Teaching Multiple Approaches to a Single Novel (2005)

Abstract To help students develop range of interpretive techniques, I introduce the assumptions and strategies of contemporary criticism; the students and I then explore possible uses of these critical approaches in writing about Ilona Karmel's Holocaust novel, An Estate of Memory. I work closely with students as they design web-based project exploring the potential of five approaches to one of the assigned novels. Introduction The interpretive skills that students bring with them from high school and from their first two years of college have proved fully adequate in the literature courses that I teach at Mississippi State University--Meridian, small branch campus serving mostly upper-division undergraduates that stands across busy street from the city's community college. Fully adequate, that is, as long we were dealing with lyric poems, short stories, and plays--all shorter works that can be read in one sitting and thus, according to Edgar Allan Poe's famous formulation, should be composed with a certain unique or single effect in mind, an idea to which all details in the work are subordinate (298). Students were not nearly as well prepared when it came to reading and responding to novels. Thus, I have begun to incorporate in my courses instruction in the multiple ways in which longer and more complex works of literature can be interpreted. This essay presents an account of that instruction through the example of Ilona Karmel's Holocaust novel An Estate of Memory (1969), which follows the lives of four Jewish women in concentration camps in Nazi-occupied Poland. Hers is the first novel we studied in an upper-division survey course in contemporary literature, course in which the students read and responded to range of post-World War II literary works, including three plays, four short stories, and four novels. This essay identifies the potential for number of different approaches to Karmel's novel and then discusses the related web-based project that students completed in the course. This essay thus provides set of useful approaches and resources for instructors wishing to teach the novel discussed here even as it addresses some of the larger theoretical and practical issues of teaching long and multifaceted literary works in the undergraduate classroom. An Estate of Memory is the longest novel I have ever set out to teach. Over 440 pages in length, it took up five class meetings, or two-and-a-half weeks of the semester schedule. We read the novel in installments that adhered to the original division of the narrative into separate sections. In their short written response to each assigned section (eight to ten sentences, to be turned in by the beginning of every class), the students were asked to move quickly from summarizing what they read to making more detailed and original analytical statement. In their responses, students frequently traced the arc of the story or focused on imagery or on changes in one character in that particular section of the novel. In short, the students continued to apply what they knew about interpreting poems, plays, and short fiction to their reading of the novel. After few classes of such responses and related in-class discussions, it became clear that I would have to encourage them more actively to vary their approach to longer and more complex works of literature. Rather than assign additional readings in critical theory, thereby adding to the already heavy reading load and detracting from our focus on literature, I gave brief presentation on the assumptions and strategies of various critical approaches. As class, we then worked out the multiple approaches to Karmel's novel detailed below. My goal was not that students should be able to provide extensive definitions of each critical approach; rather, I wanted the students to become more aware of and to extend their own practices of reading and interpretation. …