Category: Teaching

Teaching

Teaching Reading and Feeling Groovy, I mean, Grateful

Alison BakerLeave a comment
I teach in a university department that includes English and Modern Languages, and this is my grateful blog.
I am grateful that I have colleagues in modern languages, and that multiple languages are spoken and taught all around me. I am grateful that the English part of that department includes people who self-identify as Literature people, Rhetoricians, Composition people, and Linguists. Lots of schools have separated those fields in to different departments, and I feel very lucky to have us all together.
The result is that our current curriculum produces very well-rounded English majors; we even called them Linguistic samurai at one point. Our goals (which we articulated carefully as we began to assess whether or not we were meeting them) were to graduate students who read critically and aesthetically, with good attention to context, history, and language, but also who write effectively and powerfully, and who have a good understanding of English and at least one other language.
We value all these skills and attributes, and we think they are interrelated and synergistic.
But I was having a conversation today with a colleague who is a rhetorician, and we talked about different angles we take from our subfields, all sort of aiming at the same broad list of skills. I teach with a primary goal of improving students’ reading, and he teaches with the primary goal of improving their writing. (Some of this is very fuzzy, as he has a literature background, and I have a linguistics background, but it mostly holds.)
When I say I teach reading, though, it’s, shall we say, multivalent. I teach medieval (and older) literature, so sometimes I’m teaching students how to decode older forms of English: “Whan that Aprille, with his shoures soote,/ the droghte of March hath perced to the roote,” for instance. I’m literally helping students to translate Middle English, so to read in the most basic, meaning-making function.
I also help them read aloud, as performance, and that is a different set of skills–one that depends on them knowing the meaning of everything they are reading. I have them memorize and recite in some classes, and perform dramatic readings in others. This all counts as reading, even if it’s lower on the cognitive scale than other ways of reading.
When I teach reading, I also mean that I help students see the context of where a text was written, and how much that matters to the text. If we understand the context in which a text was written, we can understand it more completely and judge it on its own terms, not just ours. So I teach history, culture, the odd bit of archaeology, and some language study (mostly in the form of recognizing cognate words from other languages and understanding the development of English). All of that contributes to reading well and to transferring those skills to other books after my classes are over. I want students to leave feeling nothing is beyond their reach, or too hard/too old/too foreign to read.
I also want them to read critically and to read aesthetically. That is, I want them to be able to think about a text, explain and articulate what they get out of it, and–I think most importantly–to appreciate and enjoy texts that are foreign-sounding or off-putting at first. It matters very much to me that we learn to see the beauty in things we don’t immediately understand; that we appreciate the humor and experience the wonder of texts from cultures remote from ours in place or time.
I think good reading leads to good citizenship and rich lives, and I teach with an eye to finding connections between texts, times, cultures, and people. And I am grateful for books to read, students to read them with, and colleagues to complete their Linguistic Samurai training.
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.
Reading · Teaching

Once More to the Grail

Alison BakerLeave a comment
My students are in the midst of their third Grail romance this quarter.  They read Thomas Malory’s account (in Middle English!), Chretien de Troyes’s Perceval, and they are now intrepidly trotting through Wolfram von Eschenbach’s Parzival.
They are doing wonderful work.
They are comparing the object of the grail, and the procession accompanying it.  They’re interested in the different qualities a grail knight requires in each tradition, and in how the character of Percyvalle, Perceval, Parzival differs and stays identifiable.  And they’re doing admirably with the maze of similar but wacky-in-new-ways names. 
They’re trying to get at a core character for Percy.  He’s got to be young, naïve, and not worldly-wise at all.  This innocence seems key to his success in the grail quest.
He still makes plenty of mistakes. His mom tells him to accept love tokens such as rings from fair ladies, so he wrenches the ring off an unwilling maiden.  His next teacher tells him not to ask so many questions, so when the grail castle appears out of nowhere, he witnesses the miracle of the grail, and asking whom it serves would heal the Fisher King and the Wasteland–he stays silent because he’s honoring his teacher.
He seems to apply instruction too literally.  Instruction only gets one so far. Real life is more nuanced than any simple rule can predict.
I think this is why college students like him.  He demonstrates that no matter how well-educated you are, it still matters how you live your life.  You can have bad instructors or great ones, but it matters what you do with your new knowledge. And sometimes the learning curve is pretty gradual: what you have been told takes a while to internalize.
Percy looks on the surface like the “least likely to succeed” in the grail quest, but he lives his way in to the answers (thanks, Rilke!). His experiences shape him, and he fails as often as he wins, but he perseveres.  He apologizes and fixes things when he messes up. He keeps trying to improve himself.
And he achieves the holy grail.
All that remains for us is to do our best, too, then—to own our mistakes and to learn from them, to stand up for people when they need help, to keep going even if we get lost along the way.  It’s not over until the grail castle appears, and the grail castle won’t appear until we’re ready for it.
Innocence, then, isn’t just chastity or virginity. It’s faith that there is order in the universe. We can all achieve that.
Reading · Teaching

