Teaching Literature in the Real World by Patrick Collier

Author:Patrick Collier
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781350195073
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

I have used this project five or six times; and (let’s be honest, this is the real world) with varied success—I had a miraculous class where every group did superb work, and I had a class (later) where it went poorly enough that I considered dropping it. (It was after this class that I stopped teaching Ulysses and doing the project in the same semester.) But I stick by the project because it seems clear that almost everyone learns from it. The three-page individual reports are revealing, as students who struggled complain about the difficulty but in the process reveal the work they did and their awareness of what they needed to find out in order to justify their selections, annotate, and write bibliographies. In most of these reports, metacognition is in evidence.

The biggest challenge in leading students through this project successfully, I have found, lies in how to lay out a “conventional understanding of the period’s literary landscape” that students can successfully engage as a strawman to justify their anthology selections. You know the problem: a lecture on “British modernism” will be memorable and digestible to students in direct proportion to its reductiveness; a nuanced and complicated lecture that acknowledges critical disagreements and a tortuous critical history will be difficult for students to work with; plus there are all the usual problems with lectures, student note-taking, and so on. As I write this, I am planning a version in which I will establish the groups at the start of the class and assign each group to a well-known critical explanation of modernism from a certain historical moment (Malcolm Gladwell, Edmund Wilson, etc.); they will have to present the essay’s main argument to the class. This addition will present its own challenges: see my discussion of using literary criticism in Appendix 1.

Project 2: Class wiki. This project shares several objectives with the anthology project. It also puts students in charge of researching background information and invites them to identify relatively obscure writers and texts and to make a case for their significance. And it also propels students toward primary sources, including online periodicals and dusty old editions of novels and poetry anthologies, which give students exposure to literature in context in a material, embodied way that has an ineffable value. (Enthusiastic students are often blown away to find early-twentieth-century works by major writers sharing page space with patent medicine advertisements, for instance.)

What I particularly like about this assignment is that, as a semester-long project that I introduce during the first week of class, it foregrounds the process of developing a storehouse of usable, contextual knowledge from the start of the semester. This assignment works best in relatively focused classes, as the contextual information that you and the students build up collaboratively, and put up on the wiki, will constitute a tighter, more interconnected network if the semester’s reading covers a relatively short period of time or another relatively focused, limited topic. (The version of the assignment I provide below was

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