American+Stories+11-21-08

11-21-08 =American Stories =

When I was hired at UConn to direct the writing project I insisted that I wanted to continue teaching American Literature, and so every fall semester I teach an American Literature survey course. The survey courses are writing courses, meet many general education requirements, and are open to sophomores, which means that few of the students are English majors and the content isn’t of great interest to many of them. I strive to make the course interesting by making the material relevant to the contemporary era.

One of my favorite novels to teach is [|Willa Cather’s] //[|O Pioneers!]//. Besides the title taken from [|Walt Whitman’s] [|“Pioneers! O Pioneers!”] there are allusions to the story of the [|Garden of Eden] and the myth of [|Pyramus and Thisbe]. But my favorite line from the novel is spoken by Carl Linstrum, who says to Alexandra Bergson, “there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before.” I begin the course by asking the students what those two or three stories are. The students say things like The Loss Of Innocence or Life Is A Journey, which are both great answers. After they generate a good list, I’ll ask if they can name specific stories to correspond with these abstractions. The students don’t have sufficient knowledge of the Bible or Classical mythology to name stories, but I poke and prod them into naming the story of [|Adam and Eve], the story of [|Christ], or the myth of [|Odysseus], just to name a few. But then I say, OK, this isn’t a course on the Bible as literature or Classical mythology, though it would sure help, especially the English majors, to have a good knowledge of both of those fields. This is a course on American Literature. What I want you to do is identify American stories. Each week the students write brief response papers in which they have to relate the assigned text to something contemporary, and they meet in response groups to discuss ways to extend the connections they make. These short papers evolve into two longer works. Then, for the final, I ask the students to identify an important American story, and trace its trajectory from a seminal work of American literature to a contemporary text, person, issue, or event.

I get some wonderful connections. This semester, several students paired [|“The Custom-House”] and [|“Bartleby, the Scrivener”] with the TV show //[|The Office]//, the movie //[|Office Space]//, or [|Chuck Palahniuk]’s novel //[|Fight Club]//, all of which deal with workers disillusioned by soulless, dead end jobs. A couple other students wrote about //[|Nature]//, //[|Walden]//, and [|Jon Krakauer]’s novel //[|Into the Wild]//, another great trajectory that explores the role of nature in man’s sense of identity and purpose, with each work’s protagonist engaging in increasingly more realistic and more dangerous applications of Transcendentalist ideals.

The political campaigns this fall proved to be fertile ground for the students. Many saw connections between Hester Prynne and [|Sarah Palin], who seems to have embraced the color red and its connotations as a badge. The students generally agreed that Palin and the Republican party were fully aware of the implicit connections to Hester, but that they banked on the public’s faulty reading of Hester as a rebel, forgetting that Hester’s rebellion is thwarted, and she is put in her place. The class was delighted when in their [|endorsement of Barack Obama for the presidency], the editorial board at //[|The Hartford Courant]// wrote “America is starved for a leader who can restore pride and once again make the nation a beacon for the world, or in the words of [|Massachusetts Governor John Winthrop in 1630], ‘a city on a hill—with the eyes of all people upon us.’” One student had fun writing about sin from [|Jonathan Edwards] to [|John Edwards], focusing on the latter’s [|affair with Rielle Hunter].

By semester’s end, the students have learned to make all kinds of great connections. I had a conference with a student this past Monday for a paper in which she analyzes [|T. C. Boyle]’s novel //[|Drop City]// as a contemporary exploration of the tension between Thoreau’s and Whitman’s visions of Emersonian thought, the former embracing solitude, chastity, and the woods, the latter embracing community, promiscuity, and the city. Another student I spoke with on Tuesday scrapped her initial idea in order to write about California’s [|Proposition 8], which for now has reversed the California Supreme Court’s decision to extend marital rights to gay and lesbian couples. The student took note of [|a letter to the editor] published in Tuesday’s //Hartford Courant// that asked “when have civil rights ever been voted on by the public?” The writer suggested that the civil rights acts of [|1957] and [|1964] that respectively extended voting rights to African Americans and outlawed racial segregation were preceded by the [|1954 Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education]. My student saw the passage of Proposition 8 and the points made by the letter writer to be direct refutations of Thoreau’s opening passage from [|“Civil Disobedience”] that “That government is best which governs not at all.” She felt that the California vote demonstrated Thoreau was correct in his observation that majority rule often results in injustice, but she was sure that Thoreau would disapprove of having civil rights determined not by conscience but by courts of law. She was excited to write the paper.

These students are not honors students, and they are no more well read than the average student. Truth be told, as I am a voracious news junkie, much of the impetus came from me as I forwarded articles electronically, hoping some would excite the imagination of a student or two, which they did. Nonetheless, I find this approach makes so-called old texts relevant, it encourages students to be involved in current events, and it teaches students to read stories for narrative patterns, some of which may even connect to Biblical and Classical archetypes.

I plan to take a break from blogging next week for Thanksgiving, but when I return the following week I plan to write about technology, and in part I will discuss how a wikispace or a facebook group can really help with this kind of approach to a course.

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