Yesterday when I went to the English Department, a plain manila envelope with only my name written in the corner was waiting in my mailbox. As a non-tenured faculty member, I am still required to conduct course evaluations in at least two classes per year. I am apparently an anomaly among my colleagues because I don't mind receiving this feedback; it's usually an ego boost anyway, with the exception of one or two students in each class that I've offended or irritated somehow.
This semester I was in love with my American Literature II class. They were always eager to read, to talk, and to do their best work on every assignment. Sure, seven of the eighteen students in the class had been in a previous class with me, which gave me a sense of comfort from day one. The remaining students kept up with the veterans easily and impressively. Out of three pages of written comments, I received only one slightly negative piece of feedback from this class: one student wanted a more detailed outline of each literary period's major traits. I appreciate and will remember that comment in my next survey course.
Most of the time, I can put any negative comments into proper perspective, thanks largely to my memory of a wonderful friend and office mate at Southern Illinois, who said to me, "I figure the semester isn't a success unless I've pissed off at least one student." According to her advice, I've had an extremely successful career. This semester, I received absolutely scathing feedback from one student in my Tuesday evening class, but on my accompanying essays for my tenure application in the fall, I'm sure I'll be able to state a good case. This particular student missed at least five times before she stopped attending altogether, and she wasn't really present at one meeting: she was high as a kite and seemed downright dangerous as the clock moved in slow motion toward 8:45.
Still, I feel like I should have done something more for this student, as if she's a child I left behind. My usual behavior is to pursue any lost lambs and bring them back into the fold, but in cases like this one, I can approach the experience objectively and realize that if I had excused her behavior and let her catch up after her many absences, it would not have been fair to the other students--all of them diligent and rarely absent. What's more, her reasons for missing class never seemed legitimate--no one can have that many car accidents, flat tires, and dead family members in less than three months.
To take my mind off the evaluations, I dove back into my preparation for my Short Story Cycle course. I'm preparing a course bibliography (so far seven pages!), as usual, but this time I've ordered about 25 articles and books through interlibrary loan throughout the summer and submitted PDFs of each one to the library so that the electronic versions can be available to the students. Maybe I'm doing too much work for the students, but I wouldn't be doing it if I didn't LOVE doing research like this scholarly marathon has required.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Monday, July 5, 2010
Cycles, but not related to motorcycles or menstruation
Short story cycle: a collection of loosely connected stories. A composite novel. A novel in stories. Vignettes. Pastiche.
Those definitions will form the basis of my upcoming course called "He Said, She Said": Gender and Genre in the American Short Story Cycle. The genre shouldn't be a foreign one to students; after all, their retro music interests have included concept albums like Pink Floyd's The Wall and serial television shows like Law & Order. Each song, each episode is independent, but all together the individual pieces form a larger narrative with recognizable shared elements. Movies with sequels don't seem as relevant because they are more like books in a series, maybe because the separate movies are not short and aren't produced quickly enough for close comparison. Obviously, I'm still working out the definition of the genre.
I find it curious that in French linguistics the terms "gender" and "genre" are synonymous, and I'd like to explore with my students the possible reasons for the relationship between the two words as they mean "kind" or "type."
I'm hoping that narrative theory will help us parse out the distinctions between the short story cycle and short story collections and between genre and gender. How do we know we're reading a short story, apart from its length? Can a short story cycle include novellas? Do male and female writers, especially those writing in close chronology and about similar subjects, treat the cycle differently? Why have multicultural authors so eagerly grasped the short story cycle in the past 20-30 years? Whatever happens, I don't want to essentialize gender or ethnicity, but I still think sexual and cultural identity issues are relevant somehow.
What has been most difficult is choosing the reading selections. I initially had a list of about twenty books, but that number is not realistic for the students or for me. In my original list, I included titles by Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, but I gradually eliminated them as I conceptualized the course. As I read the James selection, it felt like swimming in a pool of maple syrup, a sensation that doesn't bode well for students; as for Hemingway and Faulkner, I'm hoping the students will have already read these big names. Maybe I'll regret these omissions. In the order of their appearance in the course calendar, here is the list of texts I've finalized with the bookstore:
Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, 1993.
Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, 1919.
Carver, Cathedral, 1983.
Erdrich, Love Medicine, 1984.
Jewett, Country of Pointed Firs, 1910.
Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place, 1982.
Norman, Kinfolks: The Wilgus Stories, 1977.
O’Brien, The Things They Carried, 1990.
O’Connor, Everything that Rises Must Converge, 1963.
Toomer, Cane, 1923.
Welty, The Golden Apples, 1949.
Wilkinson, Water Street, 2005.
In this blog forum I'm hoping to work through some ideas and welcome any input.
