equally well with an article from JSTOR. I suspect I’m using my liberties here to simply imagine myself teaching texts that I enjoy, but to teach a lecture also has the advantage of carrying many different “theses,” as opposed to the conventional singular claim of the academic essay, and so behooves itself to group work. In the end I would probably run this activity with a scholarly article. Collins—27
Lesson: [Housekeeping—3-4 Minutes] [Getting Situated, Nabokov’s Biography14—2-3 Minutes] Alright, so you guys read for today the PDF I sent you of Vladimir Nabokov’s lecture on Jekyll and Hyde. Does anyone know of Nabokov, has anyone read anything by Nabokov? Nabokov lived a pretty interesting life. He’s best known as a fiction writer – he wrote Lolita, and lots of other stuff – but he was also a professor of entomology and literature at the same time at Cornell for a while, which is where he delivered lectures much like the one you’ve read. He was, like Joseph Conrad, fluent in three languages: Russian, French, and English in this case; not, as he would tell you, because he’s so gifted and brilliant, but actually because he was one of the last people to be born into the Russian aristocracy and he was lucky enough to have a private tutor to teach him all three of these languages from the time he was able to speak. Anyway, he was always a little self- conscious about his mastery of spoken English, and he always lectured almost verbatim from his notes, so the transcript you read is almost identical to what you would have heard were you a Cornell student in one his classes in the forties and fifties, like Supreme Court Justice Ruth Ginsberg, or Thomas Pynchon, who we’ll be reading next month. [Analyzing an Argument Together—5 minutes] What we’re going to work on today is reducing all of the stuff that Nabokov says to theses: we’re going to comb through the lecture, and find everything that is A. non-obvious – that is, he isn’t just telling us what’s happening in the novella but saying something that it isn’t saying, at least not directly – and B. potentially disputable – that is, we can, precisely because it’s non- obvious, come to believe something about the text that is not compatible with what he says. Then we’re going to look at the evidence he gives us – if he gives us any at all – so that we can decide if we should believe him or not. Everyone see what I mean here? We’ll practice a little together before I send you off on your own. You’ve also, remember, got down in writing your own thoughts about Jekyll and Hyde, and roughly in sentence – aka thesis – form, so as we go you’ll want to keep in the back of your mind whether what you think is compatible with what Nabokov thinks. Yeah? So we before we shoot off our own separate ways we’ll try it out together with this paragraph I
14 I go into biographical details here for two reasons: first, to have an example of what an author’s biography might look like in a lesson plan; and second, to set up Nabokov as an authoritative figure with whom the class will disagree. A kind of confidence builder. Collins—28 wrote about The Duel based on our discussions. I wrote this yesterday, and there are some problems with it, which we’ll talk about shortly. [HAND OUT the paragraph. ASK class what the primary claim here is, what this paragraph is getting at (the relationship between Feraud and D’Hubert is an expression of homoerotic desire). ASK what they could believe that is incompatible with this claim (D’Hubert and Feraud are simply duty-bound by codes of masculine conduct to keep fighting; they genuinely hate each other; they constitute the classic “double” scenario of literature and hence are simply each other rather than mutually desiring bodies) ASK what the evidence is (death=sex, strength of “attraction” to each other, hatred is actually a masked fear of their own homosexual desires), ASK what the problems are (no citations from the text, assumes shared knowledge of the plot, no historical citations to verify that death=sex, avoids actually using the word “orgasm”, sentences are sometimes obscure for little gain). [Analyzing Nabokov Separately—12 minutes] Now we’re going to talk about Nabokov’s lecture. There are 25 pages, about four of which are facsimiles of drawings and lectures notes and stuff, which leaves about 21 pages of texts. I’ve divided these 21 pages into three sets of seven, which actually worked perfectly with the section- breaks that are in the text. Everyone will be doing one of these three sections, but we’ll be working individually to start with. Everyone with me? So I’m going to pass out the Double-Entry Argument Tracker Handout and then I’ll tell you how you can use it. [PASS it around] You’ll see in the bottom right corner of your handout whether you’re in group One, Two, or Three. Group One will be working with the entire first section, that’s pages 179 to 188. Group Two will take the section that starts on 188 until the section that ends on 196. Group three will take the section that ends on 196 to the end, page 204. Everyone with me? Does everyone have the text? I told you that you should definitely bring it. I’ve got my book that I can lend out, but only one. OK, so what you’ll do by yourself for the next, say, ten minutes, is to read through your section again and pull out any claims that Nabokov makes about Jekyll and Hyde – these are, again, non- obvious things with which we can disagree – and write them in the left-hand column. You don’t need to copy them verbatim, but you’ll want to note where you got it in the text. I’ve got numbers going down the side there, and if you need to you can draw another DEATH on the back if you’ve got more than four. Then on the right-hand side you’ll want to write what evidence Nabokov has for that claim – what, if anything, from the text of Jekyll and Hyde makes him think this and should Collins—29 make us think so too? Again, no need to transcribe it verbatim, just be sure you know where it is in Nabokov’s text. You can sort of gather your claims first and then go back for evidence, or you can go claim-evidence, claim-evidence and so on, or maybe you’ll prefer to find the evidence first and try to get the claim out of that. I leave that up to you, so long as you can tell us some arguments and tell us some evidence. It’s also important to note that, at this point, it doesn’t matter if you think Nabokov is right or not. You’ll definitely want to note to yourself the points you disagree with, but, so far as what you’re writing down and bringing forward, whether Nabokov is correct or not isn’t important, yet! Any questions? Everyone see what the gig is? Alright, get to it. [Students WORK. You WANDER around the classroom in order to seem available for questions that come up. After ten minutes, bring things to halt, even if not everyone (or even anyone) is finished in order to: Comparing Results with a Group—10 minutes] What you’ll do now is find two other people in the same group as you. Two groups of three if you can help it, but maybe we’ll have a group of two or a group of four. What you’ll do together is parse each other’s claims: tell your groupmates what you’ve got, and then try to come to a consensus about what the major claims of your section are and what the evidence is for it. You won’t have a lot of time for this, so if a sticking point emerges over something like whether a certain sentence is an argument or evidence, and it doesn’t look like it’ll be resolved, note the conflict by writing it down, and please move on. You’ve got ten minutes for this, and then we’ll report back. [They do this, while you clear off the whiteboard and create 3 T-chart column, like so:
Claim Evidence Claim Evidence Claim Evidence
[Reporting Back and Discussion—Remainder of Period] Alright, please try to wrap up the point that you’re deliberating on now. So now we’ll report back. We’ll be filling in this chart here; it’s not exactly one T for each group, so feel free to spill over if need be. Group Ones, where are you? [There should be two groups. Ask one to tell you what Collins—30 they’ve got, and ask the other group if they would agree or disagree. Write these on the “Claim” side of the T’s.15 Don’t worry about evidence yet. Do this with all the other two groups so that the “Claim” side is filled out and the “Evidence” side is still empty.] Alright, nice work. So we’ve got all of Nabokov’s claims lined up here. That’s about [I don’t know, 15?] different claims he’s making, though some of them are a little redundant. Does anyone agree with all fifteen of these claims? Anyone think Nabokov nailed it and we can pack it in and spend our time thinking about something else? No one? OK, awesome. Where do we disagree? What does he miss? [Student disputes a claim] OK, so you’ve got a problem with claim X, and you think instead it’s Y. OK, Group [e.g.] 2, what evidence does Nabokov have for this claim? [Write it next to the claim on the board. Returning to disputing student:] OK, so what do you think about the evidence he has? [Do you think of it differently? Is he misrepresenting it? Is it true but trivial? Is there competing evidence you can offer? And so on. Continue on like this, finding points of disagreement, until the end the period.]
