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Teaching Tristram Shandy

4/27/2014

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I taught Tristram Shandy this past spring for the first time, and boy did I have NO idea what I was getting myself into. Nonetheless, I think it went over fairly well, and I am happy to share the fruits of my labor with you.
  1. Start slowly at the beginning. We focused on the opening chapter for almost an entire day. We read the first two volumes together over two weeks.
  2. Take the time to enjoy the weird textual quirks in class--students love talking about the black page, the marbled page, the squiggly lined diagrams of narrative "progress," and the white page where the reader can draw his or her own ideal portrait of feminine beauty.
  3. Have the students branch out to read individual volumes on their own and then report their findings back to the class. This works especially well if you ask students to explain one particular digression that they find interesting, funny, or important. It works well in the classroom both because students came to class already excited about a particular textual passage and because the "plot" of Tristram Shandy really is in the digressions.

The opening sentence:
I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what they were about when they begot me.
Discussion questions:
  • What is Tristram saying in this opening line?
  • What are your reactions? What specific affect (emotion) did it produce in you?
  • Why do you think Sterne starts here? It’s a weird beginning for an "autobiography," no?

The Black Page:
Another major topic of classroom discussion is the black page that follows the reported death of the parson Yorick, who dies from a broken heart because of a war of words; after he incurs the wrath of the townspeople for his indecorous bons mots, they attack him with slander until he gives up. After the following passage, the book is marked by a black page:
Ten times a day has Yorick's ghost the consolation to hear his monumental inscription read over with such a variety of plaintive tones, as denote a general pity and esteem for him;—a foot-way crossing the church-yard close by the side of his grave,—not a passenger goes by without stopping to cast a look upon it,—and sighing as he walks on, Alas, poor Yorick!
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Discussion questions:
  • What do you make of this? What are various things that this black page could signify?

Through browsing the website of the Laurence Sterne Trust, I found a wonderful site--The Black Page--that features modern artistic renderings of the famous black page in Sterne's book (all of the images below come from that site). These images act as interpretations of the black page, and they can help students to tease out possible meanings such as the following:
  • The black page is a door or a portal; it can show someone either passing into a new place (the afterlife) or being shut out of a place (social acceptance).
  • The black page is a black void (a sign of emptiness) or a overabundance of inky words (a sign of presence).
  • The black page can be impersonal and abstract (a sign of the loss of identity), or it can be the thumbprint or signature mark of Tristram the narrator or Sterne the author (a sign of someone proclaiming his personality).
  • The black page can be mournful (a sign of grief and/or sentimentality) or humorous (a playful moment of satire).
  • The black page is like a Rorschach test: readers will learn more about themselves by examining what they "see" in the black page than they will learn about Tristram Shandy itself.
Of course, the marbled page provokes similar discussion. The Laurence Sterne Trust has images of several copies of the marbled page (each book had a unique page that was hand marbled). There is, similarly, an artists page for interpreting this "emblem" of the book as well. It's definitely worth checking out!
Of course the major discussion of Tristram Shandy is one of form. It is, perhaps, a book that is primarily about digressions. Ask your students to think about how this digressive model of writing develops into its own philosophy.
Digressions, incontestably, are the sunshine;—they are the life, the soul of reading!—take them out of this book, for instance,—you might as well take the book along with them;—one cold eternal winter would reign in every page of it; restore them to the writer;—he steps forth like a bridegroom,—bids All-hail; brings in variety, and forbids the appetite to fail.
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All I wish is, that it may be a lesson to the world, "to let people tell their stories their own way."
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How do we understand the tone of Tristram Shandy? In what way is Sterne mocking us (his readers), or the Enlightenment, or the printing industry? In what way is Sterne sincere in his affection for his characters or in his appeal to freedom and individuality? Where is that line of satire or sentimentality, and how do you know it? What kind of statement does Sterne make about "nature" through his digressions and through his development of the "hobby horse" concept?
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Teaching "Rime of the Ancient Mariner"

4/27/2014

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I find Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" to be a beautiful, dark, dreamlike poem. I love reading it, but I struggle to teach it. I had attempted teaching it before, but it fell terribly flat. This time around, I turned to my smart friends for their pedagogical advice, and I got this terrific response!

