Literature Prep, Genres, Etc

In live blogging this conference, I am following the conventions for conference blogging.

Philip Mitchell
Dallas Baptist University

“realistic biography… reveals about a man the precise points which are unimportant” (G.K. Chesterton)

In the early persons, he began to develop an unsystematic approach to biography. Rejected historiography. Without a sense of the emotional tone, the purposes of bio were aborted. Picturesque, comic, and heroic show the person.

Discovered that a life can sum up an era or an attitude.

Nothing of the formalist fear of the ______ fallacy. Told what a person was thinking and why.

It’s a call for sympathy from the readers’ part. (1895-1905)

Has an arresting strangeness in each biography.
Coins counter-intuitive terms to explain the periods.
Written originally for newspapers.
Particular order in books shows care.

Opening essay presents the ideas.
Next five are aesthetic.
Three are prophetic.
Sandwiched by essays on normal.

Essays on humor (Bret Harte)
Then heroic v. weak national memory
Then four Victorian cases

12 Types, starts with Charlotte Bronte and ends with Sir Walter Scott.

Point/counterpoint pattern.

Model Chesterton’s wisdom methodology.

Critic: Don’t put all the folks together the way he does.

Instead, Mitchell says, it’s a presentation. Positive and weak power. Chesterton’s judgments have a powerful immediacy.
1. awaken reader to other worlds worth arguing with
2. reader gains wisdom by joining with

Bronte:
The real that is worth recounting is the “indestructible germ,” even when it is minor.
Locating the essence of someone is the important thing.
Can’t concentrate on the comic or shocking.
Life is invested with sweetness.
All houses are houses of joy and terror.

Chesterton extends an argument for narratives, not fiction, but human narrative sets.

Extends this principle to William Morris, “Wm Morris and His School.” Rightfully forced Victorians to face up to their ugliness. Morris did not understand the “human figures in the round.” Could not love the “fabulous monster of industrial London.”
Art did a world of good for Victorian homes, but not for humanity.

Morris, the lover of fairy tales, should have known better.

Experience sympathy with past eras that they would be tempted to slough off.

“Optimism of Byron” unconscious buoyancy v. real pessimism
Everything has once belonged somewhere, including the affective pessimism.
True pessimism is different.

“Pope and the Art of Satire” is on the nature of true wit.
Challenges readers for the lack of their understanding of the 18th C.
What the modern reader lacks is what Pope possesses.
True hatred requires full awareness of what is hated (thus satire is better).

St. Francis essay.
Hopes to awaken audience to “sensual excitement that is present in the practice and goals of the Franciscans.”
Asceticism, too, is staggering optimism, fit to put all people capering.

Rostand essay.
Heroic comedy, Cyrano de Bergerac, love of love and love of death are two passions of humanity.
Poetry is great.

These four historical pieces, psychological and spiritual centers of the world view.
“romance of civilization” (see list on handout)

More nuanced historical judgment.
Charles II is open to and not engaged with religion and science.
Aspects of human beings remain unaccounted for in every system.
Charles II gains sympathy, but more pity. Epicurean of a lesser type in a protected polity.
“Strange unreality broods over the period.”
“Our restraints are larger than their liberty.”

Robert Louis Stevenson:
Critics are unable to see optimism of heroic violence.
Love of the good and the beautiful for its own sake. This includes an imaginatively lived experience.
Loyalist to the world’s physical goodness and humanity’s dramatic explorations.

Carlyle, able to love God and the great, but not the regular person.
“cosmic irony”
To understand Carlyle you must distinguish him from later philosophers.
Says he comes close to Christianity when he sees a leader who is loving and magnanimous.
Seed of Carlyle’s madness (which lead to Nietzche) came from his inability to recognize the evil of slavery.

Tolkien

Savonarola as an iconoclast was needed to cleanse them to aspire to something beyond taste.

Sir Walter Scott- romantic imagination to tell us what life really is
Loves oratory. But a poor person’s voice can speak well.
Modernist realism cannot imagine attributing good speech to the poor.
“false cosmos, a lying and horrible perfection” = what others say (biographies?)

Hopes to open contemporaries to the past.
Not in distance, but in empathic manner.

Romance and adventure, and other genres, to make sense of other lives.

Question:
How did idea for this paper develop?