Assessment: I’ll be looking for earnest participation, as always. I’ll also look for students to be, as Blau would say, willing to take the risk of disagreeing with an authoritative voice (212-3). Students will need to be able to use what Blau calls “evidentiary reasoning” (204) both on their own and to be able to identify it at work in other people’s thinking; this distinction corresponds roughly to James Paul Gee’s distinction between “learning” and “acquisition” (57). To “learn” is to learn about something, how it works from the outside and how to think about it at some remove from yourself, and this corresponds with “learning” how to identify claims and evidence in the writing of others. “Acquisition,” on the other hand, is learning how to use something for oneself, which, in this case is corollary with putting claims and evidence to work in one’s own writing. Gee is, I think, overstating it for rhetorical effect when he says that “acquisition and learning are means to quite different ends.” We can see his point, but in this case I believe they are part and parcel of the same process. I hope to see evidence of both learning and acquisition in this lesson.
15 An alternative to this format would be having groups fill out the chart on their own, but it’s not clear to me how you could mete out the differences between the two groups. Perhaps another, corollary variant would have students meet with their entire group rather than split it up. Collins—31
Lesson 4: Lady Susan/Mid-Semester Evaluation
Context: It’s midway through the semester: we’ve been going long enough to be in the swing of things and have some feelings about that swing. We’ve had two classes on Lady Susan already, and students should have finished reading it. For homework last time, students were asked (and reminded via email) to choose one epistle (Lady Susan is an epistolary novella) that they find particularly interesting, surprising, or important.
Objectives: Students will walk out of the room… With a piece of writing that documents what they think about a certain part of Lady Susan. Better understanding the relationship between an individual epistle and plot (part and whole) in an epistolary novel. Having also spoken conversationally about their thoughts on Lady Susan, and listened to someone else. Having evaluated the claims of a classmate with their own claims in mind. Having reflected, with an eye for evaluation, on the processes that we’ve been developing and putting to work in the classroom. Feeling like they have some sway in how the classroom functions (because they do, to an extent).
Materials: Whiteboard.
Lesson: [Housekeeping—3-4 minutes] [Writing on an Epistle—10 minutes] Alright, I’ve asked you guys to come in today with an epistle picked out that you find especially interesting or important. Did everyone do that? Great. What I want you to do now is to spend about ten minutes writing out what you find important about that passage: that is, why you picked Collins—32 it out. OK? Easy enough, right? Get out your writing utensils and get to it. [The students do this. You sit at your desk and keep time] [Sharing with a Classmate—15 minutes] Alright, finish up the thought you’re on if you please. It’s OK if you haven’t said everything you want to say, you can say that soon. I want you guys to partner up. It doesn’t matter who you end up with. Do we… yes, luckily we have an even number, because it’s hard to do this with a group of three. What I want you to do with your partner is to tell them the passage you’ve chosen, and to read or explain what you just wrote about the significance of that passage. Then your partner will do the same. After that, I want you two to put your heads together and think of one area where you agree – not in the sense that they said something and persuaded you, but where you both said something in your exchange or in your writing that agree. And I also, with the same parameters, want you to find somewhere where you disagree. So, to sum up: you take turns telling each other what you found interesting, then you find an area of agreement, and an area of disagreement. Any questions? Alright, to it. [There will be no wider discussion, so you’ll want to go around the room and see what people are talking about.] [Stop-Start-Continue—Remainder of Period]16 [Move to the whiteboard/chalkboard and ERASE what’s on it. Then WRITE three equal columns, using all of the space available, that read:] STOP START CONTINUE
[SAY, while erasing/drawing/writing:] OK, so do we have any more lingering questions about Auster? Anything at all? [FIELD these questions if they exist] Alright, well, in that case, we’re going to spend the rest of our time on an activity that’s going to help me out and it’s going to help you out. It’s called, imaginatively, Stop-Start-Continue. Here in a minute I’m going to leave the room, and I’m going to leave you guys in here with the markers. Your job will be to fill out these columns with things that you want me as a teacher to stop doing, things that you want me to start doing, and things that you want me to continue doing. You can put as many things as you want in any
16 I’m indebted to Matt Davis for this activity. He’s used this one for both the class for which I was his TA (English 448, Perspectives on Literacy) and the course for which I was his student (697, Seminar for Tutors) and with useful results. Collins—33 column, but you’ve got to put at least one thing in each of them. The idea is that it’s completely anonymous between me and you guys, but you should definitely discuss it among yourselves. Yeah? Any questions? If not, I’m going to go into the hallway and twiddle my thumbs. When you feel like you’ve wrapped up please send someone to come and get me. Good luck and have fun. [WALK out of the door and WAIT. Whenever you’re summoned back, WRAP up class as you normally would and TAKE NOTE of what’s written on the board.]
Assessment: While surveying the discussion, earnest participation is, as always, what I’ll be looking for. I’ll want students to pay attention to each other and to talk with some enthusiasm. For the feedback, I’ll ideally get at least one “real” comment in each column: sometimes students will put unrealistic or joke-y things down, which is fine, so long as there’s a serious kernel there. Collins—34
Lesson 5: The D-D-D-Dead!17
Context: This is the first day we’ll be spending on Joyce’s novella The Dead. Students ought to’ve read up until the section break that follows Gabriel’s speech.
Objectives: Students should would out the door… With a piece of writing with some thoughts about Gabriel and what he’s up to. With greater awareness of the political and national dilemma that Gabriel faces. With a sense of what’s important and interesting in The Dead, and therefore with a “way in” to a lengthier writing about it. With a sense of what’s important to other people about the dead, and how they feel about it.
Materials: Handout with passage from The Dead.
