I suspect that most of us who teach at the college or university level look forward to summer not because we don’t have to teach, but because it’s an opportunity to focus our working hours on research and our development as faculty members.  Of course, we create lists of writing and research projects that we want to work on – and my lists are always overly ambitious, to say the least.

But I think it’s also important to create reading lists.  While I do take some time to read lighter fare (I’m looking forward to Nicole Peeler’s next installment in her Jane True series, for example), I like to create an academic reading list for the summer.  I’ve generally tried to have a theme: a writer’s entire body of work or major works from a particular literary era where there is a gap in my own education.  So, I’ve had summers of William Faulkner, Thomas Middleton, William Shakespeare (I’m an early modern scholar, not a Shakespearean per se), nineteenth century British novels (that one really just meant Vanity Fair and several Hardy novels).

I’m currently casting about for what my reading list should focus on this summer.  I have a book to review for an academic journal and research-related reading to do, but that’s not the sort of reading that I’m talking about.  Likely, I’ll settle on Ben Jonson’s work – I haven’t read many of his tragedies.  Though, as I write this, I have to say that Frances Burney’s work also sounds appealing to me right now. I’m still undecided. [read more]

As a student, I was never really a fan of writing exercises—they often seemed gimmicky or overly directed.  Only once did an exercise ever turn into an actual story. (On my desktop I titled the exercise “Stupid Ron” because I so resented having to do it—I have since spent quite a bit of time apologizing to my then teacher, the beloved Ron Carlson; the story that resulted was published in Glimmer Train, served as the writing sample for my now tenured job, and won me a $5000 grant from the Florida Division of Cultural Affairs, which I used to go to Bread Loaf.)  Despite that one success, when I became a teacher I remained suspicious of writing exercises; they seemed like an awfully convenient way to expend a chunk of class-time. But, mostly because my students say they value them, I have gradually come to use writing exercises in my workshops.  I still don’t do them (I don’t eat lima beans either, now that nobody can make me), but I’ve come to believe in their value.

The student-me was only ever assigned one kind of writing exercise, intended to inspire—to lead to the creation of new work.  And I have never really been short of ideas for new work.  But I’ve found that there are really three types of writing exercises; those intended for:

1.  inspiration
2.  exploration and revision
3.  fun

Inspiration exercises often work best for beginning students who haven’t discovered that they are allowed to write about all kinds of things.  For example, in my intro class this semester, I had the students brainstorm historical and current events that they’d like to write poems about.  This was a pretty surprising idea for many of them, even though they’d just read a host of poems about the Vietnam War.  In the intro class, I’ve come to depend on writing exercises as a way to get students away from more clichéd topics and styles—to break them of habits they were somehow born right into.  [read more]

For the final writing assignment in my Introduction to Literature course, I want students to think about the implications of what we’ve been doing all semester, to think about the larger picture of why literature is a part of our culture.  To do this, I give them a list of six concepts we’ve been working with: love, war, identity, family, death, power, and the following question:

How do the ways that various literary texts define [concept X] suggest the role of literature in creating a broader (cultural) understanding of that concept?

This question works with any number of broader concepts or themes in a literature course: I simply choose those six because they’re the ones that we’ve focused on, and they’re the ones we focus on in our final reading, Hamlet.

I like to have the students think about this question because it allows them to do a number of things.  First and foremost, it allows the students broad range in what they talk about.  In their previous assignments, I’ve dictated which texts they can select and even limited the maximum number of texts they can write about – an attempt to encourage careful, close reading.  For this assignment, I give students a minimum number of texts (three) to discuss, no maximum number, and free range over anything in the anthology.  Doing this encourages students to explore their potential sources, cull the most relevant material, and develop an argument beyond summary.  These are important skills in any academic paper. [read more]

Several years ago, I had the privilege of participating in a Folger seminar entitled “Accessorizing the Renaissance,” and since then I’ve been thinking a lot about the material culture of the early modern period, my primary field.  I’ve also been thinking about how to teach students about the material world in relation to reading – and about why it’s important and relevant to the study of literature.

I wish that I had impressive sewing skills or cooking skills so that I could make things for my students to try on and try out; and I wish I wasn’t short on money, so I could take my students to London to actually see the material space of the city. We have a number of places in the area that I would like to take advantage of: the outer banks and Roanoke Island, St. Luke’s Church in Smithfield, Virginia, and the Harriet Jacobs sites in Edenton, North Carolina. As of now, I’ve yet to find the time to prepare such a trip, and I don’t always have the relevant literature to teach in my classes.  And – like many of us – my workload outpaces my imagination. But in my most recent Introduction to Literary Studies classes, I hit upon a plan to make the material world relevant to my students, a plan that took advantage of the resources in our small, historic town: We met one day in the local historic cemetery.