Chesterton’s approach to history. In middle of a book on…
Broad model for the thing.
Looking at individual texts more closely.
Each essay has the pattern.

Was curious if this happens in the book too.
Not just getting the audience to look at the past but also a pattern to build a case.

The only real difference is the second part (twenty total) is humility and inaction.
Queen Victoria’s strategic inaction gave her the strength to influence the masses.
He calls her attitude a raging humility, made it possible to keep the excesses of the British system in check until Edwardianism.

*SWCCL= Southwest Conference of Christianity and Literature

In live blogging this conference, I am following the conventions for conference blogging.

Ginger Stelle
Morthland College (in Illinois, new college)
PhD from St. Andrew’s University, Scotland

“Saving Poppie: Social Outreach in George MacDonald’s Guild Court”

Lecture designed to explode students’ preconceived notions about Victorian.
There is no such thing as a typical Victorian.
Attitude toward technology, women, etc, underwent changes throughout Victoria’s time on the throne.

Attitudes toward social reform also changed.

Poverty was huge.
Social reform was organized. “potentially doing more harm than good.”

George MacDonald gives his view of social reform through his character of Poppie. Non-fantasy novels, almost without exception, include salvation and often economic salvation as well.
Unrealistic to expect folks living in squalor to listen to those who are well-dressed and full.
Can satisfying immediate needs really equip them for living? No.

Octavia Hill, GMacD shared her views of social reform.

Only way to improve a person’s life is to change both physical and spiritual help.

Social workers, two main characters.
No desire for the betterment of the masses can make up for the lack of faith in an individual.

Indiv relationships built with those he wants to help. Through those relationships, works to make changes that will last.

Focuses on different approaches that are taken to help in Guild Court.
Lucy’s grama, Thomas’ employer, Thomas’ family, bookseller and daughter, Poppie

Poppie “as odd a character as any of MacDonald’s grotesque”

“a little girl… perhaps 10 years old… wild as any savage in Canadian forest… dress was a fright… ribbons that fanned her legs… shoes that afforded more room for the snow”
No parental supervision. No training. Everything she does is instinctual. Uninfluenced by societal norms.
Real is only what she experiences. Nothing else matters.
For all that she is a “human animal,” she has an imagination. Imagination begins as instinctual.
Lucy’s red cloak catches her imagination.
Cries over the rose bush.

She goes to a Wax museum and thinks it is how the wealthy dispose of their dead.

Recognizes love.
Gives Lucy a piece of shiny red glass. Present.
Lucy kisses Poppie.
Poppie breaks down and cries, for the first time since babyhood.

Lucy: bath, social education, clothes, takes her to a party…
Poppie goes. She has been clean at least once. Might serve as a type of something better.
Poppie grabs something and ducks under the table to eat it. Then when the door opens, she makes her escape.
Poppie preferred all London to the largest house.

The spontaneous kiss does more.
Bond between two.
Despite the unpleasant recollections of the party, Poppie looks for Lucy.
Poppie says she will take something, if Lucy will kiss her.
Lucy says she will kiss her, if Poppie will keep her face clean.
Poppie turns away sad. Poppie does take the letter anyway.
Lucy could not bear it.
Ran after her and kissed her.
Poppie runs away.
Delivers letter. Returns with a clean face, looking like a “little saint, except with dirty hair.”
Underscores that the kissing for a clean face was for Poppie’s growth.

Mr. Spelt the tailor:
Sees her on the square.
Poppie is about the right age of Spelt’s lost child.
5 minutes of thinking, believed or desired to believe it.
Decides to adopt Poppie.
Begins subtly.
Leaves candy in the street.
Does this for a few days.
It becomes part of her reality.
After that, he adds a string to the candy and pulls it towards him.
Continues.
Usually runs away. But do talk.
When she is injured, she runs to Spelt. She became sick and Spelt took care of her.
“the humanity of the child had an opportunity to … love Mr. Spelt”
He had a chance against her prior experiences.
Allows a safe environment and time.

She begins to see him as home.
Calls him Daddy.
Begins to adapt civilized behavior.
Becomes cleanly.
Wants better clothes.
Mr. Spelt makes her clothes that she likes, not that culture wants.
She finds work. Two kinds of work.
Loves her as she is and encourages her to find her own way.

She begins to grow in the love and understanding of God through Spelt’s sacramental approach to Poppie.

