Comp and Lit

This is not a complete list. I would appreciate any recommendations of particularly teachable works of literature that would fit within a unit on 19th century madness, particularly works of American fiction.

Alcott, Louisa May Work: A Story of Experience 1873 includes a family who finds out insanity is in their genes and their individual responses
Bronte, Charlotte Jane Eyre 1847
Browning, Robert “Porphyria’s Lover” 1836
Carroll, Lewis Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland 1862
Chopin, Kate The Awakening 1899
Conrad, Joseph Heart of Darkness 1899
Dickens, Charles The Pickwick Papers 1836-7
Dickinson, Emily “Much madness is divinest sense” 1862?
Dostoevsky, Fyodor Crime and Punishment 1866
Dostoevsky, Fyodor The Double 1846
Flaubert, Gustave Memoirs of a Madman 1838
Gilman, Charlotte Perkins “The Yellow Wall-paper” 1892
Gogol, Nikolai “Diary of a Madman” 1835 diary entries follow the narrator into insanity
Hawthorne, Nathaniel “Young Goodman Brown” 1835
Kesey, Ken One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest 1962
Melville, Herman Moby Dick 1851
Poe, Edgar Allan “The Cask of Amontillado” 1846
Poe, Edgar Allan “The Fall of the House of Usher” 1839
Poe, Edgar Allan “The Tell Tale Heart” 1843
Scott, Sir Walter The Bride of Lammermoor, the story of a woman who goes mad when her man betrays her, 1819
Stevenson, Robert Louis Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde 1886
Whitman, Walt “Bervance” a man considers consigning his son to a lunatic asylum because of homosexuality 1841
Wilde, Oscar The Picture of Dorian Gray 1890

Besides using the fairy tales to introduce the different types of literary analysis, I also use them to introduce different forms of criticism.

Since my one student wrote on it, I talk about the Marxist interpretation of “The Three Little Pigs.” I think you can imagine what a Freudian interpretation of “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” might be and “Little Red Riding Hood” lends itself to a Freudian interpretation historically. More modern versions, like “The Grandmother,” are overtly about sex. Jungian criticism offers an interesting approach to the forest often included in the fairy tales. … And I go through all the different schools of criticism that students are likely to run into later when they are writing a literary research paper.

For the final short paper on fairy tales, I allow students to either use a fairy tale we have covered in class or to pick a story they grew up with.

Using fairy tales to introduce literary analysis has worked well for my classes.

This was part of a presentation given at the Conference of College Teachers of English: Texas in March.

Some fairy tales are better than others for different types of analyses.

“Little Red Riding Hood,” Charles Perrault’s version, or the Grimm’s “Little Red Cap” offer quite a bit of information for a character analysis. “The Three Little Pigs,” at least in some versions, also has the pigs learning. “Hansel and Gretel” also has several versions with dynamic characters.

“Little Red Riding Hood” can also offer an interesting discussion of setting. Or, again, “Hansel and Gretel” offers the student some interesting setting discussions.

“Little Red Riding Hood” is also good for theme. “The Three Billy Goats Gruff” is not necessarily good for this because the most obvious theme is “might makes right.” “The Three Little Pigs” has garnered some interesting themes besides the obvious of “don’t be lazy,” the most interesting being a Marxist reading of the fairy tale.

Most fairy tales are NOT useful for point of view.

I have an answer for this. I bring in a modern children’s story of “The Three Little Pigs.” The work is called The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by A. Wolf. I don’t ask the students to write on point of view for this section of the class, but this work gives a very good introduction to the concept.

An analysis of style could be done using two versions of the same story. Use Grimm and Perrault or Grimm and Disney.

Both Grimm’s “Little Red Cap” and “Hansel and Gretel” have sufficient symbolism in them to introduce this concept.

This was part of a presentation made to the Conference of College Teachers of English: Texas in March.

I hand out a set of questions for literary analysis very similar to what I received in graduate school to teach with, and we read through the concepts first. These concepts include questions on
character
theme
style
structure
point of view
setting
symbolism

Then I give a definition and a short history of fairy tales.

After that we read one of the fairy tales in class.

My expectation when I first did this was that every native student would be familiar with fairy tales. This has not turned out to be true.

We work through a couple sets of the questions on the literary analysis handout using the chosen fairy tale. Then we go on to another fairy tale and do another section or two of the questions.

For homework, they use a different story for the same kinds of analysis.

There are also a few advantages to using fairy tales that can be missing with other literature.