Transfiguring Grief

Alison BakerLeave a comment
I taught the story of Phaethon in my Myth as Lit class last week.  In some ways, it’s become trite:  Young Phaethon gets caught up in his desire to drive his father’s car, to step in to his shoes too soon, and ends up literally going down in flames.  Phaethon’s dad happens to drive the sun, not just a Camaro, so when he goes too high he scorches the heavens, and when he drops too low he sets the world on fire.

Jove, his grandfather, has to shoot him out of the sky with a thunderbolt. Apollo, his father, mourns so that the world is sunk in to darkness, for he is too distraught to go to work. The only light comes from the burning wreckage of the earth. This sounds pretty dramatic as I write, but still the story of Phaethon taking on his dad’s role before he’s ready is pretty well known, and can feel obvious.

I classify it in class as one of the 18-year-old-itis tales—one where the only “tragic flaw” is youth. He is in that period of life when boys (girls too, but statistics bear out mostly boys) start taking big risks without realizing the consequences. When they feel bullet proof.  But they’re not.  And they die.  Icarus falls here too, of course, and for similar reasons—flying too high, too fast.

So that’s why it feels overused, I suppose, because it is. There are lots of stories of young men dying because they underestimate laws of physics and overestimate their own abilities. But reading it this time, I was struck not so much by that lesson, but more by the grieving family he left behind.

In Ovid’s tale, Apollo mourns his son with a depth and a humaneness that staggers me.  When he refuses to show up to work, he cries, “Let someone else/ now guide the chariot that bears the light!/ If none will do that, and the gods confess/ they can’t, let Jove himself take on that task!/ And when he plies my reins, at least for once/ he’ll have to set aside the thunderbolts/ he uses to strip others of their sons.” He is devastated, and he is a god. What chance, then, have the mortals who love Phaethon?

His mother mourns.  She wanders the world looking for a sign of him, any trace of his lost body.  When she finds the grave that nymphs have made for him, she throws herself on it and bathes it in tears.  His sisters follow, and in their grief, they transform in to poplar trees.  The mother loses more children, as she tries to tug at the branches to free them, only to be told the branches are their arms, and she’s hurting them more by holding on. 

A cousin, too, transforms in his sorrow, this time to a swan.  (His name is Cycnus, which means ‘swan,’ and we still have ‘cygnet’ in English, meaning a baby swan.) Ovid uses this and other opportunities to show that we have an underlying nature that can be revealed by transformation. Cycnus wails for Phaethon as a swan, while his sisters are rendered immobile by their grief.  Paralyzed.  They are able only to cry tears of sap, which, beautifully, transform in to amber. Those who could not abide the pain of grief gave themselves over completely. 

This message seems clear to me: grief is transfiguring. If we let it, it can undo us. It always changes us. In the context of Apollo and his creed–Know thyself; and Nothing in excess—we can come to see even grief can be excessive, but the gods also grieve, so there must be something noble in feeling loss so profoundly. 

In the larger context of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, it anticipates the story of Proserpina’s (Persephone) marriage to Pluto, which bonds life to death in an unbreakable union, promising that death will never just be death; there will always be life attending—following in sequence as the seasons follow one another, and living together with death, so we can bear death more easily.

