Category: Teaching

Teaching

Billy Elliot, Chaucer’s Monk, and the Modern Reader

Alison BakerLeave a comment
I was asked today, by a student doing research on teaching, how I feel when I am teaching.  There are lots of answers, of course, depending on how well it’s going, but the most prominent feeling I have in the classroom is electricity.  I even quoted the film Billy Elliot (where he’s asked what it feels like when he dances) because that’s what it feels like—electricity.

When it’s going well, we are looking at a narrative and feeling a connection to it.  A circuit closes for any number of reasons—someone discovers a parallel in the narrative to her own life, or a character who reminds a student of a family member, or the text recalls the tv show or movie they watched last week.  I talked about it as a current, as I reflect now, in rather sci-fi terms, of people establishing connections to texts and to each other, as if we create a cloud of electricity that we all tap in to (to varying degrees, perhaps, but when it’s great, pretty much everyone is plugged in).

Sometimes the current exists between two people (who we might say were “on the same wavelength”), but sometimes it is between a reader and a time, a text, a context, an archetype.  In my Chaucer class this morning, I had occasion to make a parallel I’ve never made before.  In the wake of the attack at Ohio State this morning, which was described initially as a shooting, I made the connection to our feelings about that kind of news—as college students who commiserate with other college students when violence erupts on campus, but who also sigh inwardly, relieved that it wasn’t on our campus.

This, believe it or not, was relevant to Chaucer’s “Monk’s Tale,” which is a collection of seventeen tragedies in chronological order from Lucifer through the 14th century, with the exception of a handful of vignettes that are typically referred to as “current events” for Chaucer:  the assassinations of King Pedro of Spain, Peter of Cyprus, and Bernabo Visconti.

This rather lengthy tale ranges from the fall of Lucifer, through the Bible and through history, with stops at Samson, Caesar, and Alexander the Great, to name a few.  But it is interrupted by these contemporary stories—ones that would have been more immediate and somewhat sensitive. The Canterbury pilgrims listen to the monk as we do to the news. The knight even knew one of those guys. But mostly it is a moment where tragedy becomes personal:  where individuals react with compassion when someone else’s king is killed and with relief that it wasn’t theirs.

When I connected this awful, complicated set of feelings to our reactions to yet another scene of violence on a college campus, that electricity sparked. Groggy, reluctant students still full of pumpkin pie and in vacation-mode woke up, sat up, and thought about how uncanny it is that we keep having these conversations in Chaucer class about contemporary problems.

I’ve taught this tale a minimum of fifteen times. Probably twenty. I’ve never framed it in that particular way before, never quite seen that connection. But I will make it again. There is truth to the claim that the text changes with each reading because the reader changes. And teaching reading changes, because the more of these electric moments happen in class, the more ways I have to reach the next group. And the more connections I can facilitate–the more sparks fired, switches flipped, circuits closed–the more students learn to make those connections themselves. Narratives inform narratives. The more connections we can see, the more skilled we become at reading our world, the more easily we write and re-write our own stories. And that’s how we change the world.
*That’s a stamped image of a lightbulb, by the way, from a Stampin’ Up! Stamp set called “You Brighten My Day.”
Reading · Teaching