Some of my colleagues have asked me if I am “teaching down” to my students. I don’t think so. It is not patronizing to use a story the students are already familiar with to introduce them to new concepts.

I also think that using fairy tales offers three unique advantages.

One advantage is that using fairy tales breaks the students’ expectations of what literature is.

Another advantage fairy tales have for our students is that they can help bridge the gap between the different levels of expectation for high school and college writing.

A final advantage is that I learn about the students. I ask them to choose a fairy tale (or a story) that they grew up hearing, get a copy of it for me, and tell me about their personal experience with the story.

Those are some advantages that I see in using fairy tales to introduce literary analysis.

This is part of a presentation made to the Conference of College Teachers of English: Texas.

As college instructors we want our students to be able to read and understand literature. But when we ask them to write a literary analysis, they are often confounded. The analyses come back poorly developed or full of plot summary.

I don’t think our students are trying to do a poor job with the paper. I don’t think they want low grades. I even think that most of them tried hard. But they didn’t succeed. And one possible reason for that is that our students may not understand what we are asking for when we ask them to analyze literature.

No experience
This might be because they have never been asked to do a literary analysis before. A good high school near me does not require any.

Or our students may have been told what a literary analysis is and not understood it.

Can’t assume
I decided that I shouldn’t assume my freshman college students have had an introduction to literary analysis. The problem then became how I was going to teach them literature analysis without the students having to read a new work.

Find a common text
When my students don’t have the same reading experiences, what is a common text?

I decided I would use fairy tales.

This is part of the introduction to a paper given at College Conference of Teachers of English: Texas in March.

As the ending for our freshman composition and rhetoric course first semester, I cover how to write literary analyses. These are difficult for my students particularly because few of them have ever written any. It is apparently hard for lots of people, however, because that is the number one hit on my blog, according to Google Analytics.

So, how do you teach them literary analysis without requiring them to read literature? Good question. If you’ve been reading here a while, you know the answer. Use fairy tales.

This semester, in an attempt to mix it up a bit for me since it had gotten stale, we didn’t do “The Three Little Pigs,” “Goldilocks,” or any of the multiple Cinderellas, like we usually do.

We did do Grimm’s “Little Red Cap” and “The Three Billy Goats Gruff.” I tell them that is one of my favorite stories because I grew up on Norwegian fairy tales. (I didn’t know that till I started teaching this class though, which is why teaching is so exciting– I’m still learning!)

But we also did “Bremen Town Musicians” which I think I had read once in my life before. I own a pretty book of it, but don’t read it.

We also did “Brave Little Tailor.” I love that story and the students liked it too.

Tonight they are reading “The Fisherman and his Wife.”

And in class today, we read the 1812 and the 1857 versions of “Hansel and Gretel” and then we read “The Elves and the Shoemaker.”

One way to get students involved in a fairy tale is tell them, “This was most likely the source of Dobby in Harry Potter.”

Then afterwards I asked them what about the story made me say that… It was very fun and they enjoyed the idea that they were learning some “behind the scenes” information. Now, I didn’t hear from JK Rowling that she used “The Elves” as the pattern for Dobby, but I would be surprised if she didn’t, even if she didn’t do it consciously.

And, though they aren’t great literature, my students are being exposed to some folk stories that have been around for centuries. Many of them they had never heard of before.

There was a call for papers for 19th century American literature and topics from within that. I thought of my most interesting section in freshman comp and literature at CC2.

One of the stories in the book was “The Yellow Wallpaper.” It is the story of a woman who goes crazy from the prescription for her postpartum depression. It was from this story that the whole unit grew.

First, we read “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” discussing the insanity in them and also the gothic elements (since similar gothic elements exist in “The Yellow Wallpaper”). We discussed questions of whether or not it is insanity to believe something that is patently untrue. We talked about the definition of insanity in terms of living with other people or not being able to do so. And we talked about the typical expectation of crazy people to hear voices (or sounds) that no one else can hear because they do not exist.

Then we moved into a discussion of women’s historical experiences with mental instability.

Before we read “The Yellow Wallpaper,” I told them of one experience I have had with insanity.

After that I had the students freewrite about their experience with insanity in any form. I had them write for a few minutes about the most insane thing they’d ever seen.

Then I asked them, what was their definition of crazy?

My personal experience, expressed much more specifically in my class, made it possible for students to feel safe orally sharing stories and one or two did so.

After that we read “Yellow Wallpaper.” We discussed its history and surrounding information such as Gilman’s explanation for writing the work, an English teacher’s explication of the story, and the history of mental health and women in the United States.

