“You Haven’t Read That, Teacher?” and Other “Not a Real Field” Fallacies (Teaching Rambles)
I just had a rather strange short conversation with a fellow about The Iron Heel by Jack London. That conversation went something like this: Guy: Is that Jack London? Me: Yup. The Iron Heel. Guy: I’ve never heard of that one. I wonder if I have it on my reader. (checks) Yup! I’m currently reading The Sea-Wolf. It’s a post-apocalyptic book. Me: I’ve never heard of that one. Cool! Guy: Why are you reading The Iron Heel. A fan? Me: I’m teaching it. Guy: Are you an English major? Me: Yup. Guy: And you’re teaching a book you’ve not finished? Me: Yup. Guy: Good luck. (turns away as if annoyed) I don’t know anything about this individual. Perhaps he’s an England major or just an avid reader or a philosophy major or whatever. But it was clear from his tone that he found it rather distasteful that one might teach a book they haven’t read yet (if I didn’t plan to read the book at all, then I’d deserve the tone — keep in mind he had no idea when I planned to teach said book). Of course, he might think this because many people don’t know much about literature courses — particularly, surveys, in which you have less freedom for selection (thus, we end up teaching a few things we haven’t read simply because much of the study in any major literary field — American, British, etc. — has moved beyond standard canonical studies). But we don’t select books in a vacuum (I don’t, that is). When I select books, my criteria focuses first on my own personal readings, and second (and most importantly) on the critical literature. In the case of The Iron Heel, I selected it because it fit into the themes of the course (Dystopia and American Anxiety) and because it appears in great detail in much of the critical literature on dystopian writing. In other words, I know what this book is about, I know about its themes and issues, and I know much of the major interpretations of the work as they relate to the theme in question. This isn’t a book I’m reading blindly. It’s a book that I’ve practically already read, minus the fact that the actual pages have never flitted before my eyes.* And, surprisingly, this is not unusual in academia at large (I know many people who teach introductory courses in their fields who effectively teach from knowledge obtained elsewhere than the books they assign — the same happens in a lot of introductory college argument classes, since the general information rarely changes, though the structures and pedagogical practices do). Part of the problem is the assumption that all humanities courses are entirely and utterly subjective, and that we come to literature simply from some ingrained interest or feeling about a work. This is false. Literary studies are far more than just “reading books and responding to them.” It is a tradition and a body of research that transcends the limits of the page. That literature has remained a major field of study for centuries is a testament to its validity as a scholarly field (the same is true of much of the humanities, including philosophy, religion, and so on). I can’t say for certain, but I suspect this false perspective derives from the teaching practices in the K through 12 system (everything prior to Uni for non-U.S. folks). Much of my evidence is anecdotal, though I think the shocking percentage of students I’ve taught who don’t even know what “literary analysis” means is credible enough (at least a third of all students in the few literature classes I’ve taught, if not slightly more**). In other words, if we teach literature not as a discipline of study on par with the sciences (in terms of its academic output, not necessarily in terms of its applicability to the everyday world), we might curb some of the misunderstandings that contribute to the nationwide attempt to devalue and defund literary study (and other humanities fields). If this narrative sounds familiar, it’s because a very similar narrative was used by literary scholars to disregard genre fiction — one of my major fields of study. Just as those scholars didn’t understand the value of science fiction, so too do many universities and a portion of the public often fail to understand the value literary studies. Some of that is undoubtedly because the people within my field have failed to convey the message about literature to the general public in a way that attracts interest and understandng (in particular, an answer to the question “Why should we take you seriously?”). There is already a small movement in genre studies to convince scholars to attempt to bring their work to the masses, and no insignificant amount of push back by scholars from the old guard.*** I’m not sure if it will succeed, though McFarland Books is largely considered by many faculty to fulfill that role, more or less.**** Maybe what literary studies needs is a Neil deGrasse Tyson to play Literary Populist for everyone who doesn’t become an English major. What do you think? ———————————————— *As a general rule, I do not fill my syllabi with works I have no read. The only works I will include that fall in the “I know everything about it, but I haven’t read it” category are those works that I feel are crucial to the theme I am trying to explore. **This statistic is not meant as an insult to students or to education at large. There are a lot of reasons why students don’t know X, Y, and Z, just as there are a lot of reasons why schools often can’t teach those subjects. ***I still recall attending a PCA/ACA conference wherein the keynote declared in his speech that genre studies must reframe itself for everyday folks if it expects to survive. Some people were quite unhappy with that speech. ****Despite the image as a pop academic press, McFarland has
Book Review: Birds and Birthdays by Christopher Barzak