This scene struck me last week when I taught it. It resonates even more today, in the aftermath of the largest mass shooting in recent American history. I hope we let this grief transform us too, and resolve to take action to prevent it happening again.  Young men do lots of crazy things that put their lives at risk, but going to a concert shouldn’t be one of them.
[image from touristorama.com]

Teaching

The Once and Future Course

Alison BakerLeave a comment
When I started my job, there was only one medieval course on the books: Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. I was to be the only medievalist, and in fact, even more than that. My job description was technically “Medieval and Renaissance Non-Dramatic Literature,” which meant that we had two Shakespeareans, but I could have Spenser. So in my first few years, I designed courses that fit my interests and Cal Poly’s needs. The Epic. Myth as Literature. Arthurian Romance.
Now that we’re shifting from quarters (which has the advantage of more, if shorter, classes), I find myself facing down my last King Arthur class. Poor Arthur didn’t make the cut to conversion. That’s a hazard at a school with only one medievalist—there are a number of courses that no one teaches but me, and if I’m teaching fewer courses, well….
This makes me pretty sad, but I’ve had a good run.  King Arthur is a subject, a whole field, really, that doesn’t get old. It’s an incredibly productive mythos in Western literature.  From 9th century histories to this summer’s King Arthur: Legend of the Sword, it’s still alive and well in our imaginations, and for good reason.

It starts with magic—with Merlin helping the impassioned King Uther in to another man’s bed, in a move that curries favor and power, but banks it.  Merlin is patient and can wait for Arthur to grow up. In the middle, there’s the rise of Arthur and the Round Table, from his pulling the sword from the stone, to the establishment of his court of champions, all the iconic episodes of which have been told and retold. Perhaps the peak is the unifying (but ruinous for Camelot) Quest for the Holy Grail. And finally, the fall of Camelot, set in motion by the love affair of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere.
You can see why it’s productive.  It’s bloody brilliant, really. First, the life of Arthur is mythically heroic. I mean he fits the model of so many heroes in world literature, with his supernatural birth, his noble roots but obscure upbringing, and so many other mythic traits.  He is an epic hero in the truest sense.
And then he establishes a court. Several of his knights have their own iconic adventures—Gawain with the Green Knight, Percival and the Grail, Tristan and his tragic love for Iseut.  From a marketing standpoint alone, that’s gold.  Arthur has 150 knights.  Their tales could go on forever.
And the Grail thing.  Just think how productive that has been. We use it as a generic magical object now; it’s the Kleenex of questing objects. It was also a quest that united all the court—everyone went. But not everyone came back, and only a few got close to achieving it. A quest like that is like the Expendables franchise—a greatest hits roster, made for fans who will go nuts to see them all together.
And the love story of Lancelot and Guinevere. We don’t even need Arthur anymore. He’s just the center of the circle, holding the tales together. His knights and now even his wife have moved on, but they’d have been nothing without him.

As I teach this course one last time, I’ll focus on that center of gravity that Arthur represents.  And who knows, maybe one day in the future, I’ll work him back in to the curriculum.

Living · Teaching

How We See Changes What We See

Alison BakerLeave a comment
I took my kiddo to get his senior portraits taken last week. He was every inch the contradiction that we all are on the hybrid space where childhood flows in to adulthood. I wanted him to dress up; he wanted to wear a tee shirt.The props he wanted to bring were a thousand-page novel and some pieces from some games he plays. He wanted me to stay in the lobby, but he welcomed me back when I intervened to tell him to go ahead and switch to the casual clothes. He couldn’t decide on a smile.
But the photographer was terrific. We knew him, which helped. In fact, he was my son’s photography teacher last year. As I was watching the last few minutes of the shoot, I was struck by the photographer’s style and process. I could tell he looked at my son differently than I did. He never stopped imagining him in the next pose.
I’m pathologically curious, so I asked him about it. Does he just go through the world looking at people and framing them in his head? Yes. Yes, he does. He’s always interested in what the lighting of a particular setting does to a person’s image. Photography is all about light, and he sees the world in light and subjects, and has trouble turning off that vision.
Recently I had a similar conversation with my massage therapist, who I am certain is a genius, and who invariably sees people out of joint in her daily life—a man at the bank with a foot twisted inward she can see stems from the hip, or a woman who hunches and just needs to loosen up her neck and shoulders—and she can’t help thinking about what she would do to fix them. It’s a completely different way to see humanity, as so many imperfect machines in need of various levels of tuning up.
 
And both of these make me wonder about how we learn our perspective. Is it training or disposition? Are we inclined to view people in a particular way, or do we learn it in school or work? I think I was trained to think about literature like a critic, but I think I had a natural orientation toward language—what some of my teachers over the years called “having a good ear.”
 