For instance, Governor Winthrop wrote in his Journal on 13 April 1645:

Mr. Hopkins, the governor of Hartford upon Connecticut, came to Boston, and brought his wife with him, (a godly young woman, and of special parts,) who was fallen into a sad infirmity, the loss of her understanding and reason, which had been growing upon her divers years, by occasion of her giving herself wholly to reading and writing, and had written many books. Her husband, being very loving and tender of her, was loath to grieve her; but he saw his error, when it was too late. For if she had attended her household affairs, and such things as belong to women, and not gone out of her way and calling to meddle in such things as are proper for men, whose minds are stronger, etc., she had kept her wits, and might have improved them usefully and honorably in the place God had set her.[2:225]

I introduced Nellie Bly at this time. Her work Ten Days in a Mad-House is relatively short. And it does a good job of making clear the situation for women in asylums at the time. Time limitations can be eased by picking particular sections. (Some chapters are less than a page long.)

Love’s Madness: Medicine, the Novel, and Female Insanity explains the focus on the part of the doctors on questions about her lovers and everyone’s giggles over the judge’s description of her as someone’s darling.

To relieve some of the depression of the whole unit, we also talked about her world tour . This is an amazing story of courage on the part of a woman who knows what the world can do and since it ends happily, it relieves some of the gloom this unit creates.

There is a YouTube on Nellie,
that is living history. It is short and introduces the students to her. There are other YouTube videos available on her.

Kate Chopin’s “Story of an Hour” talks of a kind husband with a life that is circumscribed not by physician or barred windows but by society’s expectations. The shortness of the story, the simplicity of the narrative line, and the shock of the ending makes it a favorite in English classes. We discussed the expectations for women in the day, in terms of education, work, and family. We also discussed the differences in working women and ladies. (This comes up in Nellie Bly and can be either examined there first or after the reading discussed here.)

The third literary work in this second section which we read in this section was Susan Glaspell’s Trifles. This play is complicated in ways that are more understandable having read and discussed women’s issues and mental health issues in the day. Though it is from a later era, the differences are not extreme, since it is about a farming community, a more conservative, less changing group than, for instance, a story about a woman in the city in the same era.

This unit allowed us to talk about women’s issues, to place women’s issues in a historical context which explained some anomalies the students had noticed in life around them, and to discuss mental health and insanity in a way that was unthreatening and thoughtful.

I am also thinking about using part of this in the class on Writing in the Behavioral Sciences to introduce the kinds of issues there have been historically.

This is a presidential election year, which can provide plenty of fodder for non-academic research. Usually when I am approving topics, I eliminate those which require primarily the use of news sources. Though the reading level in Opposing Viewpoints is often not a lot higher than that of a newspaper or online news source, the articles are generally longer and more complete. However, because I think it is important for students to know what is going on in the country they live in, even if it is not their country, I like to have controversial issues papers during the election cycle.

Introducing these can be difficult. I can’t simply list these off, because while I pay attention to politics, I ignore a lot of issues that are controversial. This may be my own bias in thinking that those topics aren’t controversial or it might be that I have read a lot and haven’t been persuaded one way or another, so I avoid the elephant and her doo-doo. And sometimes trying to look up a complete list of controversial issues online just drops you down a rabbit hole.

This year the way I introduced them in some of my classes was through online quizzes, before the primaries were finished. There were several news quizzes that listed issues and had you pick whether you agreed or disagreed with them. Then it let you know which candidates you were most in agreement with. One of those, www.votehelp.com, now presents a list of issues for you to agree or disagree with on a continuum and asks you to rate their importance. Then it tells you whether you are closer on the issues to Obama or McCain. I am not sure how they can do that when politicians swing like weathervanes, but at least they have made a stab at it.

After the students had identified themselves with certain positions on various issues, I asked them to take one of those they felt strongly about and research two candidate’s sides, looking for persuasive arguments. Right now this would come out more as a position paper, describing McCain and Obama’s rhetoric, so I used this before the primaries in the spring. Now I would ask them to look for arguments on both sides of the issue, not relating to a candidate. Often the candidate’s are asked to speak in sound bites, so their presentation might be minimal. However, people arguing on both sides of an issue can be found in the stronger political blogs. I would refer them, perhaps, to some of those: Daily Kos, the Huffington Post, Michelle Malkin, and Townhall. From there it would be easier to follow links to other sources.

This is from my TYCA-SW talk on controversial issues in the classroom.