Thoughts on Theory

Once, a friend asked me about literary theory. He explained he’d taken a literary theory class and he still wasn't sure what theory was or why it was called “theory.” He explained his confusion stemmed from the fact the class used a single text, The Great Gatsby, and applied every theoretical approach they discussed to it. He approached the class with a scientific perspective, expecting it to be a matter of testing theories and hypotheses on a literary text, and that proving one would invalidate the others.

Well, literary theory doesn't work like that. I explained that literary theory is more about the approach a reader takes when studying a text.

A reader can take, for example, a feminist approach to one text, and they will focus on the portrayal of gender and gender relationships. Another reader may take a structuralist approach to the same text and they will walk away with a reading that focuses on how the story is set up. And someone doing a Reader-Response reading will focus on how the text impacts the reader.

A literary theory isn't so much a hypothetical statement as it is a school of thought that addresses issues that emerge in literature and how those issues are read and understood; and literary theorists are constantly responding to, complicating, criticizing, validating, and even disproving (or attempting to) the work of other literary theorists. So what is the point? The goal of all of this is to learn how literature tells us something more than just, well, what the literature itself is: about how we live our lives, engage in culture and society, and with each other, etc.

Allow me to share a classic example of a prevalent issue in literary theory: authorial intention.

Authorial intention basically asks two questions: First, whether or not it is possible to know what the author intended by what they wrote. Answering this question generally deals with what is known about the author, their life, their goals, their personal philosophies, and how that biographical and historical information intersects with the text so we as readers can find the author's purpose in their writing.

Seems simple enough, right? Then there's the second question: whether or not the author themselves were aware of what their intentions were, i.e. to what extent were they subconsciously motivated, or attributing too much intention to what could be coincidences. I've told people this before and people, generally the more hard-science minded, scoff at this idea, retorting with “How can you not know what you intended?” But it has been a serious issue in literary theory, and stems from other philosophical ideas about our own ability to self-perceive and self-conceive, to understand just what's going on in our own heads.

And there are literary theorists who argue that authorial intention is a moot point: that it isn't an issue worth addressing or it is impossible to answer, while others still try to decipher the author's intention from the texts they study. What complicates this is there isn't necessarily anything right or wrong about any of these perspectives. It isn't necessarily a matter of right or wrong, but much more a matter of how. How do you read and understand a piece of literature? How do you interpret it? What details and kinds of information do you consider appropriate?

Regardless of the approach, literary theory aims to discover how a piece of writing is more than just words on a page. Literary theorists look to literature to discover what literature says about society, culture, the human condition, philosophy, psychology, history, and even how literature comments on literature itself. Literary analysis, in any form, should go beyond what the piece of literature itself says.

Studying literature is a journey, and the theoretical approach you take is merely the path you take. Not every path will take you to the same place, but you will likely come close to and even cross a few other paths on your way there.

“Nightfall” and the Experimental Nature of Science Fiction

Take our solar system, and change one thing. Only one. In the entire expanse of the solar system, one change might not make that much of a difference.

How about the number of suns that shed light on Earth? How might that affect the flora and fauna? Or even culture, philosophy, society, and human nature?

Isaac Asimov's short story “Nightfall,” written in 1941, focuses on a group of scientists, mostly astronomers, and a newspaper reporter from a fictional world called Lagash. The world is not unlike Earth: it has science, religion, culture, art, architecture, universities, newspapers, etc. There is, however, one significant difference: it has six suns. The result of this constellation means Lagash does not have a night, or rather, they have a night once every two thousand years when a perfectly placed solar eclipse pitches the world in darkness.

This sounds like it might be some kind of survivalist story: what do you do when the sun goes down? And I would not be surprised to learn some script writer has tried to turn it into that. However, the story ends just as the last visible sun vanishes from view. The fates of the characters are not specified, though the outlook is certainly grim.

What makes Asimov's story interesting, and an important piece of science fiction, is not the survivalist “do-or-die” that would follow night, but a survey of how this kind of world would compare with Earth. As stated above, there are many similarities, but the differences Asimov postulates are what make it significant. A few examples include:

• Because of the suns, astronomers had to determine mathematically there is a moon.
• No artificial lighting. In fact, when they produce torches, in anticipation of the darkness, they say graduate students developed them.
• They hypothesize a one-sun system could exist, but also that orbiting planets could not foster life because it would be steeped in darkness half the time.

Most interestingly are the soft science-fiction elements:

• People go crazy or extremely claustrophobic when put in darkness.
• Religious explanations of previous nights.
• Using religious doctrines to validate scientific hypotheses.

I like to think of “Nightfall” as a science experiment that simply changes one thing and then logically extrapolates how that one change would affect everything else; particularly the people who are affected by that change.

“Nightfall” has no starships, no light sabers, no ray guns. There is certainly science but it's basic science; explanations, formulas, and telescopes, current technology for when the story was written, 1941. Until contact is made with a world like Lagash or our current sun is joined by five others, this isn't a situation we'll encounter any time soon. So it isn't science fiction in the sense of Star Trek or Firefly, namely, predictions as to how the distant future will be. Instead, “Nightfall” is a science fiction closer to Marvel or DC comics, asking, “What would it be like if our situation, our world, right now, was slightly different.” Authors of science fiction, therefore, take these diverse elements and, like a math or chemistry equation, play with the variables, and use their understanding of scientific principles to extrapolate how that would account for a different world.

Both types of science fiction, though, try to understand the relationship between humanity and science. We tend to think of science fiction in technological terms – those light sabers and starships I mentioned earlier – but those are simply extensions of science. After all, we call it science fiction and not technology fiction.

The emphasis, though, isn't on the science. Asmiov could have tried out the math himself to postulate the existence of such a world and hypothesized, in detail, the flora, fauna, and culture of that world, but there's something powerful you get from fiction that you don't get from scholarly work. This story, after all, deals with a question: what do you do when the sun goes down? Asimov's science fiction isn't just trying to explore complex scientific ideas and theories, but, in a softer science sort of way, to explore the relationship that humanity has with science.

Where do your sympathies lie? Part 4: A Symbolic Death

As the fourth, and last, post dealing with sympathies, audience, and Anton Chekov's play The Cherry Orchard, I thought it would be appropriate to discuss the end of the play, wherein an image and a sound are powerfully juxtaposed. The image is of Firs (the old valet) dying, and the sound is the cherry trees being cut down. It seems simple enough, and yet this juxtaposition carries significant symbolic weight.