We prepared for this trip by talking about how we can read material objects much the way that we can read texts: material objects, particularly ornamental ones, can show us a lot about the attitudes and lives of the people who lived with them.  We can do this with clothing – I’ve used changes in women’s dress to introduce new periods of literature. We can do this with architecture – I often show students Baroque and Rococo architecture when we talk about eighteenth-century literature.  And we can do this with tombstones.

I asked the students to read a tombstone from the nineteenth century against an Emily Dickinson poem to show nineteenth-century attitudes about death.  It was a difficult project, because while the students wanted to talk about what the tombs said about life and what they said about the families that erected them, the assignment also forced them to stretch their idea of what reading is and what the material world shows us. [read more]

At some point while he was running, the kid’s batting helmet must have fallen off, because you can see his light blond hair—still short from the disastrous haircut his father gave him before his First Communion—practically glowing under the California sun.  He’s in the second grade and his t-ball team is the Reds.  Inexplicably, their t-shirt (the only “uniform” t-ballers get) is orange.  He is sliding, kicking up dirt, but he has already passed home plate.  Afraid that he’ll wind up short, he always waits until he has already tagged up to begin his slide.  Sliding is his favorite part of the game—that, and the free snow cones they get after they play.

Obviously, this young athlete is me, and this is my wife’s favorite picture of me when I was a kid.   I loved to play t-ball, though I obviously wasn’t very good at it.  In t-ball—at least in our league—there were no strike outs, probably because swinging at and missing a stationary ball mounted on a tee wasn’t the sort of thing that tended to happen.  It did to me, though.  All the time.  I would approach the tee confidently, bring my bat back, and then twist my entire body into that swing, to the point that my eye left the ball long before the bat in my hand woooooshed right over it.  The grown-ups would let me do it over.  Eventually, I’d wind up on a base. [read more]

Today’s guest blogger is Lee A. Jacobus, professor emeritus of English at the University of Connecticut and the author/editor of popular English and drama textbooks, among them The Bedford Introduction to Drama (Bedford/St. Martin’s) and The Longman Anthology of American Drama. He has written scholarly books on Paradise Lost, the works of John Cleveland, and the works of Shakespeare, including Shakespeare and the Dialectic of Certainty.  Jacobus is a playwright, fiction author, and blogger. Two of his plays — Fair Warning and Long Division — were produced in New York by the American Theater of Actors, and Dance Therapy, three one-act plays, was produced in New York at Where Eagles Dare Theatre.  His recent book of short stories, Volcanic Jesus, is set in Hawaii.

I decided to read Brian Friel’s Molly Sweeney just before I went to see the Irish Repertory Theatre’s recent production.  This is not something I always do.  Often, of course, I would have read or sometimes even have seen a classic play, but usually not immediately before seeing it again.  I was concerned that my emotional response wouldn’t be as immediate with the lines so fresh in my mind.  Molly Sweeney is a young woman, blind for forty years, just about to experience an operation that would give her sight.  It is a profoundly emotional time in Molly’s life and in her husband, Frank’s, life.

I read the play knowing John Millington Synge’s The Well of the Saints (1905), on a similar theme, and also knowing that Friel had been moved by Oliver Sacks’s “To See and Not to See,” which is about sight and knowledge.  All of these influences were here, but they were dwarfed by the power of actors Simone Kirby (Molly), Jonathan Hogan (Dr. Rice), and Ciaran O’Reilly (Frank).  Molly’s first speech caught me immediately.  Kirby’s delivery of the lines was so direct, so innocent, so filled with the ambiguity of fear and joy that I felt a rush of emotion.  If anything, reading the play immediately before seeing it intensified my pleasure and my response—even as I anticipated the lines I remembered best.

Everything depends on how the actors deliver their lines because this is a play with little overt action.  I’m sure some theatergoers might doubt that it is a drama at all.  In the tradition of Friel’s own Faith Healer, the actors stand and speak one after the other to the audience, telling them their very distinct view of the same story.  This may seem undramatic—and in the hands of a lesser writer it almost certainly would be.  But Molly Sweeney is riveting in part because the story is surprising and the actors are moving.  Storytelling in Molly Sweeney, especially from three points of view, constitutes significant drama.

Being able to bring your students to the theater after reading a play is usually regarded as a good idea.  I can see the reasoning behind it, and in this case I wasn’t sorry I’d read before, but I don’t always feel it’s the best idea. What do you think?  What have your experiences been, taking students to the theater just after reading a play?

I’ve been thinking about multimodal learning lately, and I’ve been drawn to the idea of making literature experiential, almost tangible. I’ve had my students work with the material, physical experience of literature in a couple of different ways – and I’ve been brainstorming other possibilities.

