Guitarsophist

Yesterday I turned in my grades. I had one student who tried to submit a paper after I had already turned them in. I need to tighten up on my late paper policies so that this sort of thing doesn’t happen. However, teaching is a kind of dance, especially teaching a course for the first time. I have goals for the course, and the students have needs and abilities and gaps, as well as their own goals and expectations. The trick is to adapt and adjust until it all pretty much works. I learned a lot about teaching from my students this quarter.

After the first midterm, we read the chapter on Structuralism in Peter Barry’s Beginning Literary Theory and a selection from Fernand de Saussure’s Course in Linguistics from the Richter anthology. The tacit theory that most undergraduate English majors bring to reading literature is that the author is a deep thinker who has intentionally designed the literary work to convey hidden meanings that only careful reading can uncover. Up to this point in the course, it was possible for them to fit most of the criticism we had read into this model. However, the structuralist focus on system rather than utterance, the elimination of the author as a limit on interpretation, and the problematic connection between signifiers and signifieds, all conspired to turn the tacit view on its head. Barry says that it is as if people who were very accustomed to studying eggs were now being asked to study chickens. One student wrote in his blog that his head had officially exploded.

From this point on, the students encounter many counter-intuitive questions. To what extent is the author spoken by the discourse? Do signifiers ultimately refer only to other signifiers? Can a work be free from class and ideology? Is language gendered? Up to the first midterm, the students feel that they are adding to what they know. Once they read Saussure, Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault they are beginning to wonder if they know anything at all, or what it would mean to know something.

New learning and intellectual growth necessarily come out of confusion. To prepare the ground, the teacher has to make the students confused. If that is true, I succeeded admirably in this stage of learning. Of course, the confusion has to be productive.

When I designed the course, I thought that I would write online comprehension-check quizzes using the Blackboard 9 quiz module. The first one I tried to write was on Saussure. Blackboard doesn’t do short answer quizzes very well, so they had to be multiple choice. A multiple choice quiz has to have a clear right answer, but the wrong answers have to be plausible enough that a student might choose them. In general, I think that putting lots of plausible wrong answers in front of students is pedagogically questionable. For structuralism, post-structuralism, and postmodernism, it is hilariously impossible. I abandoned the enterprise. I wrote a second midterm instead.

One the last day of class I divided them into groups and had them do an activity based on the Academy Awards. Each group had to select a theory for each of the following categories:

Most mind-expanding theory
Most counter-intuitive theory
Most useful overall theory
Theory most deserving of being cast into the dustbin of history
Theory most useful for impressing your friends

This led to lively discussion and interesting choices. For example, one group decided to put feminist theory, not into the dustbin, but into the “recycle bin” because there were too many conflicts among the theorists, and because they thought that something called “Gender Theory” might be more encompassing and more useful.

Instead of a final, I had each student talk for a few minutes about the paper he or she was about to turn in. Papers were due electronically by midnight at the end of the day, so they had a chance to make some last minute changes if presenting to the class made them want to revise something. This activity was very popular. Several students said that it made the papers more meaningful and several made revisions.

I am teaching this course again next quarter, and I am planning to rework some of the design. All things considered, I’d say the course was a success. I learned a lot. For the students, I think this is a course that plants seeds that sprout a bit now but blossom later. That’s OK.

Well, so far we have gone from Aristotle to the New Critics. For the midterm, I asked them to look at “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats from at least two different critical perspectives. They had 65 minutes. I really didn’t know what to expect. I designed a 20 point grading rubric that had five categories: response to the question, knowledge of critics and texts, use of theory to interpret texts, development, and academic writing style.

I read the poem to them, and I gave them a few cultural details and some textual issues, in case they wanted to go there. Still, a couple of students seemed to be unclear about what an “urn” was, or that the urn had pictures on it that Keats was describing. One never knows what sort of missing background knowledge is going to send a reading in the wrong direction.

A number of students pointed out that Plato argued that art was three times removed from reality because the object in our world is a representation of the ideal form of that object, and the artistic representation is thus a representation of a representation. This poem about the art on an urn is thus four times removed from the truth. That is a good point. However, many of them also argued that Plato would despise the poem, when in fact he would undoubtedly agree with the maxim in the last two lines: Truth is Beauty, Beauty, Truth. Well, excellence is rarely unmixed.