Whether it’s innate or trained (I suspect both, really), the way it manifests in my head is that every new book I read, movie I watch, song I hear, or even news story I see passes through the filter: Could I teach this? How? In which class? With what comparable texts? That’s the part of my head I can’t turn off, and the part of my job I can’t leave at work. Yes, there’s the grading and the prepping, but deeper and more importantly, there’s my orientation toward the world as an opportunity to find a teachable moment.
 
I include all these various examples of people I consider artists because I want to add teaching to the list of arts that give one a particular lens on the world that becomes more inherent the longer one works. Just like a painter tries to capture what she sees in paint, or a playwright uses actors and scripts, we pick our medium and try to share what we see with others.
 

My desire to help others see what I see is just my particular artist’s effort, to help people see what I see —that medieval literature is funny, for instance, or that the connections between languages are cool. And after this past horrible weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia, I want people to notice that some stories keep coming back and we can find strength and strategies in our past history and literature to help us win again.  

Teaching

A Case for General Education, or Your VFOGI and You

Alison BakerLeave a comment
I had occasion to discuss the General Education requirements of a university degree with some friends and colleagues recently, and I came home shrieking to my kids that they need to take advantage of them. (My eldest is applying to colleges in the fall; it’s not like they’re three and five, and I’m raving like a mad woman–much.)
But it seems there are some folks who don’t really get it, so I’m going to make the case I made to my kids.
First, the difference between a university degree and a trade school is GE. You are required to take a number of courses from a variety of disciplines before you “settle in” to your major curriculum. Students who wish violently that they wouldn’t have to take classes they didn’t “need” overlook the fact that most don’t know what they need, really, and even if they did, there is value in knowing a little about a lot of things.

My dear friend’s grandmother called this your VFOGI. VFOGI stands for Vast Fund Of General Information, and for context, she used it to justify spending money on astronomy classes or art exhibits because they made you a more interesting, and she believed, better person. In college my friend and I extended this notion to watching movies we wouldn’t normally be drawn to and trying cuisine we hadn’t grown up with. I admit, I stole the concept shamelessly. 

For me it’s almost a philosophical argument. I believe we should work to become the best versions of ourselves, and learning all sorts of kooky things contribute to that. I believe in the “constellation” theory of humanity—that we are all composed of our experiences, encounters, knowledge, and even the books we read and the television we watch and the people we love and hate. If you believe that, you want to make your constellation as big and varied and interesting as possible.
General Education can be a big part of that. GE classes are requirements to leave your comfort zone.  If you come to college knowing you want to be a doctor and limit yourself to biology and chemistry classes, you confine your life in ways I just can’t support. Doctors go home too, or they should, and they need to be able to do something besides read anatomical handbooks and pathology journals.
If you want to be an English major and never want to take a chemistry class because it’s irrelevant, you just lost half the world–maybe more. You might read a book that makes use of chemistry, but you won’t be  able to tell if the person is a blowhard, and you might not even understand it. And those examples don’t even touch on the value in everyone’s life of psychology or architecture or art history or kinesiology or….
The case for GE is manifold. Lots of students change their majors after taking a GE class because they fall in love with a field they didn’t know enough (or anything!) about before taking the course. If we were all limited to becoming what we knew about by 18, what a terrible waste that would be. I never heard of Chaucer, for instance, until my junior year of college, and I got my job of the last fifteen years essentially based on my ability to teach Chaucer.
Finally, you don’t have to love all your GEs. You can’t change majors as often as you take GE classes, and you wouldn’t want to. But those other classes that don’t change your life still have value. They build the framework of your brain in some very real ways. I took a Cultural Anthropology class in college, and I can’t remember a single individual fact I learned to pass it. But if someone talks to me about anthropology, I can carry on a conversation. The framework is there, so I can learn something new during that conversation. It’s not just like throwing information at my head that bounces back because I can’t follow. Because I took Anthro, there’s a place in my memory for new conversations to stick.