Those definitions will form the basis of my upcoming course called "He Said, She Said": Gender and Genre in the American Short Story Cycle. The genre shouldn't be a foreign one to students; after all, their retro music interests have included concept albums like Pink Floyd's The Wall and serial television shows like Law & Order. Each song, each episode is independent, but all together the individual pieces form a larger narrative with recognizable shared elements. Movies with sequels don't seem as relevant because they are more like books in a series, maybe because the separate movies are not short and aren't produced quickly enough for close comparison. Obviously, I'm still working out the definition of the genre.
I find it curious that in French linguistics the terms "gender" and "genre" are synonymous, and I'd like to explore with my students the possible reasons for the relationship between the two words as they mean "kind" or "type."
I'm hoping that narrative theory will help us parse out the distinctions between the short story cycle and short story collections and between genre and gender. How do we know we're reading a short story, apart from its length? Can a short story cycle include novellas? Do male and female writers, especially those writing in close chronology and about similar subjects, treat the cycle differently? Why have multicultural authors so eagerly grasped the short story cycle in the past 20-30 years? Whatever happens, I don't want to essentialize gender or ethnicity, but I still think sexual and cultural identity issues are relevant somehow.
What has been most difficult is choosing the reading selections. I initially had a list of about twenty books, but that number is not realistic for the students or for me. In my original list, I included titles by Henry James, Ernest Hemingway, and William Faulkner, but I gradually eliminated them as I conceptualized the course. As I read the James selection, it felt like swimming in a pool of maple syrup, a sensation that doesn't bode well for students; as for Hemingway and Faulkner, I'm hoping the students will have already read these big names. Maybe I'll regret these omissions. In the order of their appearance in the course calendar, here is the list of texts I've finalized with the bookstore:
Alexie, The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven, 1993.
Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio, 1919.
Carver, Cathedral, 1983.
Erdrich, Love Medicine, 1984.
Jewett, Country of Pointed Firs, 1910.
Naylor, The Women of Brewster Place, 1982.
Norman, Kinfolks: The Wilgus Stories, 1977.
O’Brien, The Things They Carried, 1990.
O’Connor, Everything that Rises Must Converge, 1963.
Toomer, Cane, 1923.
Welty, The Golden Apples, 1949.
Wilkinson, Water Street, 2005.
In this blog forum I'm hoping to work through some ideas and welcome any input.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
Dirty Pronouns and Out-of-Style Verbs
Once when I was complaining about having to clean my house before visitors arrived, my mother said to me, “They will notice if it’s dirty, but not if it’s clean.” The same basic principle applies to spoken English in non-standard or standard usage.
Before I elaborate, I want to clarify my terms. “Standard” does not mean “correct,” just as “non-standard” does not mean “wrong.” We all have a language wardrobe, and like we choose particular clothing for different occasions, we should tailor our word choices and language usage to fit our purpose and audience.
Standard English in speech also does not mean the absence of an accent. Eudora Welty had a highly inflected Southern drawl, but she never broke the rules of Standard English when she spoke.
If someone who knows your level of education and then hears a glaring error in your English usage, that person is very likely to lose respect for you, regardless of your insistence that English majors spend more time reading great literature than diagramming sentences. To maintain your credibility, you should make sure your speech accurately reflects your knowledge, especially when you are interviewing for a job, answering questions after a presentation, speaking to a professor that you’ve just met, testifying in court, or trying to convince the parents of your new significant other that you are the most intelligent, classy partner for their beloved spawn--that is, unless you claim the Cookie Monster as your father.
The most common slips in spoken English involve pronoun choices and conjugation of verbs. I’ll give some common examples:
1) Non-standard pronouns: “Me and Tom are going to Lexington tonight,” “Me and her decided to stay home,” or “Him and I aren’t dating anymore.”
Solution: The best way to avoid these errors is to be conscious of your pronoun choice intended for yourself. If you want to tell someone about your planned trip to drive alone to Lexington, you wouldn’t say, “Me is going.” Instead, you’d use the pronoun “I.” If you want to mention your plans with your friend, add the person’s name to your personal pronoun: “Tom and I are going to Lexington,” “She and I decided to stay home,” and “He and I aren’t dating anymore.”
2) Non-standard verb conjugation: “I seen the movie,” “I done the work,” “I have went to class every day.”
Solution: This misuse may take more practice than the pronoun habit, and the best route to prevent it might require substituted synonyms. Alternatives might include “watched” instead of “seen,” “finished” instead of “done,” and “attended” instead of “have went.” If you want to change this speech habit, you may need to memorize the rules of conjugation:
• I see, I saw, I have seen;
• I do, I did, I have done;
• I go, I went, I have gone.