From my smart friends:

From Ari Friedlander, professor at University of Dayton. Dr. Friedlander studies early modern English literature and pop culture and the history and theory of gender and sexuality. He's also generous, hilarious, and a really good listener:
Never taught it, but always thought it might be fun to do with Northrop Frye's "Archetypes of Literature" essay. It's not technically about the poem, but it could work anyway.
From Valerie Dennis, instructor at West Texas A&M University. Dr. Dennis works at the intersection of medieval and early modern English literature. She also has a soft spot in her heart for pet rats (she once had three named Charlotte, Emily, and Anne!), and Benedict Cumberbatch. 
I had them do some group work where they analyzed the changing descriptions of different aspects of the setting: the sea, the sun, the weather, the sea creatures, and the ship. I assigned each group one of these categories, and they had to find the relevant descriptions and explain how they change/shift throughout the poem and what that contributes to the plot. 
From Meg Sparling. Ms. Sparling is currently a graduate student at UC Davis, where she is writing her dissertation on representations of black manual laborers in nineteenth-century American literature. She is wicked smart and has impeccable taste in television, even if she constantly mispronounces the "thr-" in Game of Thrones.
 We talk about the ballad, archaic language, the circulation of the Mariner's tale, genre, environmentalism, and we talk a lot about zombies.  In terms of environmentalism, I introduce the Book of Genesis' notion of man's environmental stewardship over nature, and we discuss if this is the rationale behind the poem's message, as stated in the last few stanzas. It isn't as if the Mariner completes his voyage and then surrounds himself with nonhuman animals--he remains anthropocentric. So I ask them: what, then, is the function that animals are put to in the poem? And doesn't this reinforce a particular human/animal hierarchy? Also, I like to push back against the stewardship theory by exploring how ineffable and powerful nature is in the poem, and how impotent man seems to be against it.
Synthesizing it all:
I ended up using almost all of these suggestions, but in a modified form. I assigned the following articles, which drew on archetypal language in order to draw connections between the poem and the Book of Revelation. I had a student present each article according to the homework presentation assignment. 

Chandler, Alice.  “Structure and Symbol in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’” Modern Language Quarterly 26.3 (1965):  401-413.

Gose, Eliot. “Coleridge and the Luminous Gloom: an Analysis of the Symbolical Language in ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.’” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 75.3 (1960): 238-244.

I did break the students up into groups to focus their reading on certain recurring motifs or themes in the poem, and I noticed that all of these motifs came back to a discussion about the indeterminacy in the poem between 1) free will and fate and 2) salvation and damnation. This helped me to craft the following questions for my students.

Reading and discussion questions:
  • What are these two major moments about animals in the poem?
  • What is the Albatross like? How does the Mariner react to it? Why?
  • What are the water snakes like? How does he react to them? Why? 
  • How does the Mariner make choices?
  • How does he moves from one place to the other? Is the ship an effective means by which he can control his movements? Why or why not?  If the sea were a “character” in the poem, how would you describe it? Is is more or less powerful than the ship?
  • Is the Mariner active (agential) or passive (acted upon)?
  • Does it matter that both of his two major interactions with animals happen because of impulse rather than because of purposeful decision making?
  • What is the significance that the listener is going to a wedding?
  • What is the significance of the Mariner’s hypnotic hold over the wedding guest?  How does the Mariner’s relationship to free will relate to the Wedding Guest’s lack of free will?  
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At this point, my students started to formulate two competing readings of the poem:

This is the story of the fall and the redemption of the Mariner.  The fall is seen in his Judas-like betrayal of a Christ-like figure, the Albatross;  The redemption is seen in the eschatological language and the vision of the New Jerusalem as recounted in the Book of Revelation. The Mariner is like John the Apostle.

This is the story of a damned man. His depravity is made apparent through the shooting of the bird, and his redemption is far from certain. In fact, 1 Thessalonians 4:17 (the scriptural bases for the idea of the “Rapture”) would have us believe that the fact that he is left behind corroborates his damnation;  the "dead in Christ" and "we who are alive and remain" will be "caught up in the clouds" to meet "the Lord in the air.

At this point, I pulled in a series of images from Gustave Doré's illustrations of the poem. In each, we looked at the specific lines that Doré is illustrating.

By the way, the Doré illustrations can all be found at this page, hosted by the library of the University of Buffalo.
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The game is done! I've won, I've won!
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It ceased; yet still the sails made on A pleasant noise till noon.
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Full many shapes, that shadows were, In crimson colors came.
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I moved my lips -- the Pilot shrieked and fell down in a fit
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I pass, like night, from land to land; I have strange power of speech.
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The moment that his face I see, I know the man that must hear me.
Doré offers a great way into the poem because he seems not to have made up his mind  about the spiritual significance of the Mariner's story: the angels appear to guide the ship home (suggesting salvation and a divine providence) but the expressions on the people who interact with the mariner are expressions of terror and horror (suggesting the Mariner's damnation and abjection).
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We wrap up by thinking of the pitfalls of reading this poem purely as a spiritual allegory. I ask them to consider alternate modes of reading the poem: as an expression of the sublime and/or the imagination, or as a commentary on the privileges and burdens of the author. We also spend a lot of time discussing the ways that the self-proclaimed moral of the poem--"He prayeth best, who loveth best / All things both great and small"--doesn't seem to be an adequate capstone to the poem. 
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Strategies for Teaching Mrs. Dalloway

4/27/2014

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I taught Virgina Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway for the first time this past semester. I love Woolf, but she falls pretty far out of my field of specialty, so I had some anxiety about how to teach this beautiful but challenging book. 