The bottom line is the world is just very, very big. There are so many facets of humanity and the natural world and our societies and our history, that to limit ourselves to learning about one tiny slice seems morally wrong to me. I feel an obligation to stretch my brain; it’s designed to be stretched. I have an obligation to know enough about the world to vote thoughtfully and enough about people to understand those beyond my family and close friends. General Education isn’t the only way to such understanding, but it’s certainly one way.
(The picture is from a campout at Palomar Mountain, where the world looks big and beautiful.)
Reading · Teaching

Text and Image, the “What Do You See When You Read?” edition

Alison BakerLeave a comment
I had the most wonderful conversation in my Senior Symposium today.  Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millenium always intimidates students, but always precipitates the most animated and thoughtful discussions.  We were talking about his plea for visibility in texts.
I always take this occasion to ask students how they think.  I ask them to think of something—a cloud, say, or a dragon—and then I ask them if, in their heads, they saw images or words. (Or if I asked for coffee, would they see the plant, the word, or the word spelled out in beans?) Do they think, in short, in images or words?  Today’s tally was six wordy folk and 30 picture people. Over the last decade, my students have become decidedly more visual in their thinking.
The implications of that sent us reeling.  First, I discovered many of them write creatively, and when they do, some see mental movies, and then composition is just describing what they saw in their heads.  Calvino admits to starting with an image for three of his novels, but doesn’t claim it for all his works.  It begs the question, where do those images or movies come from that they see in their minds and try to convey.  Mostly they feel like they are spawned by their personal experiences and stories they know. They don’t believe as much in inspiration, but in compilation.
Calvino worried (I find it adorable) in 1985, that we were becoming overwhelmed with images—that we see so many images, we are saturated, and he frets about people in the 21st century being able to make original images.  I think he needn’t have worried.  It has only gotten worse (if you think image-saturation is a bad thing), and we have continued to create more and more.  In fact, visual texts are increasingly popular, and there is no sign of slowing down. In an era of memes, graphic novels, television, and film, the visual arts are still thriving, although perhaps in a more self-consciously derivative way.
Ultimately, I don’t think his fear was founded.  Just as stories can be told and retold, images can be made and remade, and just as for centuries we’ve been bemoaning the fact that no one can read everything in print, now no one can see everything either.  (I can’t even be counted on to watch a television show regularly).  That means there will always be the possibility of finding something new to you.
Perhaps the most delightful discovery we made today was the variety of ways in which different people can think and read.  One confessed she doesn’t see images as she reads; she goes from words on the page to words in her mind and only at the end takes a moment to conjure an image of what happened.  One associates feelings with colors, so reads as if through rose or crimson or charcoal colored glasses. One said ideas and stories come to him in static images, and he has to write them down to be free of them (as good a student of Calvino as there ever was).  I see words in my head as people talk to me and am constantly shifting parts of words to figure out roots and etymologies, but I have a hard time holding images in my head, and I can’t manipulate them (I am an English major, not an engineer.)  But having this discussion opened all our minds a little, just to know the sheer range of ways to process words and images.

There is much work to be done in cognitive science in terms of imagining and reading, if my class is any indicator.  Meanwhile, Calvino’s fear of over-saturation was borne out when wordy people claimed they remember distinctive images and visual people remember slogans and words more readily, as they stand out against the flood of images.  The upshot is that we all move pretty fluidly from text to image and back again.  A picture may be worth a thousand words, but one word can trigger countless images too.  

Teaching · Writing

The Ballad of Lefty and Sergio, or Teaching, Truth, and Tales

Alison BakerLeave a comment
This is a story about teaching, about reading, and about epistemology. I taught Calvino’s Mr Palomar last week, which is a lovely collection of reflective vignettes told from the perspective of a very analytical, slightly uptight man. It has no plot. It’s just a series of moments where Mr Palomar encounters the world:  physically, as in looking at waves on the beach; socially, as when he’s buying cheese in a Paris cheese shop; and reflectively, where he tries to make sense of his place in the world.