She had no conscious understanding of God, but her essential humanity is encouraged.

Her first prayer is for victory in a fight.

Mr. Fuller, local preacher, education
Gets to know indiv Poppie before deciding to educate her.
All her impressions were through her senses.
He doesn’t tell her stories, but shows her pictures of Jesus. Tells the story with art.

Poppie is almost unrecognizable.
Lucy found Poppie washing cups and saucers…
“the real woman in her had begun to grow” (and become a house cleaner)

her acquisition was not great but she learned to think with some of the most valuable characteristics of childhood.

“sign of redemption”
not brought about by formal education, strict religious training, or anything else
focused on individuals who responded to Poppie individually.
Provided for bother her spiritual and physical needs.
Started her on the journey of faith.

Advocated an approach through kindness and human affection to activate the natural and God-ward channel…

Questions:
Used the word “sacramental”
Is that his word?
That is a word that the vast majority of the critics use to describe him. The idea that all life is a means of drawing closer to God. Nature incredibly important to MacDonald and every inch of it sacramental.

Similar, relational approach to redemption is in ALL of MacDonald’s works

F. D. Morris and Christian socialist movement influenced him.
Own experience with church and outside of the church.
Own experiences with constant money problems, gotten through those by individuals who helped them.
He got in trouble with the church for his universalism.
Saw the church was unhappy with him for saying they had to do more than give money.

*SWCCL = Southwest Conference of Christianity and Literature

In live blogging this conference, I am following the conventions for conference blogging.

Carole Logan Carroll
Lubbock Christian University
“The Bible and the Qur-an: Creating a Questing Faith in the Literature Classroom”

Showed pictures of granddaughter, Madison.

Come at students differently when teaching sacred texts.
Experiences and things you see in classroom.
Teach sections of sacred texts.
My point is to look at these at literary texts, but in a way that will hopefully get them out of their bubble. Want them to start questing.

“I expect you all to be independent, innovative, critical thinkers who will do exactly as I say…” – move past this model

Beginnings:
Sophomore lit class students are confused
Interest and delight from Bible majors, because have already read some of this
Most seem uncomfortable or even wary
That is a good thing.

Questing faith begins in discomfort.
My personal pedagogical philosophy hinges on creating “possibility spaces for generating and testing ideas” (Holmes Rolston, III) and is thus founded on the very notion of questing.

When the secular collides with the sacred, non-bible majors are given the opportunity to grapple with a well-known story from two quite divergent texts, they experience a naturally occurring questing faith outside of a regular Bible class.

Old questions, new answers

Middle-ings:
Begin a questing faith for them.
the readings
PowerPoint
Have everything online with Moodle.
2-3 page journal entry comparing or contrasting the two versions

Presenter doesn’t talk first. Has them look at the PP and read.
“My goal is to help begin rather than end a questing faith.”

Several times within the reading, she interrupts and says, “Look at me. I believe that Jesus Christ is the Son of God.”

Endings:
Students don’t know that Jesus is in the Qur’an
Not aware that the Muslim faith is Abrahamic

They are complexed and I do a happy dance.

Class Discussions:
The changing face of Jesus—‘Breck girl with pretty hair and blue eyes,’ to other images, older and newer, but different for the students.

Proof-texting:
This is a problem the students don’t see.
Matt. 10:34 and Sura 4:34
–women who don’t mind can be beaten Sura 4:34
Don’t think that I came to bring peace, but a sword. Matt. 10:34
Don’t take one thing out and use it for proof.

Myth-making: Core
Which is true? How do they find them?

Story-telling and oral tradition
Story-telling main point in class.
Talk about it a lot.
How did they get so different?
Dev. of stories over time

PowerPoint gives background of the three monotheistic faiths.

Tradition and truth
Difference between what they know and what is true.

OT God and Allah
Is Allah the OT God? Where do they converge/separate?

Let the questions come up.
Sneeches version… (No one getting anywhere.)

Bible majors who will begin a discussion that get rest of student’s involved.

Walked in class. “Look up 5 Pillars of Islam.”
They are going to have to read through other things.
Exposure to a religious system they aren’t aware of before.

First pillar: One God, Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet.
- Jesus is a Muslim prophet.
- …
Second pillar: Prayer.

Students are amazed because they seem very familiar.
Can’t tell if those are OT or from Qur’an.