Lesson: [Housekeeping—3-4 minutes] [Taking Temperature—3-4 minutes] [Spend a little time asking general response questions on the novella—did they like it or dislike it? Is it what they expected for a story called The Dead? Where is it going? What’s interesting? [Voicing The Dead—3-4 minutes] OK, so I’m going to pass around a sheet with a passage you guys will remember. [PASS it out] This is when Gabriel is dancing with Miss Ivors and they have a bit of a dispute. I want us first to just read this passage aloud. We’ll do it in dramatic fashion, and since we’ve got three voices – Miss Ivors, Gabriel, and the narrator – we’ll need three volunteers. Who’s game? [Get three students to read the passage aloud]. [Marking up The Dead—3-4 minutes] 17 Much of this lesson is derived from Chapter 6 of Blau’s The Literature Workshop (123 ff) and the modifications of it that you presented in our class on “The Use of Force”. Collins—35
Now I want you to go back over the passage on your own and underline any words or phrases that seem to be interesting to you—anything at all. I’ll give you just a few minutes. [Pointing at The Dead—5-6 minutes] That should be good, thanks. Now we’re going to something that’s called pointing. In a minute, I’m going to say go, and I want you to read aloud those passages that you underlined, those phrases that you found interesting, perplexing, problematic, moving, or whatever. We’ll do this, as they say, “Quaker Style”, which means you read as the spirit moves you. No need to raise your hand, just try not to read over anybody else. Feel free to repeat phrases, read two, three, four times, all of that. Everybody with me? Go. [Writing The Dead—5-6 minutes] The last thing I’ll have you do on your own today – a solitary day, to be sure – is pick one part of the passage, whether you had it underlined to begin with or not doesn’t matter, but pick one line that you think is the most important in this passage, and write why you think it’s important. Go. [Sharing The Dead—Remainder of class] [Ask for a volunteer to read what they’ve written. Summarize, restate what they wrote. Ask if anyone wrote on the same passage, and would they read it aloud. Emphasize points of disagreement without evaluating one or the other. Ask classmates how they feel about it, which seems more persuasive. Try to roll these kinds of dilemmas – what’s important, and why – as long as you can, and when the steam has escaped ask for another volunteer. Continue until time expires.]
Assessment: Earnest engagement in the final discussion will be noted. I’ll also be looking for students to be able to disagree and be disagreed with civilly. Students should make non-obvious, evidence based claims about the passage that they thought were important. Collins—36
Lesson 6: Taking Stock
Context: We’re a little more than halfway through the semester. We’ve read through five of our nine novellas. We’ve just completed the activity Stop-Start-Continue, by which the students have given me feedback on what they like and dislike about my teaching methods. This lesson has no reading assigned: it’s meant to be a midway reflection-point on the novella itself, based on the five that we’ve read so far.
Objectives: Student will walk out the door… Knowing that I’ve earnestly considered the feedback that they’ve given me. With ideas about how the texts that we’ve studied are similar and different. With a number of categories by which to compare texts to each other. With a stance on the question: Does the word “novella” designate anything other than a certain page count?
Materials: Whiteboard; Personal notes on the S-S-C feedback.
Lesson: [Housekeeping—3-4 minutes] [Stop-Start-Continue Feedback—5 minutes] [Simply GO OVER what they wrote on the board and tell the students what you’ll definitely be incorporating in the future, what you’ll try to incorporate, and what you won’t incorporate (and why)] [Freewrite—8 minutes] Alright, that out of the way, we’re going to do another freewrite. You guys know the drill by now. [WRITE on the whiteboard: “What is a novella?”] Here you go. “What’s a novella?” We’ve read five, and I hope by now you’ll have more to say than just “prose fiction of around a hundred pages.” Even if you really think that this all you can reliably say about a Collins—37 novella, I hope you’ll entertain other possibilities if only to reject them as insufficient. Yeah? I’m going to give you about seven minutes, so write your little hearts out. [As they write, you WRITE on the board:]
The Duel
Jekyll and Hyde
Cactus Thorn
Lady Susan
The Dead
[Lengthy Deliberation—Remainder of Period] [ASK for volunteers to read aloud their freewrite. Try to summarize what they said in a sentence, ask if classmates agree(d) or disagree(d), see if a conversation can start up. Ride it for as long as it’ll go. When it slows down, turn to the board.] Alright, good stuff everyone. I thought we could try a different approach in the time remaining. On the board here are the five novellas we’ve read so far. I want us now to think of some categories by which we could compare them, and see if any patterns emerge. This is the first time I’ve taught this course, so I really have no idea what’s going to happen. Anyway, to give you an idea of what I mean, I’ll put down two of the most basic categories. [UPDATE board so that it looks like: Collins—38
Date Length
The Duel
Jekyll and Hyde
Cactus Thorn
Lady Susan
The Dead
ASK students to fill in these blanks. Then ASK them to come up with other categories (I’m thinking of things like TONE, NARRATIVE TIME, GENRE, NUMBER OF CHARACTERS, CONCERNS ROMANTIC LOVE, LOCATION, PEOPLE DIE, IS HUMOROUS, and so on, but remain open to other things students might suggest. Deliberate for as long as time will allow. Then, with about five minutes remaining, re-pose the question: WHAT IS A NOVELLA? Have your answers changed in the past twenty minutes, or have they been reinforced?]
Assessment: I’ll want students to participate earnestly, as always. I’ll want them to show some creativity in coming up with categories for comparison, and to demonstrate an ability to recall the details of the novellas we’ve read from memory. Collins—39
Lesson 7: The Classroom of Crossed Destinies
Context: This will be the second of three lessons on Calvino’s The Castle of Crossed Destinies. The novella is divided into two parts that are connected to each other only formally (we might read them as two short stories rather than one novella, but I think the formal unity is enough to lump them together for this class. The question, though, is one that we’d be well- served to broach on the third day of discussion). Now, Calvino’s novella (both sections of it, The Castle and The Tavern) is about a group of weary travellers who have somehow lost the ability to speak, but still have the desire to tell their stories. In both cases there is a deck of tarot cards handy. The travellers begin to throw the cards, and the first-person narrator (who is in the same state as everyone else in the story) begins to interpret the sequence of cards thrown as a narrative. More stories are told, more cards are thrown, such that a grid forms, as in this photograph, in which the stories weave together. The stories are, of course, told to us in prose by the narrator—it would be much too ambiguous to show us simply the cards, and in a way that’s the point. It’s actually pretty hard to get a coherent and unambiguous story out of a sequence of pictures and symbols (Calvino was fascinated by literary theory, and we‘re eager here to make the leap and say “and what is written language but a sequence of pictures and symbols!”). This activity will, I hope, drive that point home by stripping away the prose.
Objectives: Students will walk out of the classroom… … having considered The Castle of Crossed Destinies from the perspective of composition. …as slightly-more-experienced storytellers than when they walked in. Collins—40
…with greater empathy for Calvino by experiencing the challenges of composing a narrative like Castle’s. ...a heightened awareness of the ambiguity of representation. … a heightened awareness of the similarities and differences of separate semiotic systems (tarot cards and written language in this case).
Materials: The text (The Castle of Crossed Destinies); Two decks of tarot cards; Whiteboard.
