[The Fall
2014 semester is coming to a close, and as usual I wanted to end the
semester with some reflections on my courses and other conversations, leading
up to a weekend post on some anticipations of spring (and not just the season;
although, yes). I’d love to hear some of your Fall 2014 reflections in
comments!]
On two exemplary
moments of applied literary theory.
I’ve written
before in this
space about the irony of a scholar who has never been closely connected to
theory (to put it politely) becoming a frequent teacher of our department’s two
most theoretical courses: the undergraduate Approaches to English Studies and
graduate Introduction to Literary Theory. I’ll be teaching the latter course
for the fourth time this spring, and this fall taught my second and third
sections of Approaches. I can’t lie—I was still most excited for the weeks when
we were working more directly with primary literary texts (and various
contextual and theoretical materials related to them), from Henry
James’ The Turn of the Screw and
Shakespeare’s The Tempest through a
week with multiple poets and poems. But as I’ve gotten more practice with these
theoretical courses, I’ve gotten better at finding ways to help students (and
me!) connect our theory readings to literary and cultural questions and
conversations, and here want to highlight two wonderful such connections from
this semester’s sections.
Perhaps not
surprisingly, the day in which we discussed four Feminist essays (by Elaine Showalter,
Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Annette Kolodny,
and the Marxist-Feminist
Literature Collective) inspired a particularly rich discussion. The conversation
ranged across multiple subjects, from the more familiar (Disney
Princesses) to the more unexpected (She’s the Man). But
I was particularly impressed when we turned to Facebook,
and the many ways in which users on the site create, reinforce, challenge, and
otherwise engage with aspects of gender, sexuality, and identity (both in their
individual profiles and in how they relate to one another). I try throughout
the semester to argue that our theoretical readings, even the densest and most
seemingly philosophical (yes, even our essay by Derrida, much as I sorta hate
to admit it), have things to contribute to our contemporary conversations and
perspectives; in these few minutes of discussion, the students made the case
for such connections far better than I ever could.
The place where
the Approaches students most consistently demonstrate those connections,
however, is in their individual final projects: I ask them to create a Casebook
focused on a primary text of their own choosing (in any genre/medium), and to
consider how different contexts and theories can help us approach and analyze
that work. All 40+ Casebooks were interesting and inspiring, both in their
specific readings and in the way they reflected the students’ evolving
perspectives to which our readings and conversations had meaningfully contributed.
But I have to admit that I was ecstatic (my son Aidan’s favorite adjective, and
a very apt one here) when one of the students used The
Wire as his Casebook text, and applied Ethnic Studies, New Historicism,
Gender Studies, and Marxist theoretical approaches to an extended and entirely
successful reading of multiple moments, characters, and themes from that
seminal show. Omar Little
analyzed through a combination of bell hooks’
ideas of postmodern blackness, gender theory, and Georg Lukacs’ Marxist
concepts of heroic identity and potentiality? Okay, literary theory, I’m sold.
Next recap
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What stands out from your semester or fall?
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