Perhaps the most obvious idea in teaching students to experience literature physically is to have students act out scenes from plays.  I don’t mean just having them read the scene aloud; rather, I mean having the students physically act out the play at the front of the classroom.  For example, Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker’s The Roaring Girl includes a street scene with three separate shops and a group of characters moving among those shops, conversing and sampling the wares.  I think that this scene is often quite difficult for students to comprehend on the page, so I have students not only read it aloud, but also follow the stage directions.  I draw points on the board where the shops would be located, and recruit students to act the parts; then I have the actors move around the “stage” in the front of the classroom, with one extra student acting as a stage manager to remind people to move if necessary.  In this way, the students still sitting in the class can visualize what occurs, and the students acting it feel the almost dizzying experience of moving between these shops.  This is particularly useful in a play that’s deeply rooted to the city of London, a space that contemporaneous theater-goers would have known well. [read more]

Today’s guest blogger is David J. Eshelman who teaches at Arkansas Tech University, where he is the founder and artistic director of the Arkansas Radio Theatre. His plays include Vim and Vigor, A Taste of Buffalo, Bathysphere, and The Witches’ Quorum, which had its professional debut at the Magnetic Theatre in Asheville, North Carolina. His essays about playwriting and his plays have appeared in Theatre Topics, Text and Performance Quarterly, Ecumenica, and Liminalities.

Unlike print-based genres—poetry, fiction, creative non-fiction—the dramatic genres, such as playwriting, are allied to certain material realities.  By this I mean that what is mentioned in a script is not just for a reader’s mind, but is meant to be concretized before an audience’s eyes.  I find myself frequently noting on drafts of student scripts that particular stage directions sound “expensive,” and I don’t mean this as a positive comment.  I use this word to discourage writers from including elements that would make staging difficult—for example, impossible special effects and overly frequent scene changes.  In a similar vein, I ask student authors to remember that acting is paid labor.  Frequently, beginning playwrights will include a character—often a waiter—who does very little.  In the professional theatre, the actor playing this character would have to be compensated for his or her work.  Therefore, inclusion in the script means an added expense, and if it’s not a meaningful expense, there’s no reason for it. [read more]

I confess, I’m one of those writers with a deep and abiding love of the much-missed Friday Night Lights, a television show that not only entertained me, but made me think about how I want to live and who I want to be.

Now I admit, I have loved a number of shows of the young adult variety, starting with but not limited to Felicity; Gilmore Girls, seasons 1-5; Veronica Mars, seasons 1 and 2; and—surely you were expecting this—every all-too-short second of the single season of Freaks and Geeks.

I suspect young adult television, much like young adult literature, has such a hold on me because it is often about people building their identities, determining their values, and shaping their characters (as we are wont to do when we are young).

And this is why I mention Friday Night Lights in the context of teaching creative writing.  More than any two characters on television, high school football coach Eric Taylor and high school guidance counselor Tami Taylor were working hard every week to shape the values of their daughter, their high-school-age-charges, their no-longer high-school-age-charges, and even themselves. [read more]

Setting is essential to narrative, but it’s something that students often overlook. My experience with teaching literature is that students want to talk about what happens next and often something that’s vaguely like character motivation, but they need help moving beyond plot.  Talking and writing about setting forces students to look at the details of the narrative and requires a careful examination of the words on the page.

I often introduce setting by showing students clips from particularly atmospheric movies—The Shining’s opening sequence; Fargo; almost anything by Tim Burton.  While watching the brief clips, I have the students make a list of significant (or not-so-significant) details that they notice about the setting.  We then talk about how all of these elements and details work together to set the tone of the movie.  That long opening sequence of The Shining, for example, intensifies the feeling of dread, and highlights the sheer isolation—both physical and emotional—of the main character.

Moving from movies to literature itself can be a bit complicated.  I want students to do more than simply explain how the setting establishes the tone, because setting is more important than simply being part of the atmosphere. To do this, we talk about symbolism, typically within Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House.  I have students come up with a list of symbols and have them work through what they might represent in the story.  I try to steer discussion towards the physical objects—the items within the setting—as we work our way through the final act of the play. My favorite symbol is the mailbox: it is the way that information from outside of the home enters the Helmers’ apartment, the conduit between the public space and the private space.  And only Torvald has the key.  We discuss the way that this shows Torvald’s control over information and ultimately over Nora.

On a subsequent day, we read “Hills like White Elephants,” and we talk about the way that Hemingway describes the landscape.  Students are pretty good at picking up on the importance of the train station setting – we talk about the difference between a train station and a fork in the road (and we’ve, of course, read Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken”).  We discuss the relevance of these elements to the characters’ lives.  We also discuss the fact that “I’m-so-minimalist-I-don’t-need-speaker-tags”-Hemingway devotes an entire paragraph to describing the scenery of the Ebro valley. [read more]