Very first Sura that talks about God sounds just like something from the Bible.

I don’t give them the answers. I don’t have all the answers.
I do know what I believe and why and I want them to know what they believe and why.
I’ve been teaching this class since the late 90s.
These two texts seem to create this idea of questing faith.
I am very blessed to have the opportunity to teach this in the classroom that isn’t a Bible class.

*SWCCL = Southwest Conference of Christianity and Literature

In live blogging this conference, I am following the conventions for conference blogging.

Susan Bruxvoort Lipscomb
Of Houghton College
Teaching Doubt at a Christian College: Tennyson’s “Lame Hands of Faith”

BA Calvin College
MA U of Chicago
PhD U of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Avid vegetable gardener

Less than 1100 students. Uniformity in faith. Evangelical subculture. Clear narrative, testimony after crisis.

College changes them.

Spring, interviews seniors who explain what they are best at and who they are.
Books they have read: Lewis and Tolkien are always on the list.

College changes them in ways they do not expect.

They learn that the process of forming the biblical canon was messy.
Intellectual history of Western culture shows Protestant Reformation as harbinger of breakdown between faith and reason.

Some leave the faith.
Some become Catholic.
Some change denominations.

4-year institution
Students from stable, affluent families. First life-time experiences change them.
The literature classroom is one of the places where students process these changes.

When a liberal arts college is functioning at its best, but lit class is particularly situated to help students understand the changes as narrative of transition rather than a narrative of crisis.

Teaching texts that wrestle with the themes of suffering and pain, and texts that raise questions about faith, is particularly helpful for the students.

In Memoriam
Teach in 200 level, Lit and Wisdom, core requirement for lit and philosophy
Read classics of lit and philosophy
Chronological march from Ecclesiastes to 1993 play Wit
Classroom becomes a community over the semester.
Other teacher is her husband.
Title for the week in which we teach Tennyson is “An Unquiet Faith.”
Read The Brothers Karamotzov, In Memoriam by Tennyson, and Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach.”

Characteristic ways that eras have examined faith.

“Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night..” –M. Arnold “Dover Beach”

“ The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.” –M. Arnold “Dover Beach”

Seriousness of loss of faith.
But narrator is also comic.
Dover Beach is a popular honeymoon site. Probably wrote it on his honeymoon.
How did his bride feel about that?
Not to mock the Victorian crisis of faith, but to see the affectation of the crisis of faith.

One discussion period on Dostovesky.
One on Tennyson.

Written over 17 years.
College friend, engaged to his sister, died in Italy of a brain aneurysm.
Each section can more or less stand alone.
We make very careful selections among the sections.

The early sections represent Tennyson in grief.
“Ah, sweeter to be drunk…
But all he was is overworn.” In Memoriam 1. 9-16

Section 7, stands outside the house and feels his absence.
“Dark house, by which once more I stand
…
A hand that can be clasp’d no more.”— VII

Versus another time when he is there CXIX, 1-4, 11-12.

“So word by word, and line by line,
The dead man touch’d me from the past,
And all at once it seem’d at last
The living soul was flash’d on mine.” XCV.33-36

Tennyson struggles with how to come to terms with the loss of friend but also with a world which biologically requires death.

Are God and Nature then at strife, LV.5-8

“red in tooth and claw”

Nature finding that of fifty seeds, only brings one to bear.

LVL.1-4

LV.16-20 “I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope,
And gather dust and chaff, and call
To what I feel is Lord of all,
And faintly trust the larger hope.”

T.S.Eliot, from Essays Ancient and Modern
“In Memoriam can, I think… a very intense experience.”

In its day, it was seen as a poem of strong faith.
“…a priceless but much neglected means of spiritual improvement, the efficacy of which not even the most sceptical [sic] can deny.”

“a priceless benefit to many an earnest seeker in this generation” –Charles Kingsley

Encounter with a poet who is hanging onto faith while wrestling with his doubts. They don’t care as much about his theology. It is enough that he is asking the same kind of questions they are asking.

“That God, which ever lives and loves…
To which the whole creation moves.” Epilogue, 141-144

Wrote the last before the rest? Really?

Students trust Tennyson. From his strong conclusion they are confident that he reaffirms his faith.

Read authors who are strong in their faith. (X, X)
Read authors who reject faith. (Eliot, Arnold)
Not as much thought about reading about a journey of faith.