When you are speaking with your peers, your speech should relax; you have surely met their criteria for friendship and do not need to impress them. If your peer group includes people who are also working on degrees in English, enlist them in your goal to improve your use of spoken English—after all, you’d surely help each other decide the right clothes to wear to your next big event, and afterward you can kick back in your most comfortable hoodie and your faded Chucks.
I need to clean my house now because even my dogs are noticing the dirt.
Before I elaborate, I want to clarify my terms. “Standard” does not mean “correct,” just as “non-standard” does not mean “wrong.” We all have a language wardrobe, and like we choose particular clothing for different occasions, we should tailor our word choices and language usage to fit our purpose and audience.
Standard English in speech also does not mean the absence of an accent. Eudora Welty had a highly inflected Southern drawl, but she never broke the rules of Standard English when she spoke.
If someone who knows your level of education and then hears a glaring error in your English usage, that person is very likely to lose respect for you, regardless of your insistence that English majors spend more time reading great literature than diagramming sentences. To maintain your credibility, you should make sure your speech accurately reflects your knowledge, especially when you are interviewing for a job, answering questions after a presentation, speaking to a professor that you’ve just met, testifying in court, or trying to convince the parents of your new significant other that you are the most intelligent, classy partner for their beloved spawn--that is, unless you claim the Cookie Monster as your father.
The most common slips in spoken English involve pronoun choices and conjugation of verbs. I’ll give some common examples:
1) Non-standard pronouns: “Me and Tom are going to Lexington tonight,” “Me and her decided to stay home,” or “Him and I aren’t dating anymore.”
Solution: The best way to avoid these errors is to be conscious of your pronoun choice intended for yourself. If you want to tell someone about your planned trip to drive alone to Lexington, you wouldn’t say, “Me is going.” Instead, you’d use the pronoun “I.” If you want to mention your plans with your friend, add the person’s name to your personal pronoun: “Tom and I are going to Lexington,” “She and I decided to stay home,” and “He and I aren’t dating anymore.”
2) Non-standard verb conjugation: “I seen the movie,” “I done the work,” “I have went to class every day.”
Solution: This misuse may take more practice than the pronoun habit, and the best route to prevent it might require substituted synonyms. Alternatives might include “watched” instead of “seen,” “finished” instead of “done,” and “attended” instead of “have went.” If you want to change this speech habit, you may need to memorize the rules of conjugation:
• I see, I saw, I have seen;
• I do, I did, I have done;
• I go, I went, I have gone.
When you are speaking with your peers, your speech should relax; you have surely met their criteria for friendship and do not need to impress them. If your peer group includes people who are also working on degrees in English, enlist them in your goal to improve your use of spoken English—after all, you’d surely help each other decide the right clothes to wear to your next big event, and afterward you can kick back in your most comfortable hoodie and your faded Chucks.
I need to clean my house now because even my dogs are noticing the dirt.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Native Werewolves
I've been noticing a troubling pattern in the otherwise cotton-candy books I've been reading and campy movies I've been viewing. I guess my sensitivity comes from my academic work, reading and teaching about the Other in American culture, specifically how certain groups are disenfranchised by the white hegemony and treated as animals.
I've noticed that an awful lot of werewolves in recent supernatural books and movies are Native American as humans.
In the giggly Twilight books, Jacob and his community are a group of Quileute Indians, who turn into werewolves who protect the community from vampires. Jacob's last name is Black. Black? Stephanie Meyer can never be accused of being a literary heavyweight, but didn't she realize the double Othering of her characterization? Meyer includes one female in this "pack"--a bitter, scorned, more than likely infertile woman named Leah (named for the wife of Jacob in Genesis?). The vampires like to kill the werewolves--a likely dynamic since the white guys live forever, while the red/black guys die naked and with bravery, sacrificing their noble-savage lives for the good of all humankind and diminishing their already low population.
In the Sookie Stackhouse books, which provide about half of the plot of HBO's True Blood, the werewolves are more well-rounded, but still the racist stereotypes abound. Alcide Herveaux, who hasn't yet shifted into the HBO landscape, is a rich kid who is part of the supposedly noble group of werewolves (abbreviated as "were" most of the time, suggesting their already past-tense existence, perhaps). He, of course, hates the vampires but tolerates them in the name of civility. Unlike the vampires who are publicly known, or "out of the coffin," the were have not come out of the woods yet. Alcide's pack includes females, who are more vicious and bloodthirsty than the males, suggesting that when women turn into wolves, we are even more animalistic--a double Othering. The were have as much to fear within their own "shifter" population than from outside predators, and some of the most violent scenes in Charlaine Harris's series depict one-on-one fights to gain leadership of the pack--episodes that are as ruthless as the stories of Michael Vick's torture of pit bulls. It may as well be saying that external forces don't really have to worry about saving white hegemony from being overtaken or killed by wolves or Native Americans; they will eventually decimate themselves. Finally, I'm not a French speaker, but when I looked up the translation of Herveaux, I was saddened to see the closest English word: calves. They're not only wolves, but they are also cattle, and not even full-grown cows.