In the chapter entitled “Serpents and Skulls,” Mr Palomar is visiting Mexico, and touring the Aztec ruins at Tula. He is traveling with a friend who is well-versed in Aztec lore and clearly knows this site. He leads Palomar through a temple, and he “pauses at each stone, transforms it in to a cosmic tale, and allegory, a moral reflection” (96).
Mr Palomar listens rapt, but is occasionally distracted by a school group of children whose teacher keeps pointing to artifacts and describing them, but concluding each description with “We don’t know what it means” (97). Mr Palomar is torn between these two approaches to the world, and my class was inspired to wrestle with them as points on a spectrum.
To discuss them easily, I ascribed names to the speakers. The tour guide, leading a field trip in Mexico, I named Sergio. Then, feeling silly, and thinking perhaps that might be perceived as a goofy name for a Mexican teacher, I doubled down on my dorkiness: and because Palomar’s friend’s impassioned speech was on the left page of my open book, I named him Lefty. This is the kind of randomness or serendipity (depending on your attitude) that I think characterizes my classes. It also contributes to making each class its own culture. I have different students each time, but I also read differently each time. Ten years of Mr Palomar now, and there’s never been a “Ballad of Lefty and Sergio” before.
These two characters represent two approaches to the world and two ways of knowing (there’s the epistemology, as threatened).  Lefty is the conscientious teacher, who does all his homework and prepares for class, and when he gets in front of his students, he weaves a tapestry of what amounts to “scholarship’s best guesses.”  Knowing the cultural, anthropological, and literary history, he ties elements together and presents a working narrative that tries to do justice to the facts we can prove as well as to the truths of human nature (which are harder to prove, but no less real). He makes meaning.
As a medievalist, I’m very sympathetic to Lefty. It’s my job to teach works whose authors have been dead for centuries, frequently works whose authors are completely unknown.  I teach language no one has spoken for 600 years, and I do that, too, by a series of well-intentioned best guesses. If we know what Old English looked like, and we know what Modern English looks like, we can triangulate and make what feels like a valiant effort at understanding Middle English, the transition period.
But there’s no ironclad evidence.  When all is said and done, Sergio’s nihilistic approach that “We don’t know” is true, of course. Maybe it’s the difference between making meaning and making facts. My job is to look at as many external facts as I can, as Lefty does, and then to look at the most important fact—the text, for Lefty the statuary—and from those, produce a faithful reading.
Sergio is right: there is no empirical truth we can find, separated as we are from the works in space and time, but Lefty is right too. The solution is not to throw up our hands and deny any understanding. The solution is to pay attention to where we are standing, as we view as earnestly as we can and bridge the gap between art and audience.
I promise the last two weeks of poetry is not the beginning of a trend, but I couldn’t resist.  If you sing it, the meter can be smoothed out.
“The Ballad of Lefty and Sergio”
Lefty looks at all the facts;
He tirelessly prepares for class–
Reading, writing, watching, and then he
Constructs the truest story he can see.
Sergio won’t trust his eyes;
He sees this world compound of lies.
It’s foolish to presume that he can know
Anything outside of Sergio.
“I think this! It might be right.
The data speaks to me at night.
It makes sense given everything we know…
Why can’t you just imagine, Sergio?”
“It’s too far gone; we’re too far out.
We have no first person account.
You’re saying more about yourself, you see,
Than anything you’re looking at, Lefty.”

Lefty tells us stories that Sergio can’t believe.

Sergio knows Lefty can’t help but deceive.
These guys will keep arguing long after this song,
But thinking one of them is right is surely wrong.

*Photo credit to Bob Lamb, for “Two Gun Bob and Gentleman Kip” who live again as Lefty and Sergio.  🙂  Thanks, Bob!