Lesson: [Housekeeping—3-4 minutes] [Setting up the activity—5-6 minutes] OK, if there are no more questions, let’s move into what I’ve got planned for today. I’ve asked you to skip over the second part of The Castle of Crossed Destinies and instead to read Calvino’s short Note at the very end. You’re welcome. What did we get from the note, was there anything especially interesting in there? [FIELD comments. You’ll want to try to get them to talk about Calvino’s method of composition. If this doesn’t happen naturally, just ASK: “Does anyone remember what Calvino says about how he composed this text?” ASK a volunteer to READ the passage beginning on p. 126 with “I began by trying to line up tarot cards at random…” and ending on p. 128 with “But will it actually happen?”] Did any of you guys consider the story from this perspective? Was anyone curious to know how Calvino went about creating this really intricate network of stories? [If hands go up, ASK these students what they supposed Calvino was doing as he wrote] It’s probably not a surprise that he had tarot cards in front of him as he wrote them, but when I first read the story I let myself believe he had really just sort of “thrown” the cards at random in the way that I’m told tarot readings work, and then made some stories out of the result. It wasn’t like that, he was actually pretty meticulous and hyperactive and neurotic about it getting the cards in an order that worked, but we’re going to try it out the other way. I’ve brought with me today to decks of tarot cards. We’re going to get into four groups of four18 and put ourselves in the shoes of Calvino’s travellers. That means when I say “go,”
18 The exercise is designed, as we’ll see, for groups of four, but with a little tweaking it could conceivably be made to work for a group of three or five if the number of students required it. My original plan was to have Collins—41 you can’t talk to each other. That means listen carefully right now. [ASSIGN groups at your discretion, GIVE every group at least thirty tarot cards] So let’s group up now. Bring paper and something to write with. I want you guys to bring your desks together so that they form a kind of table between you [LET them get situated].19 [As you TALK, DRAW this diagram on the board and REFER to it] 2 x x 1 x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x x 3 x x 4
Now, there will be three rounds of activity here. Everyone will go at their own pace, so I’m going to tell you what the first two rounds are like now. Remember that you CANNOT TALK. The first round is to throw the cards. Whoever number one is – doesn’t matter who – will throw out six cards in a straight line, like so [GESTURE]. Then number two will throw out five cards, and use the fifth card that number one threw as their second card. Like so [GESTURE]. Number three will then do the same thing, except it’ll be number two’s fifth card that works as their second. Number four will throw four cards, and their second and fifth cards will from the lines of numbers three and one. When you’re done you should have a pound sign, or maybe you’d call it a hashtag. Is everyone clear on this? Questions? groups of EIGHT, but that turned out to be far too complicated. You can divide up the decks of cards: it is not important that every group has a complete deck (for the purposes of this activity—it’s probably very important for practitioners of tarot to have a full deck). 19 If the desks are flat and square enough to allow this, it’s best to have each student in the group face in a different direction, like this: ↓ ← → ↑
The shape of some desks – if they slope or are wonky in some other way – won’t allow this, which is fine. The activity will work just as well with desks arranged like this: → ← → ← Collins—42
The second round is where you get out your pen and paper, and you’ll now take the role of the narrator. I want you – still no talking – to take your line of cards and turn it into a narrative. Start with the first card, or start with yourself as the hero of your story, and go down the line step by step, first to last, and try to write a story that corresponds to them. I’ll ask you to please keep track either mentally or on the page of what exactly you’re getting from each card and how you’re using it: sometimes Calvino’s narrator will interpret the crossing swords on the nine of swords as a dense group of branches or something—in that case we’ll want to know, like we talked about last time, that you’re taking some liberties with your interpretation of the card. There’s no length requirement or anything, just write something that feels satisfying. Also, you’ll be sharing with your immediate group, but you no one will have to share with the whole class. When everyone in your group is done with this round, flag me down and I’ll tell you what to do next. Is everyone clear on this part? Is anyone not clear? Does anyone want to say anything before it’s verboten for a while? Alright, no excuses, then. Go. [END OF IMAGINED TRANSCRIPT. I imagine this will take twenty to twenty-five minutes. As students work, walk around the room and make sure no one’s talking. Look at the cards that have been thrown. Don’t read what people are writing (that’s very rude). If a group seems to be finished, go to them and tell them that now, rather than simply read their stories aloud (though they could do this if more time was available), they are meant to tell their groupmates what their second and fifth cards – that is, the ones that they shared with another student – “meant”. How did they operate in the story? Did they use them metaphorically or literally? Did they use the name of the card or the drawing? And so on. Then, they should see how the other student used the same card, and note the differences. How did those differences come about? Could that card have “meant” the same thing in your own story, or were you obliged to use it the way you did? Are there other options? The other students should feel free to chime in on this debate: does one interpretation seem a stretch, or another seem more “natural”? Particularly clever?20 And so on. This discussion, we hope, will carry us to the end of class.]
20 These are a lot of discussion questions, which makes me think a handout may be useful. Collins—43
Assessment: No grades will be given for the activity today. Attendance will be taken. I’ll take note of who seems to be carrying out the discussion in earnest. I’ll want students to discuss ambiguity in their final discussions, and relate it to the text. Collins—44
Lesson 8: Finding Ourselves in the Funhouse
Context: This is the one day we’ll be spending on John Barth’s canonical short story “Lost in the Funhouse.” It’s being used to set up Wallace’s Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way, which is not at all subtly a response to Barth. The goal of this lesson will be to bring out the things that Wallace finds problematic about LitF’s legacy (i.e. the entire enterprise of metafiction): that it’s obscure with little payoff, that it wallows in its own alienation to the point that it gets comfortable, that it’s reverentially narcissistic, that it’s interested in cleverness of form over cleverness of content, and that it has (by 1990) grown sclerotic and therefore lost its power to defamiliarize and needs to replaced by something more sincere. We can’t really analyze the whole metafictional enterprise, and in a sense this will be unfair to LitF, which is a great story and a watershed moment in American fiction, but we must do what we can.
Objectives: Students will walk out of the room… With encyclopedic knowledge of the plot of “Lost in the Funhouse”. With a clear sense of the gap between form and content in “Lost in the Funhouse”. Having thought about the relationship between form and content in “Lost in the Funhouse”. Having thought about the relationship between reader and writer in “Lost in the Funhouse”. Gaining, by induction, knowledge about the relationship between form and content, reader and writer in general.
Materials: Whiteboard; markers.