Firs has been a mainstay at Ranevsky's estate, and even fondly remembers the time before the emancipation of the serfs. After all, he had it pretty good as a valet, one of the head servants, and probably saw his fellow servants go their separate ways once they were emancipated and the estate grew too poor to keep them on. He rose to the highest position he could as a servant, misses the others after they have left, and his closing words, the words that close the play, are “I'm good for nothing.“

As for the felling of cherry trees, Lopahin has made no secret of his desire to do so. He had encouraged Ranevsky to save her land by felling the orchard and building estates. He had used his business savvy to know what would be the best thing to do financially, and will now do the same, making his investment work for himself. But he does so quickly, felling the trees even before the family has left so Ranevsky watches her beloved orchard fall as she leaves her family’s estate.

Ending a narrative is a daunting task: everything has to be carefully resolved, and a Russian play with its full cast is no exception. By this time the other characters have already left and Firs is alone. So the question is, why end the play on this note, with the sound of the ax and the death of an old valet?

The characters represent more than just themselves. Just as Lopahin represents the nouveau riche and Ranevsky the noblesse oblige, Firs represents an old generation, so rooted in its ways that even when emancipation came, he did not accept it and continues to live the same life he always had. Firs, by virtue of his position, his age, and his attitude about serfdom, represents an older way of life, even though he has few lines and little attention. He brings with him a lot of social and cultural baggage and he, ironically, is willing to carry it while the audience must decide how to sympathize with him and what he represents. Even as he dies, he complains that Gaev, Ranevsky's brother, probably left in an inadequate coat. Firs, as a former serf who stayed with the family and became the valet, is a strong representation of that time and that mentality. He's like the cherry trees: an old establishment representing a bygone era. Ranevsky assumed that since they always had been there, they always would be.

So what about when the character dies? All of that dies with him. When a character represents something, like a historical period, a certain mindset or occupation or lifestyle, dies, it means that, unless there's another character that also represents it, everything they symbolize dies as well.

And if they're killed? Firs' death is interesting because it has the sound of the cherry trees being chopped down. Firs stands old and symbolic, alongside the cherry trees, and the two are only further linked symbolically through the juxtapositions of their deaths. Lopahin is responsible for the cherry orchard's removal, just as how Ranevsky is responsible for having lost her money and the estate. Lopahin does not take the ax to Firs, but by felling the orchard, Lopahin symbolically brings about the death of an era, initiating a new world governed by hard work and business rather than estates and inheritances. It's a world that has no place for the old serf Firs. And so, there's nothing left for him.

We don't just sympathize with people. We sympathize with what they represent, and how we demonstrate that sympathy shows how we sympathize with their representations. To pity Firs' death is to pity an old lifestyle. Similarly, to lionize Lopahin would be to lionize all he represents. Characters and people cannot be separated from what they do and what they represent.

Where do your sympathies lie? Part 3: Reconsiderations and Cultural Distance

In a more modern world, particularly in America where I teach, it is easy to sympathize with Lopahin, unless a director manes him out to be a villain. Nevertheless, a close reading suggests he is more an entrepreneuring opportunist; a more capitalist character them a villainous one, frustrated by the inaction of his aristocratic friends.

Many of my students initially sympathize with Lopahin. In some ways, he embodies the American Dream. He started with nothing and rose through his own efforts, Lopahin brings with him middle class values and lower class dreams.

But he brings much more than the promise of economic possibilities. He brings the history of serfdom. It is at this point I ask my students about their own backgrounds, the lives of their parents and grandparents. I have yet to get a student openly claim to be as closely descended of slaves as Lopahin. None have claimed an ancestry or childhood like Lopahin's.

I ask my students to consider their lives. They have possessions, their parents are educated homeowners, and effective if there is debt - even if their family lost or losses everything - they will not be like Lopahin. Serfs. Slaves. As much a fixture of the landscape as the cherry trees and the bookcase Ranevsky fawns over while ignoring her aged servant, Firs. The very fact my students are students suggests they are better off than Lopahin's parents ever dreamed of. It’s actually rather hard for modern students to sympathize with Lopahin, even if they initially side with him.

That leaves Ranesky. My students generally dismiss Ranevsky as flighty and foolish, either frustrated or humored by her actions and demeanor. But think about her background. She was raised in a comfortable home by her parents, didn’t have to wonder what she would eat. She had leisure time. She had spending money. She could do something because she wanted to. She had parties, food, friends, fun, and family.

My students may not know the luxuries of turn-of-the-century Russian aristocrats, but I’d wager my students live lives much closer to those of Ranevsky than they do to Lopahin.

This makes sympathizing with the characters very tricky. It’s easy to write off Ranevsky as obnoxious and say that Lopahin was just being a good businessman, but there’s so much more social and cultural baggage we can understand on an intellectual level, but never on an emotional level.

When I was a child and I first learned about the concept of primogeniture, I asked my father if my oldest brother would get the house we all grew up in some day (the fact the house was once my grandfather’s certainly contributed). My father, however, said whoever pays for the house gets it. This is not something Ranevsky would have worried about; it had been her parents house and their parents house. The closest connection we can draw would be genetics; Ranesvky inherited the house and the fortune in a similar way to how I inherited my father’s stature and facial structure. It was just taken for granted because that’s the way it worked, and Lopahin’s ancestors were part of the house.

Identifying your sympathies is much harder than it seems. It can be easy to forget that we deal with different cultures and time periods in literature. Russia, serfdom, and aristocracy are concepts so foreign to modern day American students. Even the closest analog, Victorian Britain, never underwent such serious socio-cultural transformations as contemporary Russia did. This means that understanding literature means thinking long and hard about its cultural heritage and recognizing its differences from our own. It is a powerful learning opportunity to move from the historical facts to seeing the world in ways that others did, through their literature.

Where do your sympathies lie? Part 2: Performativity and Protagonists

At the risk of oversimplification, tragedy occurs when the disrupted status quo, at the start of the narrative, cannot be regained and the characters end in a worse situation than they began. The opposite is comedy, where there is a disrupted status quo, but the status quo is either regained or a better situation replaces the old.

In short, either things end poorly or things end well.

Lopahin and Ranevsky follow different dramatic trajectories. Lopahin's is comedic. He may not get married or start a family, but he begins the play as a successful merchant and ends as a property owner, with a sizable estate his ancestors had been legally tied to as serfs, and he can use to increase his wealth.

