Making Writing And Literature Contemporary

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bandar cemeEvery fall I teach a section of an American Literature survey course. I always tweak the writing assignments, but for several years I have been giving a version of the same assignment. Students have to use one or more of the texts from the course as lenses through which to view and interpret a contemporary ‘text,’ which I define broadly to include any current book, film, television series, political or cultural event or figure. Students have the option of writing two, seven-page essays, one due at midterm and the other at the final, or of working throughout the semester on one fifteen page essay. About a third of my current twenty students have chosen the fifteen page option.

Students must do research on their contemporary text, which can involve reading news articles or watching sitcoms, depending on the nature of the text they choose, and they must draft. There are four response group sessions and two teacher conferences in each half of the semester, which amounts to roughly one draft a week in a fourteen week semester.

Because it is a survey course, I like to focus on a theme for the readings. This fall it is Evil in American Literature. This year I mixed canonical works with several other works, including four I have never taught before. Chronologically, the students read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Sanctuary, A Streetcar Named Desire, Howl, Interview with the Vampire, The Handmaid’s Tale, Beloved, and No Country For Old Men. By now they have read the first four and are just completing Interview, so most of the papers thus far are only on those texts.

I am about halfway through reading the midterm papers. Almost half of them are on Huck Finn, but several are on Streetcar or Sanctuary, and two students even read ahead in order to write about The Handmaid’s Tale.

I have read comparisons of Huck Finn to Harry Potter, Forrest Gump, Everett Ulysses McGill from O Brother, Where Art Thou?, the unnamed protagonist from Fight Club, Dito Montiel from A Guide to Recognizing Your Saints, Keith Frazer from Inside Man, and to the characters from Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery.”

I have also read comparisons of Blanche DuBois and Snooki, Temple Drake and Paris Hilton, and Stanley Kowalski and Hank Moody from Californication. Sanctuary has proven a widely applicable book, being compared to films like The Shining, graphic novels like Black Hole, and traditional short stories like Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

But my favorites so far are one that discusses Sanctuary and the infamous Glen Ridge rape case of 1989, one that discusses Sarah Palin and the Conservative Feminism movement in light of The Handmaid’s Tale, Streetcar, and Sanctuary, one that discusses the history of religious intolerance in America with special attention to the Ground Zero Mosque controversy, as seen through the lens of Huck Finn, and two others.

One is on Mao’s Proletarian Re-education Movement and both Streetcar and The Handmaid’s Tale. This one is being written by a first generation Chinese-American student who conducted personal interviews by phone of her parents and another close family friend who were among the educated urban youth who were sent by Mao to the countryside to work with the peasants.

The last is by one of my advisees, a young woman studying to be a high school English teacher, who chose to write about teaching Huck Finn, and has focused on the 2007 challenge to the book that took place at Manchester High School. My student has interviewed Education Program Director Craig Hotchkiss of the Mark Twain House and Museum, and will be interviewing one of the English teachers from the high school who was embroiled in the challenge. She will also be accompanying me to a one-day symposium on Mark Twain taking place next month at Saint Joseph College in West Hartford.

I point out all this in part because I am excited about my students and the papers they are writing, but also because this is a survey course, open to sophomores and populated mostly by non-English majors, yet the students take this assignment very seriously and write very good papers. I think this happens because I ask them to write about subjects that are of interest to them. Many, like the students writing these last two papers that I highlighted, go far beyond the requirements of the assignment and pursue research that is personally or professionally transformative. To me, that’s the greatest success.