Lesson: [Housekeeping—3-4 minutes] [Taking Stock of The Plot—5 minutes Collins—45
Alright, so why don’t we get started on Funhouse. This is a difficult story, I think. It can be kind of hard to figure out what’s going on. Was this the case for you guys? I thought so. I’m sure that, nevertheless, we came out with a pretty good idea of what happened, right? It’s always best to make sure. [WRITE, in a column to one side of the board WHO: (Looking for AMBROSE, MAGDA, PETER, MOM, UNCLE KARL WHERE: (OCEAN CITY, MD; a FUNHOUSE; a CAR) WHEN: (INDEPENDENCE DAY, 194321) WHAT: (A FAMILY VACATION; AMBROSE, a pre-teen who is AWKWARD follows MAGDA and PETER into a FUNHOUSE; inside, he gets LOST and is FREAKED OUT)] So let’s be journalists for minute, and ask the basic W questions. Who are the characters in the story? [et cetera. Fill out the chart.] [Divide and Conquer—20 minutes] That was about as simple as it gets, but in most stories it doesn’t require a lot of effort to figure these things out. And it’s not especially hard in Barth’s, either, but he’s pretty coy about it. This is a story where you can do the thing where your eyes can kind of glaze over and you keep moving them over the page but you aren’t actually reading anything. So I thought it best to make sure. So now we’ve got the broad view of what happens. Now we’re going to get much narrower sense of what happens, and to do that we’re going exploit the power of division of labor. We’re going to get into groups of four now. [DIVIDE them up however you see fit] Each of you is going to be assigned a chunk of the story to comb through and pull out every significant thing that happens. You can use your better judgment to determine what's significant, but I'll be roaming around and you should feel free to run things by me. Write it on a sheet of notebook paper, or the back of something else, or your hand, or just whatever, so long as it’s legible and you can read it out to us later. You've got [I LOOK at my watch,
21 I would be kind of impressed if the students could date the story to certain year. It isn’t mentioned in the text, but a critic (name long forgotten, forgive me) has noted that, given certain textual clues (e.g. the blackout on lights by the shore because of fear of German warships), you can pinpoint the date as 1943. But, as this critic points out, it doesn’t make one damn bit of difference what year the story takes place in even given that it can be deduced accurately, and so interprets this as another “dead end” in the funhouse, another game played with no gain whatever. Collins—46 obtusely] 17 minutes, but it may not take that long. Questions? GO. [Before roaming, DRAW across the whiteboard a horizontal line: one end is marked BEGINNING, the other END] [Report Back—10 Minutes] [Groups report back what they’ve found. Try to boil it down to a short, DeLillo-esque sentence and put it on the timeline.] [Classwide Discussion—Remainder of Period] OK, so now we know what happens. Does anybody have questions about the plot? Have I misrepresented anything? Is it pretty clear now? Great. It's not actually a very complicated story. Now that we've got that sorted out, let's talk about the fact that we just had to do that. What is it that gets in the way of our knowing what happens? [Discussion happens. More questions to offer if they get cold: Do we feel like it's worth all of the thought we had to put in just to figure out what happens? Why does Barth go to all of this trouble? It's possible that Barth is just deranged and sadistic and an idiot, but let's at least give him the benefit of the doubt. What's the game? What do we make of all of the seemingly irrelevant remarks about fiction writing? What's up with all of the false-starting and -stopping sentences? The arbitrary italics? Why, according to 'Lost in the Funhouse', would anyone write fiction at all? What does the narrator think about the reader in this story compared to, say, Dostoevski’s narrator? Or the travelers in The Castle of Crossed Destinies?]
Assessment: As always, I’ll be assessing earnestness of participation. I’ll want the students, in the first activity, to stay close to the text and leave nothing to the imagination. For the discussion at the end, I’ll want students to have a solid idea of what is meant by “form” and what by “content”. I’ll want them to demonstrate an ability to relate “Funhouse” to what we’ve already read, in particular I’ll want them to consider the potential for language to connect (or fail to connect) people in all of these stories. Collins—47
Lesson 9: Westward the Course of Empire Takes Its Way
Context: This is the first day we’ll spend on Westward. By this point, I hope the students have a good grip on how discussion works in this classroom, and for that reason I’m going to try to run an open discussion for the full fifty minutes. To facilitate this, I will have asked students to think of at least one question that came up while they were reading, and to write it down and bring it to class.
Objectives: Students will walk out the door… Having discussed what they found interesting and important about Westward That being said, I would hope that they: o Consider its relationship to “Funhouse”. o Consider why it might be a novella rather than a short story. o Discuss those qualities that make Mark Nechtr unique as a protagonist. o Consider how characters relate to each other; how they connect and fail to connect.
Materials: Notecards.
Lesson: [Housekeeping—3-4 minutes] [The Writing of the Questions—3 minutes] [Pass out blank notecards] OK, so I’ve asked you guys to write out questions that came up while you were reading Westward. I’m going to try and let you guys run the discussion today as much as possible, and I think the questions are going to help keep things on track. So what I want you to do is write your question on a notecard, and pass it in to me. You can write your name on it if you want, or not. [The students write their questions and pass them in.] [The Posing of the Questions—Remainder of the Period] Collins—48
Thank you. What happens now is I choose a notecard at random and I read the question thereon. You guys try to answer the question as exhaustively as possible. Does this make sense? [Choose a notecard at random, and make this randomness visible. Read the question. Look at the students expectantly. Feel free to MODERATE, SUMMARIZE, and COMPILE the things that people say, but DO NOT OFFER YOUR OWN ANSWERS. Feel free to pose corollary questions. Do not let students talk “to you”. If someone is talking “to you” say something like “Why are you telling me? The discussion is out there!” but without snarkiness or pettiness. When a question seems to be legitimately exhausted, pull out a new notecard, and repeat. Get another notecard if the question has been broached already, but tell the students why. Repeat until end.]
Assessment: I’ll want students to, as always, participate earnestly. I’ll want them to ask questions that are provocative and that pertain to important things. I’ll want to get a few questions that relate back to earlier readings. I’ll want students to engage with each other directly, rather than through me as the mediator. I’ll want them to have principled disagreements, which they sort out among themselves. I’ll want, in short, to see signs of independence from me as the catalyst of discussion (though, to be sure, my role will be reduced rather than annulled). Collins—49
Lesson 10: Final Project Workshop
Context: There are, say, three meetings left in the semester. Final projects are due in a bit more than a week (after the last day of class, that is). Students have had time to develop their ideas, meet with me about them, and we’ve completed all of the assigned readings. I’ve asked them to bring in a full draft today. Many students will not actually have that. That’s fine, so long as they have an idea and something on paper.
I take these workshopping activities from Matt Davis, who used them in the Seminar for Tutors last fall.
Objectives: Students will walk out the door… …with revision ideas for their final projects. … with an idea of what their classmates are working, and what they found interesting enough to write about. …with slightly more experience articulating their ideas. …with higher awareness of how their writing “comes off” to other people.
Materials: Students will need a draft of their project, and writing materials. You should bring extra copies of the assignment prompt and rubrics. You’ll also want a timepiece of some sort.