Ranevsky's is tragic. She begins the play returning from France where she has squandered her wealth on a lover. She's in debt, but either refuses or is unable to acknowledge it. She longs to see her ancestral home and pines for tradition and is glad to have her home. She ends, however, ousted from her ancestral home to pay her debts. Her home, her heritage, her tradition, all lost.

And then there's the fact we're dealing with a play. Unlike poems and stories, plays are a public affair, with actors, a live audiences, and carefully designed sets and stages. A play is a communal experience in a large room filled with people. Even film was like this until the advent of television, VHS, and home entertainment.

People who have time and money attend the theater. Even today if you're going to see a professional play, you're going to spend upwards of a hundred dollars. Compare this to a feudal society where being a serf (like Lopahin's ancestors) belonged to the land and no land belonged to them. The lower classes never had the means to go see a play. It wouldn't be until serfdom was illegal and social mobility possible that someone other than the upper class, like the landowning gentry Ranevsky, could go attend the theater. While I can't confirm it, I like to think the audience of this pre-revolutionary play were mixed. Some traditional gentry on their way out, and some up and coming middle class. Those who had lived their lives with the theater and others whose parents had never had the chance to sit and watch actors and actresses play their parts.

Which characters, then, would this diverse audience have sympathized with? The distinction is hopefully an easy one to make:

The rising middle class would have sympathized with Lopahin, feeling for his rise from poverty, ingenuity, and his success in securing an estate. For them, the play is a comedy as they would have empathized with his personal struggles and successes, seeing a version of themselves and their own aspirations embodied in him.

The old aristocracy would have sympathized with Ranvesky. They would have seen the noblesse oblige embodied by Ranevsky in her parties and charities, and feeling for her as they see her succumb to the loss of her estate, which they would have all considered a tragic loss.

Whether or not Chekov intended it, and whether or not directors structure it accordingly, The Cherry Orchard can be a divisive play as it sends its characters in different trajectories. The play shows the delicate balance between comedy and tragedy with the play looking one way and then another as Ranevsky and Lopahin engage with one another, their situations, and the rest of the cast. It has the potential to remind us that happy endings are not so clean cut as we like them to be, and that our happy ending may be someone's sad ending.

But there’s another side to this issue. The play and its themes are deeply rooted in a different time and place from modern audiences. As a teacher, it is interesting not just to discuss where the sympathies of contemporaries would have been, but also to deconstruct our own reactions to this play charged with social commentary.

Where do your sympathies lie? Part 1: Tragedy and Comedy in Chekov's The Cherry Orchard

Anton Chekov, Russian author and playwright, worked at a time of social change in Russia. Karl Marx was dead, his philosophies taking root, and signs of the Bolshevik revolution were starting to appear. Serfdom had been outlawed, and a middle class was rising. His play The Cherry Orchard finds itself at a cultural crossroads, a time when the old was on its way out, being replaced by new ideas still finding their footing.

During this time Chekov wanted to write a comedy. His director made it a tragedy.

A century later, it still proves an interesting read. It shows the breakdown of an old social hierarchy through a Russian aristocratic family that loses their land to the son of former serfs turned successful merchant. It literally depicts the tearing down of the old and replacing it with the new. This social change makes the comedy-tragedy distinction a very interesting one, especially with a cast of characters who, true to the expectations of Russian literature, don’t rely on a single protagonist. The question is then a matter of where one's sympathies lie: which character do you associate with?

The play becomes a subtle social battlefield. Madame Ranevsky versus Yermolay Alexeyevitch.

Madame Ranevsky represents the old aristocracy. She is a landowner and it is her beloved cherry orchard that gives the play its name. She is popular, and generous, almost, or perhaps intentionally, to the point of being cartoonish. She has wasted her money abroad, having spent the last few years in France, and does not accept help where it is offered. She is sentimental, wishing to keep her home, and her beloved cherry orchard, the way she remembers it. Only when it is too late does she face the fact that, to pay off her debts, her beloved cherry orchard is to be auctioned off right from under her.

Yermolay Alexeyevitch, or Lopahin, represents the rising middle class. He is a merchant descended of serfs, a self-made man with money enough he can enjoy comforts that were unknown to his parents. And he too is generous: he offers to help Madame Ranevsky, suggesting she replace the orchard with cottages to be rented out to supplement their income and pay off her debts. He is well off, successful, but not represented as greedy; he is supportive and friendly. He is frustrated by his unheeded advice, and ultimately takes his own advice, buys the estate, and chops down the cherry orchard.

There are, of course, a range of other characters: servants, a governess, and other aristocrats, collapsing the social strata so everyone interacts with everyone else while each character is keenly aware of their status and situation. There is some griping from the aristocracy about the days when they had generals and dignitaries at their parties, but there is no conflict over the mixing of the clearly defined social spheres. The conflict itself revolves around the fate of the cherry orchard. A conflict Lopahin, juggling the roles of businessman and friend, knows all too well, while Ranevsky doesn’t even acknowledge, let alone, face it.

But there's still the issue of comedy and tragedy. Chekov wrote a comedy, and yet his director made something else. When you consider the public, performative nature of drama, you can see how the thin line between comedy and tragedy can be, and how easily it can be crossed based on which character you sympathize with. In the case of The Cherry Orchard, do you sympathize with Lopahin, the self made man who is rising up from a difficult past by virtue of his own wit, intelligence, and skill? Or Madame Ranevsky, whose way of life, heritage, family land, and culture are being threatened and ultimately taken from her?

As we’ll see in future posts, this isn’t as simple of a question as it seems.

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Works Cited

Chekov, Anton. The Cherry Orchard. The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. W.W. Norton, 2013. 2066-2104. Print.

Themes and Motifs - What’s the Difference?

The terms “theme” and “motif” are related concepts, so related that they frequently get lumped together. I don't like to do that. The way I see it, while they are certainly related and similar, even co-dependent concepts, they are not the same.

When we read a story, we deal with something that doesn't exist but we imagine it as if it were: characters are like real people, imaginary worlds are as real as our own, and we measure them in ways similar to how we measure real people and the real world. This means we engage with stories as if they are genuine, if not possible. This is the level of reading that says...

• Elizabeth Bennett misinterpreted Mr. Darcy.
• Intelligent raccoons and trees can be partners in crime.
• Firemen burn books.
• And a long time ago, there was a galaxy far far away...

We tend to refer to this as the “story world”; we conceptualize a world wherein these people, places, and events exist and interact.