(Note: This will be a long review. If you want the short version, it’s this — go buy the book, because it’s bloody good.) In 2007, Christopher Barzak released One For Sorrow, a supernatural YA novel that so successfully encapsulated the terrifying experience of adolescence that it became one of my favorite novels of the 2000s. While a drastically different work, Birds and Birthdays continues Barzak’s exploration of the multitudinous factors that form the basis of identity. Birds and Birthdays is, first, a conceptual collection. The fourth chapter of the book offers a detailed account of Barzak’s research in the Surrealist movement (existing roughly in the space between the two world wars) and the women who were almost forgotten there. As an experiment in feeding female artistic expression (painting) through literary interpretation (fiction), the collection draws parallels between the worlds of metaphor (the paintings) and the very real discourse of female identities in the wake of a patriarchal culture — this is part of the mission of the “Conversation Pieces” series at Aqueduct Press (to explore the “grand conversation”). “Birthday,” for example, expands upon Dorothea Tanning’s painting of the same name by turning the unknown woman into Emma, who has spent her formative years taking on the identities required of her by her parents and the culture around her (53-54). Thus, when Emma inherits her parents’ apartment complex, marries Joe at 21, and soon has a child (Jenna), she embarks on a quest to find an identify that more appropriately fits her inner self. What begins as a series of cruel gestures on Emma’s part (leaving her family and her various lovers, one by one, by changing apartments within the same complex) quickly become the sympathetic acts of deliberate personal interrogation through others. Perhaps the most disturbing of the three stories, “Birthday” is also perhaps the most profound in the collection as a work of neo-surrealist magical realism that draws into question the ways humans have been conditioned to accept identities for convenience. The other stories are equally compelling, but for drastically different reasons. “The Creation of Birds,” — drawing upon Remedios Varo’s paintings, “Creation of the Birds” and “Star Catcher” — presents a modernized fairy tale involving the romantic opposition of the Bird Woman, who has the remarkable and beautiful ability to build and bring to life real and mythical birds, and the Star Catcher, whose namesake gives away his game (the Bird Woman remarks that catching stars and other things are a reminder that “[the Star Catcher] didn’t know how to love something he couldn’t own” (4)). As a somewhat whimsical tale, “The Creation of Birds” is replete with period references to psychoanalysis (a field which is still practiced today, surprisingly) and stunning descriptions of the Bird Woman’s abilities — I particularly enjoyed the scenes involving the bird designs, if only because birds are, I believe, elegant creatures that would require painstaking detail to create from nothing. But the heart of the story is her relationship to herself and to the Star Catcher, who seeks to “reclaim” her. In this sense, it shares a relationship to “Birthday.” The middle story, “The Guardian of the Egg,” also questions our relationships and what they mean, but with a much more epic narrative. Based on Leonora Carrington’s “The Giantess,” the story focuses on a what happens to the family of those who answer a “higher calling” — in this case, a mythical calling that draws parallels to the familiar “chosen one” narratives. In particular, the story benefits from switching perspectives from “the chosen one” to an immediate family member. The shift offers a fresh — though not wholly original — perspective on the now-traditional epic form. Identity, of course, remains central to the narrative, but so too do the mythic forms upon which the narrative draws (similarly, I think, to “Birds”). As a story, it effectively rides between an interrogation of those forms and of the roles others play within them. But it is also a humorous tale, with dark references to our ability to turn people into “others” and a clever moment in which the main character must communicate with guardian geese. Collected together, the three stories have the effect of providing a range of perspectives/narratives that are each unique in and of themselves and each rendered with care and depth — a sense I draw from Barzak’s clean, minimalist prose, which he uses in service of a rather complex and specific narrative agenda. Birds and Birthdays, however, is certainly not a perfect work. While I found a great deal of thematic material to draw on, the types of stories found in this collection are, I think, geared to a particular kind of reader. With the exception of “The Guardian of the Egg,” none of the stories have “clean” resolutions (“Birthday” in particular), and all of the stories are heavily focused on the visual thematics of the original source material, thus producing works which are, in a sense, almost surrealist themselves — certainly a goal of Barzak’s. For some readers, this might be too much, as surrealist works are, in my experience, frequently just that — too much. Just like the surrealist films of the early 1900s (see examples at the bottom of this post), the stories in Birds and Birthdays are visually intense and cognitively detached. “Birthday,” for example, relies more on its character’s peculiarities than it does on an ordered universe in which the containment of an individual’s many relationships in one apartment complex could not happen. But those same peculiarities are what make the story a brilliant medium for exploring the “skins” we wear as social creatures. Plot and pure resolution would, I think, detract from the message, just as removing the incomplete resolutions and estranging (read: not cognitive estrangement) effects would do so for the other stories. In that sense, what I see as an at times compelling work of art, and at others a somewhat overwhelming vision, rests on the spectrum of work that you either love