Words and Pictures, or The Forests of Fiction

Alison BakerLeave a comment
“Fantasy is a place where it rains.”  When Italo Calvino begins his lecture on Visibility in literature, he begins with an image from Dante’s Paradiso, of pictures raining in to his imagination directly from God.  I went to sleep after reading Umberto Eco’s first Norton lecture, the first of “Six Walks in the Fictional Woods,” and awoke this morning to that miracle of Southern California weather, The Occasional Drizzle, so I started thinking of rainy images and images raining down.  This is a good time to write.
I have read Calvino’s essay at least a dozen times.  (I know because I’ve taught it annually for over a decade).  My book bears the traces of all these readings—comments and some sketches in red, blue, green, black, and purple ink, and pencil.  He discusses “two types of imaginative process:  the one that starts with the word and arrives at the visual image, and the one that starts with the visual image and arrives at its verbal expression” (Six Memos for the Next Millenium 83).  My book bears this out, as I diagram what he’s argued and illustrate what he’s described. This has been enough, every year, to send my head in to a tailspin. Which comes first, the text or the image?  And how do we understand one without the other?
When I start small, I remember that when I teach Children’s Literature, I spend some time talking about concretization. I probably should in other classes too, but especially when I’m thinking of kids reading stories, I imagine them building elaborate images in their heads as they read.  This is why movies made from books are often unsatisfying to readers—they’ve already imagined, or concretized the pictures from the descriptions given in the book, and nine times out of ten, they imagine things quite differently from the film’s director, so they spend the movie fussing that “that’s not what the house looked like” or “she’s supposed to be taller/shorter/darker/lighter/happier/smarter/better.”
In the movie case, the text has given rise to images in the reader’s and director’s heads, and then to comment on the movie (or explain our mental images), we need to go back to words to describe it.
We move back and forth from text to image to text to image.  (Presumably the author started with an image he or she was trying to convey too, right?  We know Calvino did sometimes.  He claims some of his novellas, like The Non-existent Knight and The Cloven Viscount began as images in his head of an empty suit of armor trotting around in Charlemagne’s army and a soldier split in to his good and bad sides by a cannonball.)  So sometimes it goes from the author’s image to the text he writes to the reader’s image to her description or discussion. So how far does this go?  Can we even understand images without using words, or understand words without visualizing them?
Some subjects, certainly.  Some texts don’t create images, just abstractions.  But I will confine myself to thinking of fiction here, and there is almost always some visual element—characters in a setting carrying out certain actions—all of that can be rendered in images.  Maybe we always move from image to text, back and forth like a pinball.  Maybe that’s how we understand the world.  My inner English major wants to argue, to say we go from words to words all the time—that’s literary criticism—but as I think about this relationship, I can see myself imagining the text taking place and then trying to explain it.  We understand words in terms of images, and we understand images by translating them in words.
Calvino says we spend our lives moving back and forth between text and image, so the literature we read needs to be visual in important ways.  Eco describes fiction as a forest we wander through—a world we enter, wend our way through, and leave different.  Perhaps that’s because we’ve seen, experienced, and understood things in our mental cinema while we wound through the words.
Teaching

When a single word tells a story–Hallowe’en edition

Alison Baker3 Comments

Certainly we craft stories out of words, but some of my favorite stories are the ones the very words contain, and that we often overlook.  I became enchanted with word histories, or etymology, in grad school, when I studied multiple medieval languages—some Romance languages, some Germanic—and saw the same words in different classes and then watched their meanings change as time passed. Linguists talk about languages developing like trees.  It’s certainly true they live and grow and branch out.  I’m more interested today in individual words, which feel a little more like people to me, with cousins in other branches of the family tree, a history to trace, and a story to tell.

The story of words always comes up in my Chaucer class, where we work toward reading Middle English.  The first week we always go slowly, getting to know the language.  I spend a good bit of time trying to make it seem more familiar than it might look at first sight (or certainly than it sounds at first listen).  As we worked through that first sentence that so many students memorize, “Whan that Aprille, with his shoures soote, the droughte of March hath perced to the roote,” we paused and made sure we found all the cognates.  ‘Whan’ = when (never trust a vowel!), ‘shoures’ = showers, etc. We stopped at ‘halwes.’
Chaucer says pilgrims everywhere are headed “to ferne halwes.” I assured my students they knew these words.  ‘Ferne’ contains ‘far;’ you can see it in there (especially if you’ve learned never to trust a vowel), and ‘halwes’ is just ‘hallows.’  Blank stares.  Hallows—you know, like All Hallows’ Eve. Enough impatient faces that I realize we’re losing that idea, and I shift gears in to story-telling.
Hallow is an old word related to ‘holy,’ basically.  One can have hallowed objects—things that have been made holy, like the items present in a mass, or something holy can actually be a hallow, like the holy grail or the spear of Longinus, or… Harry Potter fans… the Deathly Hallows.  So Chaucer’s pilgrims were traipsing off to visit hallowed places and objects.  Holy things.  Taking, in fact, some holy days.  “Holidays” is just a contraction of this. But we don’t think about Labor Day in a context of holiness anymore.  Neither do we, apparently, think of Hallowe’en in this context. But I do. Because it’s a great story.
In the Catholic and Orthodox faiths, where every day is a saint’s day, and people can celebrate both their birthday and their name day (the day devoted to the saint they were named after), one day a year stands out:  All Saints’ Day.  On the first of November all saints are worshipped, not just one or two, like St. Michael on September 29 or St. Francis on October 4, to name a few recent biggies.  There are various reasons that this may have come to be, but the one that appeals to me is the clash of the old pagan festivals at the end of the harvest, and the day of holiness that follows, honoring all the saints.  There is a powerful strain of death there—for the pagans, the end of the season, the end of productivity, the beginning of the death of the world, before it renews in the spring.  For the Christians, the day of saints is already a celebration of hundreds of dead people; it is easily extended to honoring all the dead.  All Hallows’ Evening, shortened to Hallowe’en (especially if you keep the apostrophe), is the celebration of the dead, an invitation to think about life, death, and life after death, and, you can see an easy story to be told about the thinning of the veil between worlds–more commerce between the living and the dead, for good or ill, depending on your approach.  Whatever you believe, this night has its history in holiness.  Hallows.
P.S.  I’m thinking of adding little “word-tales” more frequently, either as whole blogs, like this one, or as small additional tidbits on other blogs.  If you’d like more of this sort of etymology-as-story, let me know.  Thanks for reading!
Teaching