But literature is able to operate in more than just making something that didn't or couldn’t happen seem as if it could. In addition to the story world, there's also the thematic or symbolic level of a text. This is where, as readers, we recognize patterns in a story and across other stories so we can identify the themes. If something appears multiple times and in different forms in a story, it probably has some thematic significance. Themes don't exist within a story world any more than they exist in real life, but an author will focus on specific details and describe them to highlight these themes.

So, there's the story world, and then there's themes. The two are separate, and it's motifs that bring them together. Motifs are the parts of the story world that generate themes. Similar to symbolism, motifs and themes unite the concrete with the abstract.

A motif is an element of a story world that recurs in the same story and in other stories. We are able to recognize motifs because we encounter them frequently. In a way, stories are merely collections of motifs. The more motifs we encounter, the clearer the pattern they develop becomes, and the clearer the themes of the story become. The theme is the abstract concept invoked by the motifs.

For example, in my post on “Babylon Revisited” I referenced the “ghosts” and old friends who reappear and cause conflict in the narrative. These old friends, aided by Fitzgerald’s florid style, bring the theme of a regrettable past to the front. Similarly, in my post on “The Yellow Wallpaper,” the details that suggest the narrator is imprisoned are motifs for this theme: the locked door, the bars on the windows, the room being a former nursery, etc. And even though the bars are the only bars in the narrative, they reappear whenever the narrator tells us they are there.

One of the powerful traits that themes have, though, is that they go beyond individual narratives. I addressed this in my introduction to theme, discussing how Robinson Crusoe and Life of Pi are both narratives that are very different but they share the same theme of survival. It’s their differences and how they treat this theme that makes them interesting. The relationship between themes and motifs is still quite complicated, because while different stories will share themes, they will still present them with different motifs, treat the themes differently, and will juxtapose different themes. Robinson Crusoe has themes about middle-class pride and industry absent from Life of Pi, which takes a more dour look at a more dangerous situation.

Looking for themes can be one of the first exercises undertaken when analyzing a story or a poem. It gives the piece unity and meaning. It helps us make otherwise incomprehensible pieces fascinating and pieces that are centuries or millennia old significant and relevant. It helps us understand how stories are similar and different. If, when reading a narrative and anything recurs, odds are, the author is trying to invoke a certain theme. Themes and motifs are quite distinct, but one begets the other. They are inseparable.

Consider paisley. Paisley is a pattern, recognizable by its droplet or leaf-like patterns and intricate designs. Not every instance of paisley will be the same, but we can recognize it. The elements, its designs and shape, that make it recognizable can be considered its motifs: the shape, the intricate designs. Remove the designs, and it won't be paisley. Make it a square instead of a droplet but keep the designs, it won't be paisley. The theme? The fact that we can name and categorize it as such gives it its theme: its theme is paisley. The same themes will reappear, but every instance will be unique.

Culture in Closed Spaces: Symbolic Setting in “The Yellow Wallpaper”

Charlotte Perkins Gilman's “The Yellow Wallpaper” is one of those stories that is inevitable in anthologies and literature classes as an example of American women's writing at the turn of the century. Truth be told, few of were published. I'm not interested in a discussion of the history of gender politics, but it's hard not to discuss them when dealing with “The Yellow Wallpaper.”

The story was published in 1892 after Gilman herself had been prescribed the rest cure, a.k.a. confinement and the patient is allowed minimal physical movement in the hopes of calming the patient's nerves. Yes, this was a thing. While Gilman's story was a criticism of this practice, it has remained a significant piece of feminist literature to this day because it is so telling of the culture surrounding women at the time, and Gilman beautifully and eerily encapsulates it inside a single room.

The story is set in a former nursery, with the eponymous yellow wallpaper, where the wife of a physician is taking her rest cure: she is not allowed to leave the room. This lone room has a mounted bed and sits at the top of the house, with views of the entire state. Through barred windows. And she keeps seeing the image of a woman creeping in the wallpaper.

The bars make for some easy setting-symbolism: it’s a prison. But the bars are only one part of this setting’s symbolism. The narrator suggests the room is a former nursery. By being placed and kept inside, this woman – a new mother – is actually being infantilized. The rest cure basically prescribes she stay in bed around the clock. She's like a baby, kept inside, with bars on the windows meaning not just a prison, but even the bars on a crib. Even the wallpaper itself is confining, with its obtuse patterns and the woman inside the wallpaper likewise trapped. It isn't much of a stretch to draw parallels between the creeping woman in the wallpaper and the woman in the room.

At the time of the story's publication, 1892, women didn't really have a voice in American culture; this is part of the reason the same stories by women at this time period reappear in literature courses and anthologies. Universal Women's suffrage in the US was 28 years away, and World War II, the first major move of women from the domestic sphere to the workplace was about 50 years away. The Victorian era notion of “the Angel in the Home,” that a woman's role was to stay in the home and turn it into a bastion of goodness for her husband to come home to was the predominant ideal.

While Gilman specifically said she wrote “The Yellow Wallpaper” as a response to her atrocious experience with the rest cure, it can also be read as a criticism of this Victorian era mentality – perceiving women as fragile, needing to be put away and relegated to the domestic sphere. The physical space of the room where all the action takes place represents the condition of women at this point in time: confined. Gilman just used the physical space of a claustrophobic room to symbolize it.

Take this symbolic parallel a step further and think about what it means when the narrator tries to move the bed and sets about tearing down the wallpaper. After all, settings aren't simply backdrops the characters never interact with: it's important to consider how characters interact with their settings. She doesn't to go Bertha Mason and resort to arson, but she sets about tearing down the wallpaper to free the woman trapped inside. It's a story about a woman driven mad by the cultural pressures that keep her inside and her lone battle against it, to free herself and women in general.

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Works Cited

Gilman, Charlotte Perkins. "The Yellow Wallpaper." The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. W.W. Norton, 2013. ###-###. Print.

Just Where Is It? An Overview of Setting

Setting is an important part of a story, but it can be helpful to break it down in order to better identify what it is and how and why it appears. In my post on “Volar” I alluded to the nuances that Setting can take. Specifically, Setting can be described in four different but related ways:

• Spatial: This parameter deals with the physical setting, ranging from natural and rural settings like: mountains, forests, deserts, and even man made features like buildings, rooms, roads, etc.
• Political: Cities, states, nations. This is when a setting is bounded by a man-specified, but not necessarily man-made boundary. This includes countries, cities, counties, etc.
• Temporal: When does the story take place, and how long it takes.
• Cultural: When peoples or groups share a common heritage that, despite spatial or political differences, brings them together. The easiest way to think of this is in terms of religion. If you attend a religious service in one country and the same one in a different country, you can expect there to be some similarities.