Many of our students are of the Romantic persuasion. They want literature to be about individual creativity, expression, emotion, and deep insight. Thus Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” speaks to them. Fortunately, this approach works well with Keats. However, what they take from Coleridge is the distinction between the primary and secondary imagination, and the fancy. They try to identify elements in the poem that correspond to these different aspects of the mind. This doesn’t really work. Nice try, though.

Students tend to like Victor Shklovsky and the concepts of habitualization and defamiliarization. This ode does give us a new way of thinking about ancient urns, at least if you have seen a Greek urn before, so this works. However, Shklovsky is arguing against the idea that art is imagery. Sometimes students read 180 degrees wrong. They read the opposition as the position, or read the hedge and don’t read the conclusion, so they think that Shklovsky is arguing that imagery is all. Some of my colleagues have noted this tendency as well. Perhaps students are not used to academic writing that takes the opposition seriously enough to lay the position out in a nuanced and fair way. The same thing happened with Wimsatt and Beardsley’s article about “The Intentional Fallacy.” They argue that while it is clear that authors have intentions, it is neither possible nor desirable to know them. My students were discussing authorial intentions and citing Wimsatt and Beardsley as the authorities for doing so.

When I first started reading these midterms, I was disheartened. There was so much misunderstanding! However, I have reconsidered. They have actually learned a great deal, as have I, and we still have half the quarter to go.

Now that I have stepped down as writing center director, my new job is to teach three courses a quarter. One of these is an introduction to literary theory. Long ago, when I was an undergraduate, the department where I was studying had three courses in major critics. The first was called “Plato to Pope,” which I remember because the professor complained that the computer shortened the title in the catalog to read “Plato to Pop.” The second was probably Victorians and Modernists (Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, on the one hand and T.S. Eliot on the other), and the third was probably mostly New Critics and perhaps people like Northrup Frye and Harold Bloom. This was not seen as literary theory so much as literary criticism.

Most of my professors in those days were backsliding New Critics. They had heard of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction, but they thought it was faddish nonsense and were waiting for it to go away. It wasn’t until I got to graduate school that high literary theory became an important topic of conversation. Now the standard texts, such as the one I am using, The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, edited by David Richter, contain everything from Plato and Aristotle to gender studies and queer theory, all to be covered in one course.

My syllabus starts out with the following questions:

What is literature? What is non-literature?
How is literature created?
What does literature do? How does it work?
What do literary texts mean? How do they mean? Is there a correct reading? How do we know?
Is authorial intention important? Or is literature created by the reader?
What role does literature play in society?
Is literature political? Ideological?
Is literature esoteric and exclusive, or part of popular culture?
Is literature nationalistic, ethnic, or gendered?

I write reading questions for each reading selection so that students read with the purpose of finding answers to the questions. I think this gives them a way into difficult texts. I then use the questions to structure the discussion. If a question provokes insight, discussion, and more questions, I allow that to happen until the vein peters out. Then on to the next question. I think that this is more engaging than lecturing. However, what has happened a number of times is that we end up applying literary theory to popular culture and taking up a lot of time with that. We spent an hour last week talking about what Aristotle would think of slasher movies. Some of the more serious students become frustrated when we do that, but the majority of them are quite engaged.

Some of the students are quite passionate about finding out how literature works. One of them came up after our discussion of Aristotle’s Poetics to say that he was disappointed in Aristotle because he seemed to be saying that the purpose of art was to create emotion. He hoped that subsequent readings would provide more satisfactory theories.

Most of the students merely tolerated classical and neo-classical theories of mimesis and rhetorical effects. They became much more animated when we read Wordsworth and Coleridge, especially after we applied their different poetics to actual poems, Tintern Abbey and Kubla Khan. However, in that activity I found myself teaching literature, something I never contemplated doing after I made my rhetorical turn, back in about 1983. I quickly sampled some critical articles on J-Stor to see what has been said. J-Stor is like a Hubble telescope that allows one to see what critics have been saying about a literary work over a long period of time, sometimes back into the 19th century. Different times, different critical approaches, different critics, different interpretations. Each search is the Literary Theory course in microcosm. So it is rhetorical after all!