I turned to my very smart friends on Facebook asking for advice, and here is what I got. (True story, the response I got to this post on Facebook was the inspiration for my blog. I first envisioned this blog as being called "My Smart Friends." So many people have commented to me that they love my pedagogy posts on Facebook because they draw ideas from so many smart teachers! I thought that it would be nice to have a more permanent place to keep these crowd-sourced ideas but I also wanted to contribute my own ideas as well because I love this gig, and I have perhaps too much to say about it).

The first set of advice comes from my lovely friend Gretchen Braun, who is an assistant professor at Furman University, a Victorianist, and a general bad ass with a totally sick muscle car.

Here is her advice:
I frame discussions of it around the impact of WWI and resistance to both Victorian culture and Victorian narrative conventions. My students have read Wuthering Heights first, so we get some mileage out of comparing Clarissa's choice between Richard and Peter to Cathy's choice between Edgar and Heathcliff (thinking about how this novel explodes the two-suitors marriage plot and figures it retrospectively). We also talk about Septimus in relation to changing paradigms of mental health and illness in the early twentieth century. 

On Septimus and mental health

I talk about how nineteenth-century understandings of nervous disorders like neurasthenia (symptomology we would now associate with depression) totally failed in explaining and treating shell shock. Holmes and Bradshaw are following the "rest cure" approach to Septimus, and obviously, it's exactly what he does not need.  See historian Janet Oppenheim's Shattered Nerves for information on nervous disorder/depression treatments in Victorian/Edwardian England. See also Cathy Caruth's theories of trauma and narration and talk about WWI as the beginning of modern trauma studies. 

On the two-marriage plot:

Jean Kennard's Victims of Convention (there's an article and a book by that name) is an oldie but goodie. She outlines how the traditional female Bildungsroman requires a female protagonist to choose between two suitors who represent different cultural values. In choosing the "right" suitor she accepts his values, but loses her autonomy. Kennard talks about how this limits the kinds of female experiences the traditional novel can tell; obviously, it excludes maternity. Clarissa's story references the two suitors convention but insists that a woman remains fluid, interesting, and complicated after she has "chosen." And then of course there's all the interesting same-sex desire stuff in that book. Sharon Marcus's Between Women is an interesting lens for looking at Clarissa and Sally in their youth.
Dr. Braun's approach to teaching Mrs. Dalloway is super accessible to students, because in our current moment there are so many love-triangle narratives associated with Young Adult fiction, particularly when the protagonist is female. The two most popular are Twilight and The Hunger Games, but students usually can think of many, many more of the top of their heads.  The convention of being TEAM X or TEAM Y is super familiar to them, but that really doesn't work very well in this novel at all, in part because Clarissa is already married, but also because of her memories of Sally Seton complicate everything. My students initially try to start up factions for TEAM RICHARD and TEAM PETER, but inevitably those factions just sort of die away, because Clarissa is marked by fluidity and change rather than stasis:
She would not say of any one in the world now that they were this or were that. She felt very young; at the same time unspeakably aged. She sliced like a knife through everything; at the same time was outside, looking on. She had a perpetual sense, as she watched the taxi cabs, of being out, out, far out to sea and alone; she always had the feeling that it was very, very dangerous to live even one day. Not that she thought herself clever, or much out of the ordinary. How she had got through life on the few twigs of knowledge Fräulein Daniels gave them she could not think. She knew nothing; no language, no history; she scarcely read a book now, except memoirs in bed; and yet to her it was absolutely absorbing; all this; the cabs passing; and she would not say of Peter, she would not say of herself, I am this, I am that… Her only gift was knowing people almost by instinct, she thought, walking on. (200)
I got a second piece of excellent advice from another friend of mine, Mindi McMann, professor at the College of New Jersey. Dr. McMann is a postcolonial scholar, a connoisseuse of fine alcohol, and an absolute fanatic for her two adorable cats, Finn and Fergus.

Here is her advice:
I'd second Gretchen's advice, but also point you in the direction of empire and imperialism. London itself is a character in the novel, and it's important to consider the urban space, and in particular the way that space is mostly limited to Westminster. It's the metropolitan center and focused even more on the state apparatus/government. Peter's recent return from India of course feeds right into this reading. Big Ben is the masculine time of governance and empire (and St. Margaret's, always two minutes behind is, at least in Peter's mind, feminine time).
The recurring motif of ticking and chiming clocks is almost overwhelming in the novel. I bring in Monet's series of oil paintings of Westminster, painted to represent different times of the day, and ask students to think about these images in relation to Mrs. Dalloway.
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There are many more paintings in this Houses of Parliament Series.
What is Monet doing with these images? How might the impressionistic style do something similar to Woolf's stream-of-consciousness narration in Mrs. Dalloway? Why does Westminster merit such extended representation in visual art and in Woolf's narrative--what makes it "important" to these artists? Why is time so important in both of these representations of London?
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    Claire Dawkins

    English Instructor at Stanford's Online High School

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