Lesson: [Housekeeping—3-4 minutes] [Lightning Round Prompt—4-5 minutes] OK, so don’t worry about circling up today. I’ve asked you to bring a full draft today: does anyone not have a full draft? [Hands go up. Ask them if they have a draft at all: if so, great, they’re still in the club; if not, hope that there’s more than one without anything] OK, there’s more than one with nothing on paper, so we’ll just have you guys work together. So what we’re going to do is group up by what we’re doing. So all of the folks doing the Collins—50 analytical essay come over here, all of the folks extending a novella come over here, and everyone doing the exploratory essay meet up over here. You guys who haven’t brought a draft will be in your own group over here. Go ahead and move. I’ve got a few workshopping exercises we’ll do today, so be prepared to talk about your work and have other people read it. The first thing we’ll do is a highly structured activity. I’ll literally be using a stopwatch. Within your groups, get into groups of three if you can. Two isn’t great, but is OK. Four is not OK, don’t get into fours. Now that you’re all grouped up, what will happen is this. We’ll have three rounds of about five minutes. For each round, there will be one person A and two persons B. Person A will get two minutes – no more than two minutes – to explain, in their own words, without referring to anything they’ve written down, what they’ve chosen to do with their projects. The thesis that they’re arguing, the scene they’re adding, the problem they’re exploring. The two persons B will be taking notes: you’ve got to be writing while they’re talking. After two minutes are up, one of the persons B will get one minute to briefly restate A’s idea, and to offer any suggestion he or she can come up with. Then the other person B will do the same thing. If you’ve only got one B, then they’ll have to talk for two minutes. After that the next round begins with a new person A. Does that make sense? Is everyone clear on what’s going to happen? Anyone not? [Lightning Round—15-16 Minutes] [You’ll essentially be keeping time in the way “you” just described. The point is enforce concision, so do not be lenient with the time.] [Glossing and Reverse-Outlining—Remainder of Period] Alright, now comes the time that you’ll be reading each other’s work. Stay in the same groups, if you would, and just pass your draft over to the left. Everyone should have someone else’s work now. So what we’re going to do first is to gloss each paragraph in the margin. “To gloss” means, essentially, to write the gist of, or the main idea, or a very brief summary. So what you’ll want to do is read the draft, and write in the margin by each paragraph what you think the gist of that paragraph is. If you’re reading a creative piece and you come to, say, a stretch of quick dialogue, where there are a bunch of paragraphs that are really short, just groups them together and gloss that exchange as a whole. When you’re done with that, get out a piece of paper and create an outline of the draft. If you had Collins—51 to divide it into sections, how would you do it? What are the subsections? And so on. You may not be able to complete this, which is fine if not ideal. If you don’t have a draft, I want you to work out an outline of what your draft should have looked like. Just map out the big movements you see your essay taking, the points that you’ll want to make, the things you’ll want to happen, or the problems you’ll want to explore. By the end of the day you should have two documents that show you how your writing is coming off to other people – what it means to someone who’s reading it, regardless of what you think it means. Yeah? Everyone clear on what’s going to happen? I won’t be shouting time from up here anymore; I’ll probably be cruising around to see how everyone’s getting along. So feel free to flag me down and ask any questions you might have. [The students do this until class is over.]
Assessment: Whether or not a student brings a draft will be the major point of assessment. I’ll have very little direct interaction with student work in this lesson – the lightning round is much too noisy for me draw out anything, and I won’t read over anyone’s shoulder in the later activities – so, like many other days, I’ll be left to judge how earnestly students participate in the activity to see how they’re getting along. Collins—52
III. Artifacts
1. From The Syllabus DISCUSSION: In this class we’ll be talking about literature as though we are human beings. Now, some human beings are (like the author of this syllabus) professors of literature and will often be heard talking about “textual fields” and “overdetermination” and “hermeneutics” and other things that Microsoft Word doesn’t even recognize as words. Some human beings (like the author) enjoy talking about things in this way. At the same time, a good many human beings neither talk like that nor enjoy listening to other human beings that are talking like that. This is perfectly fine: it is not necessary to speak academic English in order to talk about literature. Many of you have no ambition to become professors of literature and have no real need of being able to talk like one. I will not force you to fake it. It is my hope that in this class we’ll talk and write about literature in all kinds of different modes, including, but not at all limited to, academic English. In our class discussions you should feel free to talk in a way that’s comfortable to you, with the provisos that:
You must be civil: no slurring or slandering, no epithets, no personal attacks. You must do your best to make yourself intelligible. We’re here not only to express our thoughts and opinions, but also to communicate them. So long as we’re communicating in a non-combative way, everything’s good.
I’ve designed a variety of writing assignments that will hopefully allow you to practice writing about literature in the way that seems the most useful to you. Many of you will have no need of writing thesis-driven essays in five years and, though I think it’s a useful skill to have, I won’t make you write one for this class. You’ll have to write something, and you’ll have to work hard and put thought into it, but you won’t necessarily have to work hard in that way. Collins—53
2. Reading Profile
Reading Profile NAME ______MAJOR ______CLASSIFICATION ______
1. Do you think of yourself as “a reader”?
2. What do you read most often?
3. What do you like to read the most?
4. In the past 12 months have you watched more films or read more novels? (Please don’t count, just check the box that corresponds to your immediate reaction.) Movies Novels Not immediately sure
5. Why did you enroll in this class? (Your answer to this won’t hurt my feelings)
6. What, briefly, do you want to do with your degree?
7. Have you read any of the texts we’ll be reading this semester? If so, which ones?
8. Do you write? What do you write, and for what reason? Collins—54
9. Rate your familiarity with the following authors: Don’t even know Know as a Passing Pretty good Know like the back the name. name, but familiarity with handle on their of my hand nothing more their work work William Shakespeare Jacques Derrida James Joyce Chinua Achebe Ursula K. Leguin Chuck Palahniuk J.K. Rowling Plato Gloria Anzaldua Mary Wollstonecraft David Sedaris Friedrich Nietzsche Richard Dawkins
10. Finally, is there anything else you feel like I should know about your relationship to reading? Collins—55
3. Passages and Questions for The Duel (This will be three separate pages, of course, but for brevity’s sake [a concern that arose all-too-late] I’ve condensed them here.) p. 15: “I am going to attend to it at once,” declared Lieut. Feraud, with extreme truculence. “If you are thinking of displaying your airs and graces tonight at Madame de Lionne’s salon you are very much mistaken.” “ Really!” said Lieut. D’Hubert, who was beginning to feel irritated, “you are an impracticable sort of fellow.” The general’s orders to me were to put you under arrest, not to carve you into small pieces. Good morning!” And turning his back on the little Gascon, who, always sober in his potations, was as though born intoxicated with the sunshine of his vine-ripening country, the Northman, who could drink hard on occasion, but was born sober under the watery skies of Picardy, made for the door. Hearing, however, the unmistakable sound behind his back of a sword drawn from the scabbard, he had no option but to stop. “Devil take this mad Southerner!” he thought, spinning round and surveying with composure the warlike posture of Lieut. Feraud, with a bare sword in his hand. Directions: Spend some time parsing the third sentence of the second paragraph, beginning with “And turning his back…” Why does D’Hubert have “no option but to stop”?
