Teaching Notes, Or What I learned during My Winter Semester

I haven't been posting much in the last few months because most of my reading time has been taken up by prepping for my women's lit class. Teaching this class has been a learning experience for me. I came into it with all sorts of assumptions--e.g., that students taking a women's lit class would automatically be enthusiastic about the material, that many of them would be practiced readers, and that they would already be familiar with canonical novels like Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre from high school or other English classes. On the first day, I realized how naive I had been: only two or three of them had read P&P or JE, few of them had experience (much less enjoyed) reading fiction, and most of them were there to fulfill a general education requirement.

We began the semester with Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre, two books that I originally worried would be too familiar, but also assumed everyone would be excited about reading. As it happened, the students were overwhelmed by the reading load and I'm fairly confident that they weren't all able to keep up. Even the more advanced students found the prose really difficult to understand, so it was hard for them to get through over a hundred pages per week.

 As a result, the focus has been on making the texts legible by walking through extended scenes, reading aloud, and focusing on who's speaking and what's being referred to. Our most productive time in class has been spent taking turns reading sections aloud to help the students figure out what is happening in a particular scene before attempting any kind of analysis. My hope is that the novels have made more sense to them and that--maybe--they've even enjoyed them more as a result.

For the second half of the class, we're reading a series of short stories from the Norton Anthology of Women's Literature, and I'm hoping that the reading will be more manageable and more enjoyable for them because they won't be racing to keep up. Next time I teach this class, I'm going to assign more short stories so that we can really break down each story in class. Last week, we did a close reading exercise using a passage from Edith Wharton's "The Angel at the Grave," and the students seemed to find the process of paraphrasing the text to be both challenging and productive. It's so tempting to stray from the text in discussion, but a paraphrase exercise forces you to focus on what's on the page. Once they had a better idea about what the passage was saying, they were in a better position to pay attention to its language and imagery--and then to move on to thinking about the effects of those elements.

On the whole, I can say that I have learned as much this semester as (I hope) my students have. I am looking forward to teaching this class again at some point so that I can incorporate what I've learned into the syllabus from the beginning. It's easy to forget that a syllabus is more than just deciding what you want the students to read and that it can take several iterations before you have crafted a successful class. For this semester, it has been enough to be reminded that my job is to teach my students how to be readers and thinkers rather than just to expose them to a series of greatest hits.

Can You Trust Him?: The Rosie Project and the Unreliable Narrator

I'll say right at the outset that Graeme Simion's The Rosie Project is a delightful novel. Simsion has a light touch and has created a completely engaging narrative voice that has just the right balance of objective distance and lack of self awareness.

This balancing act of objectivity and the inability to see himself clearly shows the ways in which Simsion is playing with the motif of the unreliable narrator. This figure plays a key role in creating narrative tension--an unreliable narrator who, at least at first, gives the impression of telling the reader everything in an open and trustworthy way means, when handled well, that the author can conceal the story in plain sight. Think of Lockwood, Wuthering Heights's opening narrator, who has absolutely no insight into Heathcliff's household. Or, Agatha Christie's criminal narrator in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, a narrative innovation which outraged many of her readers.

Simsion gives us a narrator whose scientific mindset, obsession with standardizing all aspects of his life, and social ineptitude allow him to dissect every encounter in a seemingly insightful and objective way. Of course, Don Tillman, the narrator, is completely deaf to all emotional aspects of any scene, which means that he has both uncanny insight into what is happening around him and doesn't get it at all.

What makes this really work, though, is Simsion's comedic touch. The Rosie Project is a funny novel. Reading this novel is a little like one of those thought experiments where a space alien arrives on earth and has to have the function of all objects and bahavioral norms explained. The humor is not accidental, either, and it brilliantly shows (rather than tells) what Don means when he says that he adopted humor as a defense mechanism.

While this novel works in many ways, it also made me wonder if it would have worked better as a short story. Not that it felt too long, but rather that the conceit of Don's hyper-objective narrative voice would have been so well suited to the freedom of the short story to capture a moment and move on without needing to adhere to the machinery of a novel's plot. For me, the novel worked less well toward the end when Don's narrative moves toward the inevitable conclusion and greater level of emotional awareness. The novel ends the way that the plot dictates that it should, but I felt a little sad to see it happen.

What is Women's Lit?

This semester I'm teaching again for the first time in a long time. I love my job as a librarian, but I sometimes feel like I spend most of my time pointing researchers toward sources rather than  actually engaging with those sources. So, I picked up a women's literature class at a university not too far away, and I'm back in the classroom.

There are many ways that I could have designed this course, but my main goal was to keep it as fun as possible, both for me and for the students. I've been reading a lot of chick lit in the past few years, so I was imagining a class that takes a look at the origins of chick lit. Looked at from that perspective, the obvious starting point was Austen's Pride and Prejudice and Bronte's Jane Eyre--in other words, two classic love stories that a lot of contemporary women's literature is responding to and revising.

Once I had decided on my motif for the class--i.e., how women writers have been re-writing and re-thinking the ways in which P&P and JE set up the love story as defining women's opportunities--I had to decide which texts to spend the rest of the semester reading. There are so many possibilities that I finally decided to punt on the question by assigning the Norton Anthology of Women's Lit and giving myself some room on this first time through with the course to figure out exactly what it's about.

I'm pretty content with the shape of the course and its readings, which run from Sui Sin Far up to Toni Morrison and Jhumpa Lahiri. The Norton has a pretty diverse selection of texts, so we'll be able to look at the love story, and narratives about plots and possibilities for women, from different perspectives of race, class, gender, and sexuality. My plan is to transition from Jane Eyre to the second half of the class by having us read an excerpt from Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl where she says "Reader, I didn't marry him" so that we can talk about how narratives for black women were different from that of a Jane Eyre, regardless of how disadvantaged Jane may have seemed in her own story. I also plan to bring in Rachel Blau DuPlessis's Writing Beyond the Ending to frame the second half of the class in terms of her claim that twentieth-century women writers create stories that are intentionally not leading up to the traditional happy ending of marriage.

Once I had all this in place, however, I realized that the narrative that my syllabus has a distinct problem: plenty of contemporary women's fiction, especially chick lit, is about the happy ending defined romantically. In fact, that's one of the criticisms of chick lit, and many would say that chick lit is unfairly dismissed for exactly those reasons. So, by focusing on literary fiction that writes beyond the ending I'm not really staying true to the debates about what women are allowed to write or the ways in which women's fiction isn't always taken seriously.

Given that the semester is only 14 weeks long, and I can't pile on as much reading as I'd like, what would a women's lit syllabus that takes these questions into account look like? Something tells me that it is going to be several semesters before I have any answers.