I am also going to use a book by Peter Barry called Beginning Literary Theory. Another brief introduction to Literary Theory by Jonathan Culler is like a helicopter overflight of the landscape. The Barry book is like a bus tour where you actually get out and walk around a bit and look at things. Barry starts with structuralist theories, and for every theoretical perspective he gives you a historical overview with major figures, a bulleted list of what critics of that persuasion look for, a summary of a sample article, and questions to ponder. I think this will serve students well for the more recent, and more philosophical, approaches.

So far, this is all a lot of work, and I am having difficulty keeping my head above water. It is great fun, however, and it will get easier. I think the students are learning something. I know I am.

I was a big science fiction fan when I was young.  I may have read every science fiction book in the Rosemead, CA public library at one point.  I subscribed to The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction for many years.  Even years later, after I had a Ph.D. in English, I continued to read some science fiction novels, though not as voraciously as in my earlier years.  However, I never imagined teaching a science fiction course.

In fall 2002, I had been at my current institution for a little more than a year.  I was running a new writing center and teaching a section of basic writing.  Two weeks into the quarter I got a message from the English Department that  Dr. Steve Whaley, a long time member of the department, had passed away suddenly of a heart attack.  He had been teaching a general education science fiction course that now had 31 students and no instructor.  Did I want to take it over?

It turned out that I was the only member of the department who had read any of the assigned books.   They gave me his folder of materials for the course and some of the texts.    I decided to do it.

The folder was full of old quizzes, a lot of them on mimograph.  Dr. Whaley had been teaching this course for a long time.  I got a sense of how he ran the course day to day, but there was no hint of what he was trying to accomplish with it.  He had ordered a number of books, including the following:

• Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
• Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin
• Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clark
• The Forever War by Joe Haldeman
• The Science Fiction Research Association Anthology, 1988

However, there was no schedule of readings, and I did not know why he had chosen these particular books.

The first meeting with the class was tough, as one might imagine.  I had to tell them that their professor had passed away.  Dr. Whaley had spent the first week lecturing and showing videos about science fiction, so they had not actually started reading yet.  I told them to start reading Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

To tell the truth, I had not thought of Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde as a science fiction book until I saw it on Dr. Whaley’s syllabus, but it clearly is.  Ursula Le Guin calls science fiction a “thought experiment,” and others have noted that science fiction asks a “What if?” question.  In this case, the book asks, “What if one could suppress the good side of human nature and indulge the bad side simply by taking the appropriate drugs?”  Dr. Jekyll wants to indulge in the base pleasures of the lower class parts of London, but he wants to remain a respectable member of society at the same time.

There was a student from Africa (who claimed to be a prince) in the class who had never heard of the book.  Thus, when he discovered that Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde were THE SAME PERSON, he was immensely surprised!

It turned out that A Wizard of Earthsea is also about an individual split into good and evil parts.  Earthsea is fantasy, but the rules of magic are more rigorously observed in this book than are the laws of physics in most science fiction novels, so it is a good vehicle for talking about genre differences.  These books worked well together.  Clearly Dr. Whaley had had a plan.

Childhood’s End is also a very teachable novel.  It is typical Clark, but more self-contained than the sprawling 2001 series.  Some complain that science fiction is unsophisticated because it hits you over the head with big ideas.  Childhood’s End certainly does that.  It asks, What if technologically sophisticated aliens showed up and solved all of humanity’s problems?  What if they did this just as humans were about to enter space, but would not allow human space travel?  In the resulting utopia, what would happen to human creativity and drive?  And what purpose do the alien overlords actually have in doing all of this?

It turns out that undergraduate students enjoy being hit over the head with big ideas.  This book is always popular, though not with all members of the class.

It’s a general education course, so most of the students are not English majors.  I run the class sessions like dorm room bull sessions.  Every major has something to contribute.  Psych majors are doing character analysis, physics majors are  calculating orbits and relativity effects (very relevant to Haldeman’s Forever War), engineers are talking about the strength of materials, and business majors are costing things out.  I create reading questions to help them stay focused, and I fall back on them if the discussion lags, but it rarely does.

The short story anthology Dr. Whaley was using was full of classic stories.  I had read many of them in the original magazines when I was young.  I don’t use it anymore because it is expensive, and some of the stories are somewhat dated, but I enjoyed choosing from it the first time I taught the course.  I switched to a newer anthology, Visions of Wonder, but next time I am going to use The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Sixth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois.  This covers 2008.  In winter, I will be teaching an honors section again, so I will give them the option of writing a short story.  This anthology will give them a very good idea of what the current market is like.