Reading · Teaching

Reading for Character, Reading for Plot

Alison Baker2 Comments
Lettore READER Lettrice
“You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler.  Relax.  Concentrate. Dispel every other thought.  Let the world around you fade.  Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room” (3). When you sit down to read Calvino’s hypernovel, the narrator starts talking to you directly.  He addresses you, the Reader, in the second person, just like he’s talking to an old friend.  He draws you in, you–the Reader, by describing what can be seen as pretty generic descriptions of how people read. But just like when you read a horoscope or a Facebook quiz, the description is vague enough (and informed enough—he knows what readers do) that you can find enough truth in it and buy in to his game.
But he addresses you as Reader.  In English this is wonderfully vague.  It is gender-neutral and judgment-neutral. The latter matters because in this book about the acts of reading and writing, there are lots of kinds of readers and lots of kinds of writers, and there is certainly some judgment thrown around.  At the beginning, though, we don’t know what kind of reader you are; you are just a Reader.
In class I spend considerable time asking my English majors what kind of readers they are.  Do they read for plot mostly, to find out what happens?  Do they read to get to know the characters?  Some people won’t read a book unless they like or can identify with an important character.  Do they read for long, richly evocative descriptions, like Dickens’s three-page description of Mr. Tulkinghorn descending into his wine cellar for port?  Do they read to see their favorite kind of story retold anew?  What people look for in books varies, and the students sometimes form support groups for factions.
The self-described “plot whores” hang together and defend each other.  Story above all!  The “character-lovers” share each other’s outrage when film versions give lines to the wrong character or when adaptations make the characters do something contrary to their original character. “Hermione didn’t say that!  Ron said that in the book!”  We decide how we read in relation to Calvino’s characters, and deny others like Lotaria, the overly zealous critic whose acts of interpretation seem violent attacks on the book (at one point she puts novels through a word counter and only reads the list of frequent words to figure out what the book is about! Another time, she rips one chapter out of a book and says that’s all she needs to judge the book.)  All of this helps people figure out their own reading persona, and sometimes through reading this book, they even get a bead on their writing persona.
But this time when we talked about the Reader, the subject of identification with the Reader got a little more attention.  In English, “Reader” is gender-neutral. That means until “you” get in to the second chapter, “you” could be anyone, and it is only at that point where the Reader Calvino envisions identifies as a man, trying to meet an attractive woman, the Other Reader, that female readers have to adjust. (This confusion doesn’t exist in Italian, where the word “Lettore” indicates a man, and later on, a female “Lettrice” appears.) I have read this book a dozen times, and every time it’s a little letdown.  I enjoy the pages where it feels like he’s talking to me—really to me, not the character he’s asking me to be. And sometimes I slip in to my new role as male character with more grace than others. I’m used to it, after all. The default has been male for so long, and I’ve read so many books where the protagonist is male. And sometimes I’ve gone right ahead and identified with him, because I’m trained: females are asked to assume a male persona more regularly than the converse. Still, I’m often a little jarred when I reach the point where I can no longer pretend he’s talking directly to me.
It’s this point that stuck today, in this reading, after the Women’s Marches around the world.  The default is still male.  This book was written in a far more sexist time and culture than 21st century America, but the default is still male.  Gender is understood by more people now as a spectrum than a binary, though, and somehow it was this strict adherence to increasingly outdated gender assumptions that made it feel dated this time, rather than the story about the guy who runs from house to house, thinking all the landline phones along his jogging route are ringing for him.  We talked about how we read and what we looked for in books, and none of those groups of character-readers and plot-fiends were divided along gender lines.  This book keeps bringing up questions about how we read and why we write, and some of the answers are changing, but the most important ones are not.  We all know who we want to identify with—the readers of novels who really enjoy books, who use them as links to understanding other people, who throw stories like ropes across the void between souls, to make friends.  
Reading · Teaching

Why Read Calvino? Or Any Other Classic Author?

Alison BakerLeave a comment
I’m teaching Italo Calvino again, and that means starting with his essay “Why Read the Classics?,” wherein he decides ultimately that the strongest reason to read the classics is that it’s better to have read them than not.  He gets there through a list of fourteen attempts to define what a classic is or does, all while crafting a definition everyone can agree upon.  This is at once, I think, an important discussion and one whose reality we deal with in the effects it produces—what ends up on bookstore shelves and stays in print—and a futile discussion, but one I continue to have.
It is of course necessary to distinguish between those traits of a classic that you think everyone would benefit from, and those more personal preferences that make a work classic for you, but that may not be everyone’s cup of tea.  He addresses this.  He goes so far to name them “personal classics.”  When I discuss the essay with my English majors, we distinguish between “Upper Case Classics” that are somehow empirically classic, and “Lower Case classics,” our own personal favorites.
Ten years of discussing this issue with English majors, most of whom self-describe as “avid readers” and so invested in the discussion, and I have come to think he’s right:  it’s a muddle, and there are lots of traits of classic literature that ring true, but nothing that pins it down neatly.  If we can’t pin down what’s good about classic literature among people who almost uniformly love it, we don’t have a prayer of explaining what’s good about it for every person on the planet.
Part of the problem is logistical:  we can’t very often find a work of “classic” literature that everyone in the room has read. The two times we have, it has been Hamlet.  So we’re trying to triangulate positive traits in or definitions of classic books by finding several books that most of the class have read, and hoping there is enough overlap that everyone can stake their claim.
This year we loosely decided that Classics should make us think and feel deeply (hopefully inspiring us to change or grow), and that within those functions, we can choose what kinds of subjects or characters or style works more effectively on each of us.  This leads in to our discussion of the first novel of the quarter, If on a winter’s night a traveler, where Calvino tries to build a classic everyone can agree on, and which I’ll think more about for next week.  Meanwhile, I put the questions to you:  Is there something that classic literature does for us that Dan Brown or JD Robb or Tom Clancy don’t do?  What do we gain from reading something old, attested, and approved by previous generations?