Most poetry is the “luminous particular,” the one moment narrative.
But Tennyson opens up a lifetime of doubt.
One continuous process of reflection and even questioning.

Students come to college understanding about their faith.
In teaching In Memoriam I also hope to teach them about doubt.

Questions:
How did the students do with the nontraditional ending of Tennyson, where he says his friend is mixed with God and nature?

Curious… with Brothers Karamatzov “greatest attack on Christianity ever”… Overwhelming. Caused depression. Prof said, “Keep reading. It’s not the end of the story.” Do you let them know “The Grand Inquisitor” is not the end of the book?

Crisis of Modernity.
Nietsche taught the next week.
Week 15 present Flannery O’Conner, at people who are putting together with faith post-modern answers.

Was there a bit of Hebrews’ “though he is dead, continues to speak”?
Is there a sense in which the friend is actively speaking these?
Yeah. There’s a kind of a resurrection. It’s mystical. But it is a strong statement of faith and the students see it that way.

*SWCCL = Southwest Conference of Christianity and Literature

In live blogging this conference, I am following the conventions for conference blogging.

Bill Carroll
of Abilene Christian University

“Victorian Knowledge, Faith, and Assent: Responses to Doubt by John Henry Newman and Robert Browning”

Issues of faith and doubt are ubiquitous.

Nature as the book of God.
Looking at Newman’s “An Essay in Aid of Grammar to Assent” (guide to reading the world)
Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”

Victorian understanding of the role of nature in science.

Newman is conservative religiously.
Not going to offer an answer for reading Browning.

How can any reading of experience be reliable?

The challenge of the skepticism… other ways of knowing.

Together the two works make a reading for faith and understanding the impulses in the Victorian culture.

“all knowledge outside of science are nonsense” –

Experience is ringed round through our personality…

This awareness means all reading, all nature, all data will be hard to figure out without recognizing our thoughts.

Victorians attempt to accumulate empirical data to prove their faith beyond a “shadow of a doubt.”

Dissimilar responses. Strongest responses from the Victorians.

“For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities–his eternal power and divine nature–have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.” (Romans 1:20)

Christians have struggled to interpret God from his nature.
12th C the conversation on this topic changed.
Altered the metaphor of “book of nature.”
Increased the experience, importance of reading the book of nature.
If nature is to be conceived as a text, the reader needs to be fluent in the language in which it is written.

The added importance of “reading the world/book of nature” grew in the university.

Galileo, “Both scripture and the divine text of nature…” leads to God.
Heresy is only a failure of understanding science.
By the 19th C, though, stronger challenges to reading nature and the Bible harmoniously.

Most of the poetry of Taylor and Coleridge was written to help readers read nature.

In Blake’s Song of Innocence “The Lamb” is the shortest presentation of this.
Compared with “The Tyger” from Song of Experience.
Blake acknowledges that our reading of the book of nature depends on what we are looking at.
56-57 In Memoriam
“Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed.”

Newman’s friend Froude says he is drifting from his Catholic belief.
The central concern of “A Grammar” is …
1839: The grounds of belief and faith do not rest on evidence.

Newman sees two modes of rationality.
Under firestorm of intellectual attack…
Notional belief v. X belief
True vocabulary of science is symbol.

Assent, though a mental act, is not an act of logic.
Arbitrary, but not incompatible with an appeal to logic.
Science makes claims beyond its reference…

When vocab of science moves out of its purviews, it is problematic.

Assent rarely relies on types of proof science requires.

Newman says you can read the natural world by observation. Can arrive at assent to metaphysical claims.

Browning
From “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came”

The basis for accepting directions from someone who lied all the time is weird.
Thinks the guide is only there to lead travelers to their death.
His quest is leading him to his death.

What constitutes truth and the use of language?
For Roland he is a good guy because he is the one who ends Roland’s endless journey.

Browning’s Roland rarely sees his experience as…
Browning’s character demonstrates how personality limits the understanding of experience.

Dark Tower appears at last moment.
It is hard to see what shows up in our experience. Often we don’t see what is right before our eyes.

Though he is standing directly in front of the Dark Tower, he doesn’t see it till he remembers how he was told to find it.

What role memory and values play is important?

Wise critics hesitate to offer a final reading.

