I Don’t Have an iPod, But My Mom Does

Since I was quite young, I have been told that I have an “artistic temperament.” By some, that was a compliment: I was sensitive, insightful, and curious. By others, it was not a particularly good review. When I made known my intention to be an English major to the professor of my freshman drama seminar, she told me that “you can’t be both a good artist and a good critic.” Her view was that if you identified as a writer of literature yourself, you would sympathize with the author, and this sympathy smoothed out the edges too much for you to be able to analyze and interpret “objectively.”  (As if “objective” reading exists!)

I’ve always known she was wrong. And this semester, the tenth anniversary of my first as an undergrad, I think I know how to say why. 

There is always a lot of talk in pedagogical circles about the importance of giving students the experience of writing their own poetry in order to understand the way the craft operates from the inside. Anyone who has ever tried to write a sonnet, or even a haiku, knows that it’s a lot more complicated than writing an email. In the case of fiction, though, that point may be more elusive. Most people would not bring The Oxford Book of Verse to the beach, but many would bring a novel. Poets are cloaked in mystery and romance, but writers of fiction prose are perhaps often seen simply as people who have the time to observe reality and write it down. Writing a poem takes magic; writing a novel takes discipline. Oh, please.

In terms of student engagement, my most successful units have been novel studies. My students tended to be very reluctant readers, nonreaders independently, and so there was a certain sweetness about one of them swooping up to me at the beginning of a period, asking breathlessly, “Miss, can we read the book today? Pleeeease.” In general, they hadn’t been read to, hadn’t been allowed to sink into a good story without the passive shock and awe of movies and television, into a story that required more than 90 minutes of their lives. Part of my job was to do what I could to give them the experiences with reading I had had that made me love it. 

If students are reading and enjoying it, it’s tempting (especially with rowdy, easily bored teenagers) to take the path of least resistance. But teachers fall short of their goals if they don’t get students to think critically about what they read, which can be difficult when the reading is pleasurable and more accessible. Untrained readers can “get into” a book, but when it’s time to talk or write about it, it sounds like the class is catching up on a soap opera. They blow past any implications of form and discuss the characters and their lives as if they were real. The key, then, is to get students to go beyond caring just about what the author is doing and begin to probe and appreciate how and why he or she is doing it.

First, one small confession: I am a massive Harry Potter fan. My interest in mythology, medieval literature, and teenagers, alongside my taste for British wit and flights of fancy, make it impossible for me to turn away. The first time through the series, I read as fast as I could, hundreds of pages flying by in a single day. Especially in the case of the seventh and last book, I was resolute that no one would spoil it for me, but popular media was so saturated with it that I knew I had to get to the end as quickly as possible. That kind of emotional investment is, I think, an important experience to have as a reader, but it is not literary studies. The second time through, when I was not so bound by suspense, I began to appreciate how clever Rowling is. Having done some writing myself, I noticed things like a device to get certain characters at the same place at the same time, speculated on why characters had certain names, and saw symbols and motifs emerge. (One example: Voldemort, as a half-blood who is obsessed with establishing a new order of only pure blood wizards, no matter what he has to do to rid the world of muggles, mudbloods, and blood traitors, must be an allegory for Hitler and Nazi eugenics movement. That’s deep!)

Writing fiction, that “beautiful lie,” is a series of decisions. As an author, you are trying to present something essentially true about the human experience, but it is a craft in which raw material is shaped into a story. Reality must be observed, considered, and finally cut down to size and packaged. Every author must contend with certain narrative conventions, even (perhaps especially) modern and postmodern authors who want to expose and explode them. People learn by doing, and there is no better way to demonstrate how fiction writers’ craft operates than to make students fiction writers themselves. Having written a short story, or even just a scene, students would understand the decisions authors have to make, like which conversations to have the reader listen in on, and which of the characters’ activities are part of the plot and which are not important or relevant enough. They would, as all fiction writers do, have been forced to create systems that operate as analogues to reality. 

The creation of literature is not a mystery, and neither is literary analysis. So let’s be democratic about it. Making students into authors themselves makes them more likely to care about another author’s craft and gives them a way to talk about the hows and whys because they have asked themselves those questions from the inside looking out. And once people, of any age, have a way to talk about something, they usually can’t be stopped. This post proves that.

So, Professor X, you might have a Ph.D. from Yale, but you got this one wrong.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 11:05 pm and is filed under Off my chest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.