Thoughts on Teaching Literature | David Owens

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David Owens
Walla Walla Community College

Thoughts on Teaching Literature

There are two ways to look at a literature class: as a content-based class or as a process-based class.
In the content-based class, the idea is to expose students to the most important works of literature in the hopes of
passing on a shared sense of culture so that educated citizens could stand around quoting Emily Dickinson to each
other at opportune moments and referencing Young Goodman Brown to help explain some idea or to add color
to a humorous or sad story, and we would all know what they were talking about.
There are several problems with this approach to literature. For one thing, important works of literature are being
written all the time, and instructors tend to stick with what they know best, so the culture moves forward, leaving
the classroom behind. Eventually, the literature classroom becomes a dusty museum of things that used to be vital
and thrilling but are no longer of the moment. It is in danger of becoming a history of literature course, one that
gets bogged down with supplemental readings to help the student reconstruct the original context so that they can
get a dim view of what made the literature vital in the first place, or, like many history courses, condenses the last
50 years of history into the last week of class because it runs out of time. Helping us to reconstruct the lived reality
of the past is, indeed, one of the great benefits of literature, but this is not the course most students expect when
they sign up for Intro to Lit, and it is a course I would teach much differently.
The other problem with the content approach to literature is that the culture it is attempting to pass on is a culture
developed exclusively for middle and upper class white men, so it would be more like anthropology for many
students today they would be studying a culture they do not share and perhaps dont even care to belong to.
Sure, if everyone in America had read and loved Huckleberry Finn, there would be more unity and mutual
understanding across this sprawling and diverse nation, but great novels like Huckleberry Finn, which has a
history of being dropped from the rotation or banned outright for various reasons, tends to cause division as much
as it fosters communication, so we are more likely to bond over bland, harmless entertainments like Gilligans
Island, Cheers, Titanic, Friends, Survivors, and American Idol. These are worth studying as cultural artifacts, but
not as great literature, and, again, this would be a very different class.
So, rather than attempting to get students to absorb culture by saturating them with an ever-expanding canon of
the best and brightest in the world of literature, I hope to introduce students to some tools and concepts they can
use to understand and appreciate the literature they may already love on a higher level of complexity. I have done
this by choosing examples of contemporary literature that have moved me, and which are also superior examples
of the various forms of literature moving the culture today: plays, poems, short stories, novels, graphic novels and
film. Also, I have found that using a theme for the class keeps me from getting overwhelmed by choice and creates
moments of serendipitous communication between the texts as we discuss them in class. My theme this quarter is
Transformation: What changes and stays the same in a character arc. While it is not important that you know this
to enjoy the literature, and we may never reference this idea directly in class, I hope that we find connections
between our primary texts this quarter that will increase their meaning in surprising ways and perhaps deepen
our understanding of this idea.
You may also note that most of our major texts this quarter were written by people who are not only still
breathing, but who are very active and vital writers from various cultural backgrounds. It is important to me to get
a variety of voices in my syllabus, especially in an introductory course, because literature has the ability to help us
experience perspectives and realities vastly different from our own. This virtue of literature, this ability to connect

23/12/2015 13:48

Thoughts on Teaching Literature | David Owens

http://web.wwcc.edu/davidowens/engl-111-intro-to-literature/thoughts...

with another mind, a strange character, or a foreign belief system, and perhaps even get us to look at ourselves in
a new way, is one of the primary benefits that I really want to impress upon beginning students of literature. At
the same time, it is important to be aware of techniques writers use (like irony, metaphor and symbolism) to help
convey this experience so that we dont miss it.
The short stories and poems will not be quite as diverse simply because, in an attempt to keep costs down, I did
not want to assign an anthology, so I am sticking with texts that are easily accessible on the web, which I hope in
most cases means that they are in the public domain. Also, these shorter pieces may not always have been chosen
with our theme in mind, since they will sometimes be used to help illuminate a particular literary technique.
Poetry and short story writing are still very vital and exciting forms of literature, and I encourage students to seek
out some contemporary examples, but the stories and poems I have chosen from our past are also rich and
masterfully crafted, so they will be ideal for introducing sophisticated narrative and figurative techniques in a
concentrated package.
When I taught my first literature class, I was stymied by the essays I received in response to my assignments until
a colleague reminded me that there was no writing prerequisite for our literature classes. Since it would be unfair
to expect you to know how to write a literary essay without teaching you how, and unfair to me to expect me to
grade the results, and since I dont want to waste anyones time by teaching writing in a literature class, I have
opted not to require any essays in this course. I have also made our reading load relatively light. However, rather
than assuming that this will be an easy course or that I see the study of literature as a light matter, I hope that
students will put twice the effort into the few assignments and readings that I assign. Indeed, I hold the
understanding of narrative and literary devices to be one of the most important skills students can arm
themselves with in an age when the easy availability of information and stories has come at the cost of their
reliability and artistic merit.
Narrative is one of the most powerful persuasive tools we have available to us, and many people dont see any
problem using stories to manipulate others. Great writers and good stories can help us precisely because they use
stories to raise questions rather than provide us with temporary answers. By studying them, we can learn the
techniques used by the less altruistic storytellers and thus defend ourselves against their seductive lies. Also, if we
pay attention to the questions and problems raised in powerful literature, we will learn how to study ourselves and
the world. Therefore, I hope that my students take the room I have given them to read each text more than once,
be as thoughtful about a discussion board entry as they would be about a paragraph in a graded essay, and think
hard (meditate) about the ideas and questions these texts are desperately trying to get us to think about that
they believe are vital for our survival in this world.

David Owens
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