p. 17: And Lieut. D’Hubert did follow. He could do nothing else. Yet in vindication of his sanity it must be recorded that as he passed through the anteroom the notion of opening the street door and bolting out presented itself to this brave youth, only of course to be instantly dismissed, for he felt sure that the other would pursue him without shame or compunction. And the prospect of an officer of the hussars being chased along the street by another officer of the hussars with a naked sword could not be for a moment entertained. Therefore he followed into the garden. Question: Why is the option that D’Hubert is verified as sane for considering instantly dismissed? Why is the idea of an officer being chased down the street by another officer un- entertainable?
p. 34: “There’s a crazy fellow to whom I must give a lesson,” [D’Hubert] has declared curtly; and [his seconds] asked for no better reasons. On these grounds the encounter with duelling-swords was arranged one early morning in a convenient field. At the third set-to Lieut. D’Hubert found himself lying on his back on the dewy grass with a hole in his side. A serene sun rising over a landscape of meadows and woods hung on his left. A surgeon—not the flute player, but another—was bending over him, feeling around the wound. “Narrow squeak. But it will be nothing,” he pronounced. “ Lieut. D’Hubert heard these words with pleasure. One of his seconds, sitting on the wet grass, and sustaining his head on his lap, said, “The fortune of war, mon pauvre vieux. What will you have? You had better make up like two good fellows. Do!” “You don’t know what you ask,” murmured Lieut. D’Hubert, in a feeble voice. “However, if he…” Questions: What does the surgeon mean by “narrow squeak”? Why does D’Hubert agree to the duel so easily? Why does his second tell him to make up with Feraud, and why does he refuse? Collins—56
4. Sample of Thesis and Evidence At the end of the day The Duel seems to be a story about male homosexual love. Why else would D’Hubert and Feraud keep coming back to each other? From what other source could arise that desire to engage in that most visceral and vigorous activity, trying to make each other die? We should bear in mind here that until relatively recently “to die” was a euphemism that has been displaced by “to come,” but many writers still exploit this historical meaning. The objection could be raised that clearly D’Hubert and Feraud hate each other, and that this is the opposite of love. But how many of us have felt a bizarrely visceral hatred toward the one we supposedly love? Imagine how much stronger this hatred – a disguised fear of the one who has such an inexplicable power over us – of the one we desire would be if the relationship that could validate this desire were forbidden to see the light of day! Collins—57
5. Double-Entry Argument Tracking Handout Collins—58
6. Handout on The Dead When they had taken their places she said abruptly: "I have a crow to pluck with you." "With me?" said Gabriel. She nodded her head gravely. "What is it?" asked Gabriel, smiling at her solemn manner. "Who is G. C.?" answered Miss Ivors, turning her eyes upon him. Gabriel coloured and was about to knit his brows, as if he did not understand, when she said bluntly: "O, innocent Amy! I have found out that you write for The Daily Express. Now, aren't you ashamed of yourself?" "Why should I be ashamed of myself?" asked Gabriel, blinking his eyes and trying to smile. "Well, I'm ashamed of you," said Miss Ivors frankly. "To say you'd write for a paper like that. I didn't think you were a West Briton." A look of perplexity appeared on Gabriel's face. It was true that he wrote a literary column every Wednesday in The Daily Express, for which he was paid fifteen shillings. But that did not make him a West Briton surely. The books he received for review were almost more welcome than the paltry cheque. He loved to feel the covers and turn over the pages of newly printed books. Nearly every day when his teaching in the college was ended he used to wander down the quays to the second-hand booksellers, to Hickey's on Bachelor's Walk, to Web's or Massey's on Aston's Quay, or to O'Clohissey's in the bystreet. He did not know how to meet her charge. He wanted to say that literature was above politics. But they were friends of many years' standing and their careers had been parallel, first at the University and then as teachers: he could not risk a grandiose phrase with her. He continued blinking his eyes and trying to smile and murmured lamely that he saw nothing political in writing reviews of books. When their turn to cross had come he was still perplexed and inattentive. Miss Ivors promptly took his hand in a warm grasp and said in a soft friendly tone: "Of course, I was only joking. Come, we cross now." Collins—59
7. Tarot Cards. http://www.tarot.com/tarot/decks/dali/box There are many different unique decks available. This one was designed by Salvador Dali. It is, I think, unimportant which of the many decks is used for Lesson 7. On the one hand, all decks seem to be structurally “the same” so long as they have both the major arcana – twenty-four unsuited cards with names like “Death,” “The Wheel of Fortune,” and “The Lovers” – and the minor arcana – fifty-six suited cards that are functionally the same as the normal deck of cards that we use today. On the other hand, each deck has an aesthetic specificity – each card is drawn in a certain way for each deck – that is very important to Calvino’s story. But it seems to me that so long as the deck has some aesthetic specificity, and it’s not instead 78 pieces of paper with the name of the card stamped onto each, then the activity will work as I’ve planned. Collins—60
8. Final Project Handout (Body Text) You will have three options for your final project. It is my hope that you’ll choose the one that you find most interesting, useful, or suitable for your interests. Please note that each option has a certain style or tone that’s appropriate for it: part of your assessment will be how well you take on that tone. If you’re having trouble deciding, or are unsure what any of the options entails, swing by my office hours or send me an email (sooner than later!) and we can discuss it. I hope that you’ll drop in anyway to talk about what your plan. Either way, good luck! I will bring rubrics for each assignment with me to our next class meeting. I will recommend again Purdue’s Online Writing Laboratory (owl.english.purdue.edu/owl) and [whatever local assistance is available] for ideas on how to make your writing persuasive, evocative, clear, erudite, or whatever you want it to be. Each assignment will require a 1-2 page afterword22 attached to the end. The requirements will differ for each, so see below for what they entail.