A story like Robert Galbraith's Cuckoo's Calling has a clear political setting: London. But this also means it has distinct spatial settings as well, as London is a major urban area. Cultural setting gets trickier, especially as the spatial setting gets larger and the political setting gets a greater population density. For example, Cuckoo's Calling follows a private detective as he has to deal with people from a few distinct subcultures: the fashion industry, law offices, and half-way homes. The sequel, The Silkworm, still largely takes place in London, but deals with the publishing industry juxtaposed against a different class of lower income than that found in Cuckoo’s Calling. Any given spatial or political location will have different cultural settings, only some of which the author will use.

The next distinction to bear in mind for setting is scope. Some settings will be large and vast and others small, and most stories maneuver from one setting to another. Cuckoo's Calling doesn't leave the city proper of London, but contrast this with any fantasy epic, like The Hobbit where the characters traverse caves, forests, mountains, towns, and cities: they never stay in any one place for long. But even a city can be a large setting to deal with, while others, like “Volar” are confined to an apartment or a room, like Raskolnikov's apartment in Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, or Gregor Samsa's room in Kafka's “The Metamorphosis”.

It can be difficult to separate one setting from another, especially when dealing with the scope of temporal and cultural settings. A story with a temporal setting of 1930 and a political setting of the United States of America will be very unusual if it does not have something to do with the Great Depression, i.e., The Grapes of Wrath, which will greatly shape the Cultural setting. Other settings will be more allegorical, like the film and TV show M*A*S*H, which took place during the Korean War, but were more about the Vietnam War. Other settings will be more flexible; a good example of this would be most police procedural shows.

Setting is an important part of understanding a narrative because it, quite literally, gives a backdrop to the story. It is the first way to contextualize and understand just what is going on and why it is significant. Setting, literally, grounds a narrative in a time and a place, even if they are imagined, and give us an opportunity to better understand the characters, events, and themes of a story as we better understand the world they interact with.

So, whatever you're reading, pay attention to the setting. If the author has something, a simple event or the entire story, take place somewhere or someplace specific, it's probably for a reason.

Flying High and Coming Low – Setting in Judith Oritz Cofer's “Volar”

We underestimate the importance of setting in fiction. It's easy to overlook when there’s so much else going on. There are characters, events, the conflict and action that make up the plot, but it all has to happen somewhere.

I like teaching setting with Judith Oritz Cofer's story “Volar.” This story isn't about what the characters do as much as how they respond to their environment. It's about the setting and how the characters perceive and interact with their surroundings, so it doesn't start by describing the setting.

The story begins with an unnamed female protagonist and narrator recollecting her girlhood love of Supergirl comics, which she kept in her bedroom closet. This little detail is the first indication of setting – for whatever reason, she kept her beloved comic books in her closet. If these were something to be hidden, they'd likely be under, or even inside, the bed, and there isn't anything to suggest she was trying to hide them; on the contrary, she spent her allowance on them, so her parents probably knew about them. This suggests there's no room on a desk, shelf, or drawer for them. Already it starts to feel a little claustrophobic.

The protagonist then describes her childhood fantasy of climbing to the top of her apartment building and becoming Supergirl, including a range of physiological changes (best saved for a discussion on race and ethnicity representations). She would then, as Supergirl, observe the community around her and comment about it – specifically using her super-breath to disturb the intimidating landlord. She would then awake in “our tiny apartment” (286) and go into the kitchen where her mother would try to convince her father that they could vacation in Puerto Rico and visit their family, and he would comment on the cost.

From within the kitchen, the only image outside the apartment is from the kitchen window: “The view was of a dismal alley that was littered with refuse thrown from windows. The space was too narrow for anyone larger than a skinny child to enter safely, so it was never cleaned.”

The first thing to take away from this is that settings can be confining. It's not as overtly restrictive as, for example, “The Yellow Wallpaper,” but there is a certain claustrophobia about this little story, which is made all the more apparent by the character's longings to leave it. The protagonist wants to become Supergirl so she can rise above and exert power; the mother wants to visit their family, while the father reminds that them they don’t have the fiscal means to go on a vacation to Puerto Rico.

The claustrophobic setting itself represents their situation. The story never specifies where they live (Cofer herself was born in Puerto Rico and then moved to New Jersey and later Georgia) but their financial situation shows itself through the parents' conversation and by the quality of their apartment. If they could afford to fly to Puerto Rico, they'd probably have a nicer apartment. If they'd had a better situation in Puerto Rico, they would return to be with family. Meanwhile, the protagonist shirks her biological heritage when she imagines having Super Girl's blonde, straight hair instead of her own dark, curly hair. Each aspect of their lives are confining, whether it's something geographical, like their distance from home; financial like their inability to visit Puerto Rico. It's even cultural, demonstrated by the protagonist's interest in American comics while her parents mingle Spanish and English, or her desires for Super Girl's straight blonde hair, or even something so simple as the confining descriptions of their apartment, juxtaposed with a longing for something more expansive – the power to fly.

After all, “volar” is Spanish for “to fly.”

Looking at setting gives us a way to contextualize the stories we read from a variety of perspectives. “Volar” has economic, cultural, and spatial conditions and uses these settings to create an atmosphere that is, like I said above, claustrophobic. Authors use setting to develop themes, employ symbols, or give a historical or cultural background: setting provides basic information to help the reader negotiate the storyworld. By paying attention to how the spaces in a story are presented, we can get an idea at what will be important for the story.

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Works Cited

Cofer, Judith Oritz. "Volar." The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. W.W. Norton, 2013. 286-287. Print.

Theme: Repetition & Abstract Concepts in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Bablyon Revisited”

Themes are scattered in fragments throughout a piece of literature. Identifying a theme is not simply a matter of “X marks the spot,” but rather a gathering of similar and related elements.

For example, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's “Babylon Revisited,” a spiritual sequel to The Great Gatsby, a man named Charlie returns to Paris after he has put his life back together to gain custody of his daughter, who is being raised by his deceased wife's sister. Much of the story plays out in flashbacks and with commentary on the past. It begins with Charlie inquiring after old friends from a bartender, and describes how the places and people once were: “the once-clamorous women's room” (699) and “the head barman, Paul, who in the latter days of the bull market had come to work in his own custom built car” (699) Most poignantly, however, outside of the hotel and bar, the narrator describes “the fire-red, gas-blue, ghost-green signs shone smokily through the tranquil rain” (700).

