Bringing my focus/area of emphasis has always been a slight challenge. For starters, I in a way treat the different areas of English as summer jackets and winter coats, trying each one to see how it fits and if it keeps me warm only to find that it may do the job at this moment, but it fails miserably and suffocates me later on. I am officially am focusing on Literature for grad school (I have a penchant for contemporary short story) but find it hard to remove the creative writing undergrad….so just to be high brow, difficult, and a general nuisance to some, I try and bring both to the 110 classroom.
I use story telling rhetoric in my class unconsciously. I always tell them to treat their papers like stories, you can’t move from point in the plot without taking care of this other point just as you can’t progress your paper without tying up some of these loose ends. I encourage them to build their papers around concrete examples and in some cases create a hypothetical character or problem to help ground their reader in a specific scene. A short story and typical academic paper are strikingly similar, both attempting to convey thought and a message but use mediums which differ on the…well…on the chromosome level to be honest.
Literature…well since Literature is apparently the rebel without a cause boyfriend Father Composition doesn’t want dating his daughter 110 Students, it is a little more difficult to get the two sneaking out together at night. But all my research examples deal with literature along with many of my academic analysis examples. I use A Modest Proposal (thanks for the idea Moses), Shirley Jacksons “The Lottery” as a text to analyze, the critical methods applied to literature are now applied to basic essays, articles, and other venues in order to deepen the student’s awareness. If they don't come out of the class knowing at least one author they did not know before, they didn't show up for about a 1/3rd of the class.
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
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3 comments:
I'll be honest, I primarily want to comment on your post just to say that your analogy about literature being the rebellious boyfriend of Father Composition's daughter ENG 110 is both hilarious and astute. It's definitely quite catchy. Still, I see a lot of truth in that analogy, judging by a lot of the critical opinions I've seen on the topic of having literature as part of the curriculum of the composition classroom (opinions that mostly seem to come from composition teachers and scholars, which I find interesting). I've personally found that using short stories to provoke student writing can definitely be worthwhile. For whatever reason, students have an easier and much better time reading and discussing "Flowers for Algernon" than they do "Biotech Century." I'm sure I could read all sorts of reasons into that, but the end results speak for themselves as far as actually getting students thinking about writing and gearing themselves towards it in a beneficial manner.
"I always tell them to treat their papers like stories, you can’t move from point in the plot without taking care of this other point just as you can’t progress your paper without tying up some of these loose ends."
This is one of those "I wish I had thought of that" comments. I wonder, how do your students react to this statements? Do they "get it," or do they sit there with that frustratingly blank look that makes you wonder if you're actually speaking aloud? (You can tell I'm a little frustrated with my students' reactions.)
i like this idea about each paper being a story. right now, i'm talking to my students about the intros to the position papers, and we're discussing "hooks." this technique is so much like the story-telling you're talking about, drawing the reader in and catching the reader's attention. i think i'm used to seeing my fiction writing as my "fun" writing, and academic writing has often (more than not) been a means to an end. i find myself teaching my students some of my best "tricks" with academic writing, when i should be infusing those things i find fun with my fiction writing. this is why i love the i-search assignment!!!!! it's a nice marriage of the two. :)
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