You Can Lead a Student to Literature, but. . .

You might gather two things from the title of this post--that I've been much engaged of late with teaching, and that the experience has been less-than-pleasant. The first assumption would be correct; the second, well, you'll see. . .

I am wrapping up the second major work on the syllabus, after the introductory foray into poetry that always begins my lit classes. I love teaching poetry, but it has to be done early in the semester to allow time for the poetry paper-and-presentation combo that I generally assign. They can't work on those without some basic understanding of form, meter, and some basic steps of interpretation. Having wrapped up "Goblin Market" last week, we have been covering William Morris's utopia News from Nowhere because I just couldn't talk about feminism in a serious, unbiased way with Herland. I had a difficult time convincing students that the "it takes a village" method of parenting promoted in Gilman's book had any benefits. "No really!" I said, "Doesn't it make sense that the most competent women should be raising the children?" "Well yes," I said, "It would depend on your criteria for judging competency." And "Yes," I said, "that would be a rather difficult line to draw." And, "Oh by the way," I said, "Gilman was a big proponent of Eugenics." "Why, yes, the concepts are very complimentary, aren't they?" Besides, I'm a poster child for motherhood right about now. Talking about it theoretically gets to feeling a little, um, disingenuous. So I decided to tackle socialism instead. Well, not really.

Because, you see, Morris was a socialist politically, but his utopia basically does away with any form of economics. There is no "economy," just a willingness to share--a communalism (I don't want to say "commune" or "communism") that resembles a large-scale monastic existence (only the economics of it--for want of a better word) more than any other model. Marxists, socialists--they don't really want to see an end to economics. Money stays, private property goes. It may not have started that way--just ask Marx and Lenin. . .

What's interesting about this utopia are Morris's aesthetic ideas, including ideas about the aesthetic value of work. Well, this can be hard to impress upon a group of students whose self-stated purpose in life is to compete and to work to acquire "things." If this sounds harsh, I wish you could see the class discussion boards. I had someone grudgingly acknowledge that there are people who work because they enjoy their jobs, but most can't see why anyone in Morris's utopia would be inclined to work. They suggest instead that the mindset would, in reality, be more like those who "mooch" (my word--their sentiment) off of Welfare. Ooof. Well, considering the financial backgrounds of a lot of these students, I'm not all that surprised.

What is surprising to me is the way they harp on reality. I guess Morris's utopia is realistic enough and yet idealistic enough that the main question in their heads seems to be, "Could this really work?" With the implied answer being, "No, because people are. . ." (nasty, cruel, lazy, competitive--enter negative adjective of choice.) And many of these students are self-described Christians. I must say that it pains me to see students so young who are so cynical. I consider myself a pretty cynical person, but I realize more and more that I have a kind of idealism that runs pretty deep. At any rate, I do believe that there should be more to choosing a profession than the money one will make and the things that one will acquire by working in that particular job! And I do believe that there is a dignity in just knowing that one has a job and that there is a kind of despair that goes along with not believing that a job will ever come along--and that the despair leads people (not all, but some) to rely on social services. Why bother, when the world seems against us? Where I differ from many others who profess similar philosophies is in the solution--namely, that I don't claim to have one. I believe that the individual is the key--not the mass, and so to help the general, we must look for the one person who needs encouragement, then another, then another. My job here is just to get them to look beyond their social situations and their conceptions of reality and say, "Well, yes. . . I guess it would be better if people could do what work appealed to them and still be just as comfortable as the next person." Perhaps the next question might be, "Well, why isn't it like that, anyway?" At any rate, I actually mentioned the term "dignity of work" on the discussion boards, and pointed out that many people work who have no hope of ever gaining a Lexus, or even owning their own home--which so many people take for granted. And I asked why that might be, when many of the people in question do not enjoy what they do.

I guess this brings me to what a wonderful thing discussion boards can be if used correctly. Not that I'm a master by any means. I have modified how I moderate and assign the discussion boards from the beginning of the semester, and I have tried this in semesters past. Basically, I have to have them write questions about certain topics on certain days, and on alternate days, they answer others' questions. Then, depending on where their questions lead, I either use them as discussion-starters in class, or start my own discussion board and have them answer my thematic questions. The result is that they actually say more about the literature--when properly prompted, and when they don't get stuck on "how people really are" or "how the society works"! At any rate, the discussion can evolve much more naturally, and I like having the students set the agenda, since I'm not really trying to promote one (contrary to their expectations--when they saw the term "socialism," they expected the worst from me, I'm sure!!). I'm not a socialist, but at this point, you might have a hard time convincing them of that!

While this is a frustrating experience in some ways, it is also inspiring in a way. Here, I actually do have an opportunity to get them to imagine the world in a different way--which is, indeed, the point of a utopia, and the value of fantasy. C. S. Lewis once wrote that one who reads fantasy “does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted." Tolkien takes this a quite a bit further in his (much more scholarly) "On Fairy Stories," which promises to provide for a lot of good discussion in the coming week(s), by theorizing the nature of the enchantment (in a Christian context, which might inform some of the discussion board topics, but will probably not enter into class discussion).

As we wind down William Morris, who it seems we have barely started, and prepare to meet Tolkien, which meeting I look forward to eagerly, we have ongoing contemplation of poetry on an individual level as they prepare to write their poetry explications (with a fantasy twist). Today I met with a student who was so petrified of poetry that she was literally only reading words on paper, and wasn't really sure how they strung together to make meaning. This sounds harsh, but it is accurate. I have never seen such anxiety with regard to literature before. She was literally shaking as she answered my "What is this poem about? What's going on in this poem?" with a timid, "Well, it could be about . . . death?" I believe that answer seemed as likely as one of the other "Themes of Literature" she undoubtedly learned about in high school. But the beauty of assigning an explication paper is that it really allows the student a true opportunity to discover the meaning of the poem for him or herself--in this case, guided by me, but it was a good teaching opportunity. I believe I did "lead her to literature," and she does indeed understand this poem--and perhaps, by extension, all poems--better.

In short, I really love this syllabus. I hope that wherever I go next, I am able to continue my thematic course on fantasy. Maybe one day I will even be able to edit an anthology of British fantasy literature that can be used for such a course--you know, the Norton Anthology of British Fantasy or some such thing. . .

It's the idealist in me, perhaps (you know, the one I keep hidden like Boober fraggle and Sidebottom), but I think there might be some value in this reading and teaching literature thing after all. At any rate, this semester is giving me that feeling.