After conversations and observations that address a once-was past, the notion of ghosts stands out. It suggests this story is not just about a man in Paris in the years after the stock market crash, but it isn't a story about actual ghosts either: don't expect a spectral Gatsby to appear and offer advice. It's about memory and ghosts in a more abstract, thematic sense.

It would then be expected the word “ghost” will appear and reappear multiple times in the story, but it doesn't. There is only one more instance of “ghost” in the story: when two old friends, Duncan and Lorraine, encounter Charlie while he's lunching with his daughter, they are described as “ghosts out of the past” (704), but they aren't ethereal phantoms. The question is then, why describe them as ghosts?

Ghosts are intangible manifestations of the dead. They remind us of the, generally unpleasant, past. Prince Hamlet's father doesn't appear to tell Hamlet how great of a king Hamlet will be or how wonderful heaven is: he haunts Elsinore to describe how he was murdered, demand revenge, and bemoan his hellish condition. We can then say ghosts represent unfortunate pasts that cause problems in the present (why else haunt?).

Therefore, when we encounter references to the past in “Babylon Revisited,” whether subtle reminders or flashbacks, we encounter the same themes of regret, sadness, and dealing with the past, specifically, a past of wasteful fun preceding the stock market crash. Charlie is indeed haunted, and not just by the metaphoric ghosts Lorraine and Duncan; almost every page has some kind of mournful reminder of a lost life that left his wife dead and himself in a sanitarium.

When reading for theme, pay careful attention to what similarities emerge in subtle repetitions. Sometimes we don't understand the themes or the repetitions until we've already read a piece through. I didn't notice the “ghost” references and therefore didn't appreciate the deeper thematic meaning they gave the story until the second time I taught it. So, when looking for themes, look for those repetitions and similarities between the repetitions. There are different ways to represent any given theme, and the context of the piece will affect it.

Theme is one of the ways we are able to make personal connections with literature. It takes us from the distant, different events described by a story or a poem and gives us a way to make them personal. It’s more than 80 years since Fitzgerald published “Babylon Revisited” and almost 90 since The Great Gatsby, and yet we still read these and older stories. It’s because the themes gives us a way to understand not just different cultures, but it gives us ways to understand and identify how we see and engage with the world around us.

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Works Cited

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. "Babylon Revisited." The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. W.W. Norton, 2013. 699-713. Print.

Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. New York: Scribner, 2004. Print.

A Brief Introduction To Theme

Theme can be hard to pin down. It's what a story or poem or play is about, but not in the sense of “he does this and she did that.” Rarely will a character or narrator boldly announce the themes of their texts, but finding the theme is the first step in interpretation.

Most stories try to make the events and people they describe appear as realistic as possible. For example, Yann Martel and Daniel Defoe went to great lengths to make their novels Life of Pi and Robinson Crusoe seem real as they plunged their protagonists into tales of shipwrecks and survival. These novels were published centuries apart, but both of them have characters whose lives are suddenly and drastically changed by a shipwreck. It doesn't matter one had an island with benign flora and fauna and the other was stranded on a raft to fend for and defend himself: they had to survive for a long time with what little they had.

Survival is an abstract concept. Any narrative where the characters are placed in a situation where the main concern is find food and shelter or die, it's safe to say it’s a tale of survival. Because survival is an abstract concept and because it appears in other narratives, like Lord of the Flies or Hatchet, we can call it a theme. However, it’s not going to be the only theme in these narratives. Just as a theme will appear in multiple narratives, multiple elements in a narrative will complicate and contribute to the themes of the narrative. If each of these were only about a single theme, they’d be the same story telling the same events the same way.

Theme develops through the repetition of narrative elements that complicate and advance the narrative.

Robinson Crusoe is not just about survival, but also colonization, ingenuity, and the middle class. The novel starts with his father admonishing him not to go to sea but to live a comfortable middle class life, and much of Crusoe’s narrative is about how he maintains and improves his conditions on the island. Crusoe doesn't just survive: he thrives. He catalogs his wares, his crop yields, his animals, and his activities, and even projects what he needs to do to maintain a comfortable existence as he becomes master of his domain. Every material aspect is accounted for. He rises from a poor situation to a higher one, advancing from being at the whim of nature (the shipwreck) to commanding it as he shapes his island.

Life of Pi isn't quite so positive. Pi has to struggle to survive, and rather than gradually improving, Pi’s condition gradually worsens. He has no trees to harvest nor seeds to plant – let alone ground to plant them in – and Richard Parker perpetually threatens his life. Pi catalogs what he has not to measure his wealth, but because once it's gone, it’s gone. Pi certainly has to be ingenious to survive, but the themes of the middle class and colonization are absent. If anything, loss factors much more into Life of Pi: he loses his family, his home, and his animals, in a single event and is left with a few bare supplies, Richard Parker, and his faith. Pi Patel survives but he does not thrive.

Theme is about identifying major issues and concepts that appear and reappear within and across stories. It involves associating not just the entire narrative with a single abstraction, but how the narrative repeats similar topics and issues, how these repetitions can cue us to broader concepts, and how these concepts reappear in other stories.

A Prayer of Love

Aphra Behn was one of the first professional female writers, famous primarily as a dramatist. She has some poetry to her name, including a three stanza piece called, “On Her Loving Two Equally.” Like the other love poems and songs I've written about this month, it's in first person, but that's where the similarities end. This poem has two characteristics that set it apart. First, the speaker is torn between two suitors, not serenading one. Second, the speaker is a woman.

The two men in question are Damon and Alexis. The first stanza suggests neither could have caught her eye without the other, and the second stanza says when she's with one of them, she thinks about the other. There's no indication she loves one more than another, as the poem starts off with the lines,

How strongly does my passion flow,
Divided equally twixt two? (1-2)

The speaker never tells us much about either man, save putting them in contrast with one another: the only reason Damon had managed to subdue her heart (3) is Alexis had already done some wooing (4). Alexis couldn't prove his love (5) without Damon's aid (6). The two are both in competition and indebted to each other. The speaker gives no indication to the forms of their relationships, how they met, how they fell in love, or how Damon or Alexis see, or even know about, each other.

There's any number of things that could be read into Behn's vagaries. The poem could be about how love...

• ...is fickle, as she has to decide between two men. She invokes cupid's aid at the very end.
• ...is something beyond control, even something divine or supernatural. She calls cupid “though mighty winged god” (13).
• ...is blind. She's willing to go either way. She just wants someone else to make the decision for her.