Poem itself says…. XXX

Danger of reading the world… We read ourselves as the moral center of the universe. He does not solve this problem, but presents it so that we can see it.

Our attempts to read the book of nature can always be compromised.

Richard Dawkins says he is “not a fundamentalist” because he would “change his mind in the face of evidence.”
But Browning shoes us that we never read only the evidence.

Browning’s answer is that though reading the book of nature is fraught with problems,
How is it read?
Pushes reader to recognize our subjective, contextualized reading of the text…
That means every text will be subjective and contextualized.
We need to recognize this.

Question:
Breaking down of natural theology…
Decreased interest “Faith and Reason” 1998 John Paul, first time of Book of Nature as divine presentation.
Think about Darwin, Origin of Species, disappointed.
Tennyson writing before Darwin but both reading the geologist.

*SWCCL = Southwest Conference of Christianity and Literature

The Guardian offered an article that caught my attention with this:

Just like Augustine marveled, in the year 400, at the sight of Ambrose reading in silence, many members of academia marvel (or react with rejection) at the rapid changes in the production and dissemination of scholarly work and interaction between academics and those “outside” academic institutions. Thousands of scholars and higher education institutions are participating in social media (such as Twitter), as an important aspect of their research and teaching work.

Now, I’m all about the technology, because I do believe that, to some extent, that is where we are going.

But the part of this that really got to me was Augustine marveled, in the year 400, at the sight of Ambrose reading in silence…

Augustine marveled, in the year 400, at the sight of Ambrose reading in silence…

Augustine marveled, in the year 400, at the sight of Ambrose reading in silence…

And that is where we are with technology, except that tech is different. Yet, we are, in fact, involved with marveling at the sight of students doing/using tech in different/new/odd/unique/unfamiliar ways. Like Denise Horn’s comment:

they can text with one hand, under a desk, without looking.

Back to the original article:
As we all know, tech is “new” to us, though not new to our students who never grew up without it.

New technologies have slow adoption cycles, and often the learning curve is steep. Those already using these tools within academic contexts should not be considered a priori as “the converted”; perception and usage of social media varies wildly, and due to the inherently fluid and malleable nature of the platforms themselves we are still in the process of assessing all their possibilities.

The most hopeful sentence in the article, for me, was this:

the 21st century scholar has the tools not only to publish and disseminate, but also to facilitate the development of specialised audiences, and therefore of what is called “impact”: people read, and in turn write about your work, which is in turn read by others.

Then there is this:

For higher education, social media is part of a process of democratisation. Its effective use can lead to an ethical shift towards active efforts for engaging new audiences and widening participation beyond the Ivory Tower’s walls.

What do you think of that?

We talked about the plague in class on Wednesday. Then I saw these two posts online:

Rats not involved with plagues, because there weren’t any dead rat infestations.

Yersinia Pestis WAS present with plague victims, not before that. So, while the rats did not deliver, what we thought was the Black Death apparently was.

So how was it spread? Perhaps through the air or by fleas, which do not need to have rats.

Hrothgar’s Playlist is an assignment one of my colleagues has come up with for Brit Lit I. I like it and will be adopting/adapting it for my class. I haven’t actually seen his assignment, just heard someone else talk about it, so I may change it up, but here is what I have so far.

Hrothgar’s Playlist
Choose a character whom we have read about this semester. Find ten appropriate songs for this particular character. Attach the MP3 files or links to the songs online. Attach the lyrics. Write an essay explaining why you picked the songs you did and/or how those songs apply to the character.

Extra credit, minor: Find ten images which express something about the character and explain in a paragraph each how the images are related to the character.
Extra credit, major: Create a digital story (audio and visual) using lines from the songs to tell about this character. (There you will have the original playlist plus the images, plus a title, introduction, discussion, reflection, etc.)

Apparently this is a very popular assignment and I think it could be a great final assignment.

Introduction
I am going to introduce Hrothgar’s playlist with this commercial: Stethoscope.

Poetryfoundation.org has this article, which is a reconsideration of The Bell Jar. I loved this book as a moody high school student, though I usually disliked literature because of its sad endings and this book also had a sad ending.

When I went off to college, I left the book behind emotionally and just this year gave away my copy of it and other Plath writings I had collected.

But the article was interesting and, even though I know it ends badly, it makes me want to go back and read the book to see if I can suss out what it was that made me so enamored with it.