So here we are, at the start of another semester. I find myself in a curious position this year, which is similar in kind, though not in existential "space," to the environment I rejected back in March of 2013: juggling the responsibilities of study, teaching, and work.
We near the end of week 2 in the spring semester, for which I've taken a temporary assignment teaching American Literature for the College of Southern Maryland. (Probably there needs to be a legal disclaimer here about these views not reflecting those of the College, etc, etc.) This is a fantastic opportunity for me to keep the dust off, the edge sharp, or the proverbial muscles of the teaching skills warm: it's part time and fits neatly with my work and school schedule. (Yes, by strange fate, I've managed to compile full-time work with six credits of graduate study while simultaneously assuming responsibility for a reading-intensive survey course. I am unafraid.) On the bright side, my athletic schedule has screeched to a halt as I survey a six week (minimum) recovery period from abdominal surgery.
The first week went as well as could be expected with two meetings conducted virtually. Thank God for web enhancements that enable distance learning! I was able to facilitate online discussion of the first two works on the syllabus and am pleased with the tone the students have struck in the early stages of the semester. It's always at the point at which instructors get the first writing responses that we either cringe or rejoice at the writing competency of the group. In this instance, I was pleasantly surprised that the first written artifacts from this session were - though very informal - mostly incisive and pithy. These folks seem to have a good idea of what I wanted in that first assignment. And they did even better on the second set, after I modeled some analytical responses to the proposed questions.
Our first class period was taken mostly with syllabus review and a brief synopsis of the state of the US cultural and social developments in the latter 19th century. I lingered over Whitman (and wanted to address Dickinson) as harbingers of change, both thematically and formally, for literature in the United States at this time. I see Whitman as a synecdoche for the changing direction of American consciousness in the 19th century. With his inclusivity - thematic, imagistic, linguistic - of the "range of life" for 19th century Americans, he participates in a dynamic period of sociocultural growth while also setting the tone for the literary awareness to come. Both he and Dickinson can be thought of as forebears of the 20th century modernists, who experiment with form especially and whose disillusionment with traditional motifs and methods give force to that movement. Several of the students expressed the - by this point - venerated frustration with Whitman and his "epic minusculinity" (a phrase of my own invention!): that habit of his by which he attempts to cram the entire universe of significance into a grain of sand, or an insect's antennae, or a black man's sweat, or the thinly-coded sex act. The commonest reaction to our excerpted reading was, "Whaaaaat?!"
And yet several students also clued in on this merger between the cosmic and the infinitesimal, and they were able to articulate it to a surprising degree. Surprising both because it got at the pith of Whitman's project and originated in a 200-level English class. Whitman is traditionally the most difficult poet to access in the first half of American literature, simply because he's all over the place.
Our second "meeting" covered Bret Harte's "Luck of Roaring Camp" and Twain's "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County." We used these as an introduction to Realism and Regionalism, with heavy emphasis on the latter as a subset of the Realist mode. (We'll crack into Realism more formally in "Daisy Miller: A Study" in a few short weeks' time.) Again I observed a pleasant distribution of gusto when I didn't observe precision about the student responses. Many were restricted to the standard first-time reflections on dialect as a regionalist motif: in Twain especially, there was much comment on Wheeler's crude southernisms. But these were taken up by some others to speculate on the latent opposition between formal, educated elite (read: "polite") audiences. A few enterprising students even observed this binary between the speaker and the character of Wheeler himself. In my satellite comments via Blackboard, I observed that this was a hallmark of the regionalists' project in that they relied heavily on dialect and "local color" (to borrow a tired phrase) to express a specific "image" of a specific social "caste." We noted some strains of class disparity between educated elites and the stereotypes of the rustic. Some of these observations melded into our remarks on Harte's piece, but they were labored in most cases. This is probably because Harte's use of dialect isn't as critical to the regionalist project - either that or he doesn't use it to such great effect as does Twain. Harte, as I see it, relies more on specific imagery or description of community practice. So much in "Jumping Frog" is spoken from Wheeler's perspective that the audience feels the idiosyncrasies Twain attempts to convey. But in Harte, they're told rather than shown. But at a time when this dictum hadn't yet entered into the discourse of American letters, it's no violation. If Twain lampoons the rustic American and his tendency to inflate the insignificant to grandiose, Harte certainly lampoons that same figure's credulity and conformity to tradition. After all, the roughnecks of Roaring Camp essentially reenact the Christian Nativity, Regeneration, the Flood, and Redemption in fictive space of several months.
To craft a teaching opportunity, I synthesized the group's responses and elaborated on the points above while also added a few remarks on the regionalist's use of the frame narrative: the framing narrative is simply a device by which the author cultivates a point of access to enter the story: the introductory method, as it were. We don't see that much in Harte or Jewett, for instance. But Twain will take a lot of mileage out of it in his works.
In our third iteration (and second virtual session), I dialed it back a bit and provided only a list of questions, any of which was fair game for the class to address. And I have to say they took the modeled behavior and ran with it. The difference in the commentary was drastic: where before it had been simple commentary tending towards summary, this second round of remarks incorporated the same distribution of incisiveness, but it also developed the citation-evidence-analysis texture that's so necessary in college writing. It gives me a sense of ease about the impending semester, if only because I have a better view, and one earlier on, of each student's proficiency in the craft.
In fact, this has inspired a major research project for my Technology for Instruction and Management course, which I'm taking through Notre Dame of Maryland. That topic seeks to investigate - any takers? - blogging! And how convenient that I took up the habit so recently! That's a separate issue, one which I'll be writing on as the semester progresses (and time allows). But for now, things "hasten into the midst of things," as Milton once said of his great work.
More anon!
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