But being vague about the men is the least of her creative endeavor. The last three lines indicate she's in a dilemma that will have negative consequences:

But which, O Cupid, wilt thou take?If Damon, all my hopes are crossed;Or that of my Alexis, I am lost. (16-18)

If she ends up with Alexis, she’ll be denied her hopes. If Damon, she’ll be lost. Or maybe it means that being with Damon will ensure her hopes will be gained. If Alexis, she will find herself, but there’s little in the text to suggest that.

There are only a few things the poem makes sure: she loves two men equally, she can't make up her mind, and so she turns elsewhere, well aware of the consequences.

Behn's poem, in the end, is a prayer, and a prayer, regardless of your belief system, is an appeal to something beyond your own faculties and abilities. People pray to divinity because they need or want something they can't get on their own, and so seek the favor of another who can, who (depending on your belief system) may not even need you. In the end, I think love itself is like that, and I think that is part of the issue the poem is addressing. The kind of romantic, passionate love the speaker of the poem is dealing with isn't the kind to be divided and shared. It's personal and meant for a single other person. Love like this is asking someone else to do for you what you can't do for yourself.

It's like Waller's “Go Lovely Rose”: doing everything that you can, and then putting your faith and your heart in the hands of another.

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Works Cited

Behn, Aphra. "On Her Loving Two Equally." The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. W.W. Norton, 2013. 860-861. Print.

More Than Skin Deep

I want to talk about a love song, actually two love songs, one with substantial derision and another with substantial respect.

The one I respect is pretty obscure; it's called “Proofreading Woman.” It's a song by the Rockbottom Remainders, which was a rock group formed by novelists and writers, featuring, among others, Stephen King, Amy Tan, and, the singer of this song, Dave Barry. You can find a few performances of it on Youtube, and while this one is the best, none of the recordings are really great. 

I discovered this song years ago when I was on a Dave Barry kick. Like Barry himself, the song's cheesy, and meant as a joke. It is also one of the best love songs out there. It addresses traits and characteristics beyond those love songs usually address. 

Love songs tend to be either abstract or focus on how beautiful a woman is, and sometimes, they're flattering.

Then there’s the song for which I have substantial derision: Bruno Mars' “Just The Way You Are.” It sounds like it's a good, positive, affectionate song about how, with all of a woman's beauties and flaws, she's still someone important to the singer of the song. In Bruno Mars' song, he sings about:

Her eyes
Her hair
How beautiful she is
How he compliments her beauty
How she asks if she looks okay.
How he feels when he sees her face.
Her smile
Her lips (and how he would kiss them all day if she'd let him)
Her laugh (which is sexy)
How he'd never ask her to change
How she's perfect

Mars' song is, first of all, about a hot girl with a sexy laugh who may be a little bashful, but is still preoccupied with her appearance. The line about how he'd kiss her lips all day “if she'd let me” always strikes me as creepy and suggestive in all the wrong ways.

“Just the way you are” is a woefully superficial song and suggests the woman is too. There is no commentary on her skills, abilities, talents, or intelligence. She could be a doctor. She could have a debilitating drug habit. She might know all of Shakespeare's work by heart. The only words she recognizes may be her own name. We have no idea. Bruno doesn't tell us. It just doesn't seem like he cares. On the one hand, this makes the song marketable and popular because it operates under two popular assumptions: women care about being beautiful and women want to be told they're beautiful.

I'm not going to say there's anything wrong with being beautiful or complementing a woman's beauty, but a man whose main preoccupation is on whether or not he's with a hot chick isn't a man worth being with.

Hence my immense appreciation for “Proofreading Woman.”

The very first lines riff on the very heart of these other love songs:

Some men like a woman with a beautiful body,
Some men like a woman with a pretty face,

Nice body, nice face? We've heard that before. The difference here is the song sets up the expectation of a reversal. The next lines are:

But I like a woman with a big vocabulary, And every single little comma in place. I'm in love (he's in love) with a proofreading woman!

She's intelligent and possess a skill.

She fixes up plays, She fixes up novels, She fixes up books full of poetry,

She's accomplished professionally and in a variety of ways. Different genres require different proofreading skills, and she's well versed in several genres.

Just as how Bruno left us not knowing how talented or capable the woman is, Dave Barry lets us know this is a competent, intelligent woman with a specific skill set she uses professionally. With no lyrics to give any idea as to what she looks like. There’s no hint, no inclination. But her beauty doesn’t matter. If it did matter, it would be in the song. The song is more preoccupied about the kind of woman she is, not the kind of woman she looks like.

She even gets a voice. In a situation involving another man. She gets to speak for herself. In part of the song Barry sings 

A handsome man fell in love with my woman.
He tried to take her away from me.
He said, “Hey baby, I'd like to really know ya.”

In each recording that I've heard, the music pauses here, and a woman, I believe it's Amy Tan, responds,

“Frankly, I'm not attracted to men who split their infinitives.”

He probably doesn't even know what split infinitives are. The point, though, is not only is this woman worth serenading because of her intellect , but she has the opportunity to speak for herself. She's not just an object to be desired, nor one to be defended or held back, she can speak for herself.

On the other hand, how many women want be serenaded about what wonderful proofreaders they are? The song has limited appeal, and, given that it was written and performed by a bunch of professional writers and not musicians, it can be hard to give it great critical fanfare from music connoisseurs. If nothing else, though, it's worth stopping and thinking about the songs and poems and what it is they celebrate. Do they celebrate a significant other's skills, talents, intelligence, capabilities? Or how beautiful they are?

Ask yourself just how skin-deep do the love songs and poems you enjoy go?

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Works Cited

Barry, Dave. "Dave Barry Sings 'Proofreading Woman'." YouTube. Google inc., 24 Apr 2010. Web. 9 Feb. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jMJ0k2tSxE>.

Mars, Bruno. "Bruno Mars - Just The Way You Are [OFFICIAL VIDEO]." Youtube. Google inc., 8 Sep. 2010. Web. 9 Feb 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LjhCEhWiKXk>

Simple Symbols of Love

Ah, February. a short month punctuated with varying shades of red and pink hearts; bare-bottomed, infantile archers; and a continuation of the winter holidays binge eating. There’s still plenty of sugar to go around.

And poetry, lots of poetry.

Poetry and literature about love is as common as carbon, so... why not do a few romantic poems these four weeks of February.

Love is a difficult thing to represent or describe, which is why we have a proliferation of certain colors, shapes, and pictures to represent it. We use these colors and images to try to shape and define this abstract concept. Love is so profound, and yet so common, we use these images because they symbolize something significant.