I. Analytical Essay: The bread-and-butter of today’s literature class. For this option, you’ll need to write a 6-10 page, thesis-driven essay about a text we’ve read this semester. Make an interesting claim about it, and prove to me that it’s true by using evidence from the text and 2-4 secondary sources (already-existing scholarship on the text, historical sources, or, if you like, some or another theoretical text). You’ll want to put on your academic’s hat for this one: a good model for this style will be your secondary sources, or some of the criticism that we’ve read during the semester. MLA format will be enforced. For your afterword, tell me in two pages what hesitations or concerns you have about your argument. If you feel unsure about a certain point, if there was something that you wanted to address but decided not to, or if you make a move that you feel is not quite honest, tell me about it here. Or, if you’ve got not hesitations or concerns, tell me what you’re especially proud of. II. Extend a Novella: We’ve been discussing the role of length in narrative all semester. For this assignment, you will add another chapter to one of the novellas we have read. It must be at least 8 double-spaced pages, but it can be longer than that if you’re feeling it. This chapter can simply pick up where the action left off, it can be a flashback, it can leap forward way into the future; it must, however, be related to the plot of what we read. The stylistic model for this assignment will be the author him- or herself. The key here is consistency: You should try as best as you can to approximate the voice of whomever you’re extending, and the plot that you add should feel continuous with the rest of the story. In your afterword, explain the choices you’ve made. If you’ve disregarded anything I’ve required of you above – which is what creative writing is all about – that’s OK, but you must tell me why. You should also identify any subtleties in your prose that you don’t want me to miss. III. Exploratory Essay: Also known as the “Lyrical Essay,” the “Literary Essay,” or, in some circles, just “The Essay”. For this option, you may choose any of the novellas that we’ve read – more than one, if you like – and write a problem-driven essay of 6-10 double-
22 I take the idea of a reflective afterword from Judy Goleman. Collins—61
spaced pages. This means that, rather than making a claim and trying to prove it to me, you’ll find a difficulty that you’ve been presented with this semester and work through it. Maybe there was a passage in Pynchon you had trouble making sense of, perhaps you’re disturbed by the suspension of traditional morality at the end of Cactus Thorn, or you might be intrigued by how identity and self-knowledge work in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The archetypal problem for the course might be “What’s a novella?” but you are not at all required to address that question. The goal of this assignment is to think through such a problem on the page. You may not be able to make a stable claim by the end; you might have more questions at the end than when you started. That’s fine! While you’ll certainly want your prose to be polished and intelligible, you need not be so formal and academic as you would be for the analytic essay. This genre has a good deal of room for different styles and approaches, so offering a “model” is difficult. You can, however, think of “Joseph Frank’s Dostoevsky” [which, N.B. Alex, we will have read] as an example of this genre. You should feel free to incorporate secondary sources if the problem takes you there, but I won’t require it. For your afterword, narrativize your writing process for this essay. This will not count against your grade, even if you’ve only just hammered it out the day before, so please be as honest as you can be. IV. Bonus option: If you can think of something you’d rather do than these three options, and you can convince me that it would take the same amount of time and effort, come to my office and pitch it to me.
This project will be irrevocably due on ______. I have given you this prompt well in advance of this date for two reasons. 1) So that you’ll have time to weigh the options and consider which one is the best for you; and 2) Because, as the syllabus says, we’ll spend the last week of class workshopping your writing, for which you’ll need a full draft. So, to put it in list form, the dates you need to know are:
______: Full draft brought to class to be workshopped. ______: Second round of workshopping. ______: Final, ultimate, that-after-which-there-is-none Paramedic Method workshop. Bring a draft to this meeting that you would feel comfortable turning in. ______: Final project is due by midnight. You will email the assignment to me as an attached word document. I will email you back to confirm that I’ve received it and that I can open it. I will, after grading, email your essay back to you with my comments, and a filled-in rubric at the end. Collins—62
9. Rubric for the Creative Writing Option23 Form: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 (needs much work) (outstanding)
1. Closely appropriates style of the target texts. 2. No obvious and unintentional grammatical or spelling errors. 3. Is written clearly, or, if the text is obscure, is obscure for a reason stated in afterword. 4. Is at least six pages long. Content: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (needs much work) (outstanding)
1. Does not misstate or mistake plot points from the target text. 2. Shows imagination and creativity in additions to target text. 3. Characters are consistent with target text. 4. Engages with themes present in target text.
Afterword: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 (needs much work) (outstanding)
1. Has an afterword. 2. Is no more than two pages long. 3. Demonstrates engagement with ideas discussed in class. 4. Demonstrates the ability to reflect on the process of writing. 5. Clearly explains the major choices made in the process of composition.
Comments:
23 All three of my rubrics are based on your rubric for our unit plans. Collins—63
10. Rubric for an Analytic Essay Form: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 (needs much work) (outstanding)
1. Closely appropriates the style of academic prose. 2. No grammatical or spelling errors. 3. Is written clearly, or, if the text is obscure, is obscure for a reason stated in afterword. 4. Is at least six to ten pages long. 5. MLA format is used correctly. 6. Citations are cleanly incorporated. 7. Has at least 4 secondary sources. Content: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (needs much work) (outstanding)
1. Has a clearly stated, non-obvious, and disputable thesis. 2. Uses specific evidence from primary source with citations. 3. Evidence is appropriate to the claim being made. 4. Sentences and paragraphs clearly relate to each other. 5. Does not say objectively false things about primary source.
Afterword: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 (needs much work) (outstanding)
1. Has an afterword. 2. Is no more than two pages long. 3. Addresses hesitations, or enumerates strengths of the essay. 4. Is written clearly and in a personal voice. 5. Shows ability to reflect on own writing. Collins—64
Comments: Collins—65
11.Rubric for an Exploratory Essay Form: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 (needs much work) (outstanding)
1. Is written clearly and in a personal voice. 2. No obvious and unintentional grammatical or spelling errors. 3. Is written clearly, or, if the text is obscure, is obscure for a reason stated in afterword. 4. Is at least six pages long. 5. If secondary sources are used, they are integrated cleanly. Content: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (needs much work) (outstanding)
1. Is unified by one clear topic, question, or problem. 2. Shows imagination, creativity, and rigor in treatment of question. 3. Moves from the particular details of the primary text to larger issues. 4. Sentences and paragraphs clearly relate to each other. 5. Does not say objectively false things about the primary source.
Afterword: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 (needs much work) (outstanding)
1. Has an afterword. 2. Is no more than two pages long. 3. Demonstrates ability to reflect on the process of writing. 4. Seems honest and authentic. 5. Is written clearly and in a personal voice.
Comments: Collins—66 Collins—67
IV. Works Cited Barth, John. “Lost in the Funhouse.” Lost in the Funhouse. New York: Bantam, 1969. Print. Blau, Sheridan D. The Literature Workshop: Teaching Texts and Their Readers. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2003. Print. Bruns, Cristina Vischer. Why Literature: The Value of Literary Reading and What It Means for Teaching. New York: Continuum, 2011. Print. Calvino, Italo. The Castle of Crossed Destinies. Trans. Weaver, William. Orlando: Harcourt, 1977. Print. Conrad, Jospeh. The Duel. 1908. New York: Melville House, 2010. Print. De Botton, Alain (alaindebotton). “Honest evaluation never has to involve meanness: nastiness and criticism are logically entirely distinct.” 12 May 2013, 10:50 p.m. Tweet. Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Notes from Underground and The Double. Trans. Wilks, Robert. New York: Penguin, 2009. Print. Foucault, Michel. Power/Knowledge. Ed. Gordon, Colin. Trans. Colin, Gordon. New York: Pantheon, 1980. Print. Gee, James Paul. “What Is Literacy?” Negotiating Academic Literacies p. 51-9. Eds. Zamel, Vivian, and Ruth Spack. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1998. Print. Nabokov, Vladimir. Lectures on Literature. San Diego: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1982. Print. Smith, Michael W. and Jeffrey D. Wilhelm. Fresh Takes on Teaching Literary Elements: How to Teach What Really Matters About Character, Setting, Point of View, and Theme. New York: Scholastic, 2010. Print. Street, Brian. “The New Literacy Studies.” Literacy: A Critical Sourcebook. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2001. Print. Žižek, Slavoj. How to Read Lacan. New York: Norton, 2006. Print.