Over the years, I have found that classic science fiction novels from the 1950′s and 60′s are more teachable than current novels.  Writers like Clark, Phillip K. Dick and Alfred Bester tended to paint in big ideas with a broad brush, with just enough detail to allow the reader to fill in the rest with his or her imagination.   Current science fiction novelists try to create whole worlds with all the complexity of a fully imagined society.  There are lots of minor characters, lots of subplots, lots of intricate technology, cultural practices, etc., and many novels are trilogies or more.  The earlier novels are shorter and more efficient at big idea delivery.

However, next time, I am going to try two new ones.  Actually, I have been teaching one newer novel for quite a while: Neil Stephenson’s Snow Crash.  To quote from my syllabus

Snow Crash is a fast-moving, wild and crazy book, set in a future where everything is privatized and there are no laws.  The CIA has become the CIC, the Central Intelligence Corporation.  The cops are private too. There are the Meta-cops, and The Enforcers.  If you are arrested, they might take you to a Hoosegow (pretty nice, you have to pay extra) or a franchise of The Clink (pretty terrible).  Fast food is provided by Uncle Enzo’s Pizza, which is owned by Nova Sicilia, i.e. the Mafia, which is no longer a criminal organization, because there are no laws.  People live in “burbclaves” which are gated communities with lots of rules.  You might live in a franchise of “Mr. Lee’s Greater Hong Kong,” (pretty high tech) or if you are a racist you might live in “New South Africa,” or if you like the old south, “White Columns.”  Justice is provided by “Uncle Bob’s Judicial System.”  Into all of this chaos and order someone has introduced a computer virus so lethal that if a programmer sees it, his or her mind is scrambled like an operating system shutdown, or “Snow Crash.”  Along the way it turns out that this virus was originally written in Sumerian cuneiform and was responsible for the story of the tower of Babel.  It also turns out that Judaism, and to a certain extent Christianity and Islam, are essentially anti-virus protection written against this virus.  The main characters are a hacker named Hiro Protagonist and a 15-year-old female skateboard “Kourier” named Y.T. (for “Yours Truly”).  Her mother works for “Fedland” which is what is left of the U.S. government. A good part of the action takes place in the “Metaverse” which is cyberspace.  In many ways, this book is what the Matrix was trying to be.

That is always a popular book.  However, this time I am going to teach his newest book Anathem, which takes place in an alternate universe where all academics are sequestered in co-ed monasteries studying philosophy, mathematics, and some physics, some aspects of physics being too dangerous to study.  When the rulers of the secular world outside the walls encounter a problem that requires academic expertise, they can call a monk out, but the monk can never return.  Suddenly, one monk after another is being called out.  Something strange is afoot.

My daughter describes this book as starting out like a combination of Harry Potter and Gene Wolf’s Shadow of the Torturer, and ending up like a new version of Snow Crash.  It should be great fun.

I am also planning to teach Excession, by Iain M. Banks.  This takes place in the “Culture” universe.  The Culture is a society of immense ship minds, vastly powerful machine intelligences who give themselves names like “Not Invented Here,” or “Sleeper Service.”  Humans live aboard these ships, but do not control them.  The Culture is like liberal humanism writ large.  They are oh so ethical.  One of the races within their space is the Affront, who are squid-like creatures who like fighting, war, oppression, torture, male-chauvinism, bear-baiting, dog-fighting, drinking, carousing, etc.  The race that was trying to mentor them got disgusted and called them an “affront to civilization,” and they kind of liked the sound of that, so they became the Affront.  The Culture would like to annihilate them, but that wouldn’t be ethical, so certain political conflicts are set in motion.  Also, there appears to be an object in the universe that is older than the universe, and this is causing strange occurrences and odd ship behavior.

This one should be great fun as well.

Most science fiction is about ethical and moral concerns created by new technolgies.  Many of our students are actively involved in developing and implementing new technologies.  I think it is good for them to think upon the implications, and that makes this an important course.  I also want them to enjoy the reading and the discussion, so much so that they continue to read and discuss science fiction long after the course.  Since many students write me to tell me what they have been reading, it seems to work.