From: gwr@hedonist-1.lanl.gov (Graham W. Redgrave)
Subject: Re: Literature students
Organization: Los Alamos National Laboratory
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 16:45:07 GMT

In article <1992Sep29.130732.9949@grebyn.com>, fi@grebyn.com (Fiona Webster) writes:
|> After lambasting Hemingway (for all I know, Papa H. deserves it)
|> Michael Wise laments:
|> >                                           I would be pleasantly sur-
|> >prised to see either a genuine reaction to a work, or even a standard 
|> >interpretation.
|> 
|> What I noticed in college, though, is that many of my most treasured
|> "genuine reactions" to literature were difficult to present in the
|> context of a literature class--because they were usually more related
|> to real events in my own life, than they were to anything in the text
|> or to other texts.  How was I to confess to my class on 17th century
|> French drama, for example, that the monologues of Racine's heroines
|> (especially Phedre, Andromaque, and Hermione) were awakening my naive
|> 18-yr-old body to the delicious possibilities of being tortured
|> by lust--to the point where when my first college boyfriend broke up
|> with me, I wandered the campus in a Hermione-inspired state of "mad"
|> distraction, crying "Ou suis-je?  Qu'ai-je fait?  Que dois-je faire
|> encore?  Quel transport me saisit?  Quel chagrin me devore?" to every
|> puzzled soul who crossed my path? 

But not "Je brule, je frisse!"?  Not fully awake yet, I guess ...

Guess the only appropriate response to Fiona's concern is to relate
a personal tale.  At my college (no name, lest there be renewed
canonical firings), we got lots of practice, _lots_ of practice, talking 
about books, and it was very useful sometimes, quite often actually, 
to hear someome make a point by anecdote.  True, freshman year there was 
much self-aggrandizment tied to the main thread of the discussion by 
the merest gossamer strand, but by the time junior year and Cervantes,
Rouseau, and Kant rolled around, people seemed to be much better at
seeing and communicating the reciprocal relevance of any particular
book and their lives.  Not all the discussion, certainly not all of
the best, stemmed from personal tales of relevance, but these stories
did often add to the impact of what someone was saying.  My experience
at school centered around group discussion with sometimes minimal
guidance from the prof, so there _was_ plenty of time for us to work
the bugs out of us, and thus out of the system, but seems to me that
it is easier for books to have real meaning, or at least a deeper,
more personal meaning, when one is allowed to make and explore those
personal connections with them.  I won't (here and now, anyway ;-)) 
advocate any particular classroom methodology, but I do think it is 
wrong to stifle connections that students will, with some encouragement, 
make with authors (DWM or otherwise), even in a class as "normal"
as Eng.Lit.

|> 
|> My early relationship with Hemingway would be equally difficult to
|> describe within a college paper: 

Not so difficult perhaps in a college seminar?

|> [an amazing story of apostolic aquisition of maritime stigmata
|>  and other acts and feelings of devotion deleted ... ]

Wow.  I wish, I wish, I wish I coulda done that!

|> By the time I was a senior in college, I had enough confidence
|> about these things that I indulged myself by writing a paper about
|> Robert Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came" that was
|> based almost entirely on a dream I'd had *before* reading the poem.

This is the kind of indulgence that profs at school were constantly
having to reign in, but in general they seemed not to mind too much,
and would rather some err in this direction than that students not
communicate in a deeply personal way about what they read.

|> 					--Fiona

Yours in a muddle of wanting to participate and not quite knowing how,

Graham

-- 
Graham Redgrave    |    --  I don't speak for the government, 
gwr@life.lanl.gov  |        but I wish the government would speak for me ...  --
Newsgroups: rec.arts.books