Imagery and symbolism, like lovers, go hand in hand. It's possible to have one without the other, but you usually find them in tandem. Sometimes we see symbolism as trying to dig out the author’s deeper meaning behind symbols and images, and we expect symbolism to be deep, profound, and elusive. Not all symbolism has to be so elusive, though. Sometimes, it’s as simple as the symbols of love.

The poem I want to discuss is one of these simple ones. It appears in anthologies and classrooms. I don't think there's anything deeper or more profound in it than its being a love song. Edmund Waller’s “Song” or, as it is more commonly known, “Go Lovely Rose.”

This poem is special to me. I don't have any great romantic attachments to it, but it makes for a beautiful song, and I sang it in my high school choir. It's simple, sweet without being saccharine, and invokes simple, beautiful imagery of a single, impermanent, significant rose.

Roses are simple, delicate, beautiful, and when the speaker of the poem says, “Tell her...when I resemble her to thee,/How sweet and fair she seems to be” (2-5) the speaker addresses the rose and tells the rose to tell the woman he is wooing how he compares the rose to her. The poet relies on the symbolism of the rose, and yet, tries to imbue it with his own symbolism. Roses are common in Western culture as a ubiquitous symbol for love. Giving a person a rose will send a very different message than sending them columbines or poppies, because there's something delicate and romantic in a single rose.

What the speaker of the poem is trying to do is take the collective, societal symbolism of the rose and individualize it – personalize it. He does this by addressing the rose itself about its own symbolism, but he adds to it in the process. He suggests the rose's beauty would have been “uncommended” (10) had it bloomed in a desert. He suggests beauty is beauty whether it is recognized or not. For the speaker, the rose isn't just a beautiful flower symbolic of love because convention says so. He encourages this added symbol of the barren desert as a way to encourage her to “suffer herself to be desired,/And blush not so to be admired” (14-15). The speaker isn’t content to accept the rose as a symbol in and of itself, but mingles the symbolism of the rose with the image, and thereby the symbolism, of the desert to make it as unique as his love.

He then reminds us, and the rose, that the rose will die, regardless of whether it bloomed in a desert or not. There’s a departure from the romantic. Roses don’t symbolize death, and love poems don’t usually end on a note of “and we’ll die some day.” He doesn’t forget that he’s dealing with a plant that lives and dies and not just emotions and abstract symbols. He knows the rose won’t last long, a fine detail vendors don’t mention, but he’s not going to shirk from the truth, and is going to use it to his advantage. In short, to say they should take advantage of “how small a part of time they share” (19).

The speaker takes the rose, relies on the rose’s traditional symbolism, and develops upon that symbolism to make it his own. Which is what we do with love.

Romantic love has kept writers of every sort employed for centuries, each one wringing some new significance, form, model, or moral from it in order to delve deeper into this ubiquitous emotion. I mean, Nicholas Sparks has published 17 novels, and the rose has remained a symbol of love for centuries. Edmund Waller wasn't doing anything new here but his piece does say something about the nature of love and our relationship with it: we try to make it personal.

In a culture where people can build careers on the serialization of romance, and yet, it's something abstract. We can't put our finger on it, and its different for everyone. So the speaker of this piece finds himself in a plight not unlike that of most every person who has fallen in love. He has so many ways to convey this love, but he wants to do something unique.

It isn't just a poem about a man wooing a woman nor is it just about how roses are symbolic of romantic love. It's about how we take these symbols of love and breath new life, new love, into them.

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Works Cited

Waller, Edmund. "Go Lovely Rose." Poetry Foundation. Poetry Foundation, n.d. Web. 7 Feb. 2015. <http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180684>.

Waller, Edmund. "Song." The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. W.W. Norton, 2013. 1006-7. Print.

Why Literature?

Andrew Hudgins' poem “Day Job and Night Job” is a 36 lined poem with 9 stanzas, 4 lines apiece. The second and fourth lines of each stanza rhyme, barely. It's about a young man whose life is divided by his day job, which involves pushing a broom (line 5) and stealing time to “read my masters.../Donne, Marlow, Dickinson, and Frost” (10-11). His father insists he study law or business, but the speaker defends his decision to study literature with, “Because I want to!” (26).

“Day Job and Night Job” is a fine poem but it's nothing great or grand, nothing revolutionary in the realm of literature and poetry. Its a nice, fun poem that reminds me of why I got into literature in the first place - “Because I want to!”

The pursuit and study of literature is, in its own way, a selfish endeavor. I realized this when I went through page after page of The Norton Introduction to Literature (eleventh edition) as I developed the first literature class I taught. I looked for stories, poems and plays I knew would fit the requirements for the course. There were plenty of texts I read for the first time in preparing that class, and many I’d only read a few times before I met my students. Thankfully, my education had prepared me to read and interpret. What I’m most grateful for though was the small but devoted group of students who dutifully applied themselves.

Some days went better than others and the value of some texts become apparent only as we discussed them. “Shiloh” by Bobbie Ann Mason became a surprising favorite for its depth, characters, and simple but descriptive language, and twisting of gender roles. Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Kahn” fell flat when I tried to use it to discuss imagery, but the imagery did make for a perfect discussion on fantasy. Chaim Potok’s My Name is Asher Lev did not disappoint as an engaging text about art, culture, and religion, but also as a test for my students at the end of the course as I handed class over to them, one by one, to introduce the chapter for the day.

There are plenty of studies about why reading and studying literature are important or worthwhile. These studies have shown literature helps us become more empathetic, wiser about people and cultures, exercises different parts of our brains, and teaches new ways to see the world. These are great reasons to study literature, but it’s now why I do it. I study literature, and indeed, teach literature, because I want to and because people want to learn about it.

I don't have an agenda in teaching literature. I don't look at my students as future literary theorists, nor do I see them as the heads of book clubs, nor as people who resort to literature for any of the reasons specified in dozens of studies. I don't expect every student to enjoy every classic, but I do hope they read the stories, poems, plays, and novels and they enjoy some of them

Like I said above, teaching literature is a selfish endeavor. Reading it should be too. It should be something we do because we want to.

I am selfish in devoting my time and energy to the study of literature, but that's because I have found a good thing, and if I have a good thing, shouldn't I share it?

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Works Cited

Hudgins, Andrew. "Day Job and Night Job." The Norton Introduction to Literature. 11th ed. Ed. Kelly J. Mays. W.W. Norton, 2013. 882. Print.