Folklore and Facebook

Alison BakerLeave a comment

or Quizzes and Character 

The fall quarter started today, and I met three new classes’ worth of readers.  I always spend a few minutes on the first day getting to know the students, and introducing them to the subject.  My folklore students were pretty eager, really.  They came in thinking it sounded fun, so we talked about why.  What are some of the fundamental differences between folk literature and authored literature?

Folk literature is orally composed—people tell stories they have heard told, but each version is legitimate to a folklorist.  Orally composed texts tend to focus on plot, not character, and use stock scenes and characters to build up a narrative.  We stopped there for a while.  One of the fundamental differences between folktales and novels, say, is depth of character.  Folktale characters are bare-boned.  Novel characters are developed, fleshed out, or what E.M. Forester called “round” (as opposed to “flat,” which folktale characters definitely are).
Folktale heroes and heroines have very few identifying traits, as a rule.  Nice, young girls and clever boys populate this world.  All we know about Little Red Riding Hood is that she’s young and beloved.  All we know about Jack is that he’s poor and clever.  The effect of these sparsely developed characters is that anyone can identify with them.  There are so few details, they tend not to hamper our seeing ourselves in them.  We can quickly insert ourselves in to the story and focus on the plot: live the adventure.
Novels are different, as are modern television or movie characters.  These, we read (or watch) for character development, and they don’t disappoint.  Anyone who reads The Great Gatsby has a crystalline vision of that character.  Scarlett O’Hara—very clear.  Any character we spend that much time with, we get to know, and if they’re well-written, “round,” we know them very well.  This actually makes it harder to identify with completely.  We may be like them in some ways, but some of their actions or emotions make it hard to identify completely.
This is why that recent Facebook trend, to post pictures of the three fictional characters who define you, requires three.  When it comes to fictional characters, one won’t do it.  There’s always some detail to the character, or some lack, that keeps us from identifying fully.  But if you could choose three… that makes it easier. I chose Molly Weasley because I am a goofy-but-fierce mom and wife. But there are some qualities about her I don’t embody, some actions she takes that I wouldn’t. I chose Mole from The Wind in the Willows because I am an incontrovertible optimist who finds reasons to be joyful all around me, but I’m not, you know, a mole. Or a male. I chose the Lorax because I speak for the trees; I am a nature nut, a tree- hugger, a hiker, a bird watcher, and an environmentalist–and because I sometimes sound self-righteous and priggish.  But if I left any of these out, the picture would be hopelessly incomplete.  Molly Weasley wouldn’t address the teacher in me; Mole leaves out my protective Molly-ness. The Lorax, without some Moley and Molly would be insufferable as a person.
Human beings are more complicated than the roundest of characters.  And in the wave of Facebook quizzes and people asking to be told who they are, this one feels refreshing.  We choose (I had help from my family), and we get to be complex, multiple.  Instead of a Facebook quiz spitting out one ‘80s song or aura color or spirit animal for you to believe represents you, you get to choose your own, and you get to choose several.  Narratives inform our lives, but it takes a lot of narratives to come close to containing us.  And so we keep reading—searching for and finding more of ourselves in each book.
That was just the first day.  It’s going to be a good quarter.