Another less famous example of the sanctioned racism of the Native American as animal is in the really bad movie Skinwalkers, which happened to be on cable last weekend while I was grading papers. The two packs/tribes in the movie war against each other, intent on annihilation. The "good" group doesn't "feed" on humans, and they keep their shape-shifting secret even from the people closest to them. The women in the "bad" group are more violent than the men, and what's more, they reinforce misogynist stereotypes by manipulating men through their sexuality or their feigned vulnerability. Vagina dentatis, indeed. Both packs seek control of the son of a white woman and one of the "bad" tribe's men because the boy can somehow determine the entire future existence of the Indian-wolves, creating a living, breathing Manichean dialectic in this mixed-race child. His blood, if injected into a werewolf, can magically and permanently restore the humanity of the creature, as if racial identity is in the blood--a throwback to the physiognomists and phrenologists.
Granted, I am aware of the Native American concept of the spirit animal or the shaman-skinwalker who draped himself in a wolf's coat to perform certain rituals. However, as far as I know, none of the Native American myths of lycanthropy involve violence toward humans and especially not cannibalism.
It's no wonder that vampires and werewolves are all the rage again, and the twenty-first century has added a level of appeal by putting an ethical spin into their supernatural personalities. The Twilight Quileutes will always save the girl from her perils, the were will always be Sookie Stackhouse's hairy saviors, and the Skinwalker-types will work for humanity by eradicating the wolfen blood from one Indian at a time until each one can fully assimilate into white culture.
These twenty-first-century depictions of werewolves indeed project a romanticized view of the disappearing Native American, but in any romanticism of an entire population is a thick foundation of racism that the Twilighters and fans of blood-sucking, shapeshifting creatures will internalize. Vampires are still human in their undeadly presence, but the Native Americans who shift into wolves lose all humanity, including the power to speak. They are the subaltern of the supernatural world, and even when they are human, they are not allowed to speak of their primal nature. The recent depictions of werewolves serve as yet another example of removing the agency from the Native Americans.
I've noticed that an awful lot of werewolves in recent supernatural books and movies are Native American as humans.
In the giggly Twilight books, Jacob and his community are a group of Quileute Indians, who turn into werewolves who protect the community from vampires. Jacob's last name is Black. Black? Stephanie Meyer can never be accused of being a literary heavyweight, but didn't she realize the double Othering of her characterization? Meyer includes one female in this "pack"--a bitter, scorned, more than likely infertile woman named Leah (named for the wife of Jacob in Genesis?). The vampires like to kill the werewolves--a likely dynamic since the white guys live forever, while the red/black guys die naked and with bravery, sacrificing their noble-savage lives for the good of all humankind and diminishing their already low population.
In the Sookie Stackhouse books, which provide about half of the plot of HBO's True Blood, the werewolves are more well-rounded, but still the racist stereotypes abound. Alcide Herveaux, who hasn't yet shifted into the HBO landscape, is a rich kid who is part of the supposedly noble group of werewolves (abbreviated as "were" most of the time, suggesting their already past-tense existence, perhaps). He, of course, hates the vampires but tolerates them in the name of civility. Unlike the vampires who are publicly known, or "out of the coffin," the were have not come out of the woods yet. Alcide's pack includes females, who are more vicious and bloodthirsty than the males, suggesting that when women turn into wolves, we are even more animalistic--a double Othering. The were have as much to fear within their own "shifter" population than from outside predators, and some of the most violent scenes in Charlaine Harris's series depict one-on-one fights to gain leadership of the pack--episodes that are as ruthless as the stories of Michael Vick's torture of pit bulls. It may as well be saying that external forces don't really have to worry about saving white hegemony from being overtaken or killed by wolves or Native Americans; they will eventually decimate themselves. Finally, I'm not a French speaker, but when I looked up the translation of Herveaux, I was saddened to see the closest English word: calves. They're not only wolves, but they are also cattle, and not even full-grown cows.
Another less famous example of the sanctioned racism of the Native American as animal is in the really bad movie Skinwalkers, which happened to be on cable last weekend while I was grading papers. The two packs/tribes in the movie war against each other, intent on annihilation. The "good" group doesn't "feed" on humans, and they keep their shape-shifting secret even from the people closest to them. The women in the "bad" group are more violent than the men, and what's more, they reinforce misogynist stereotypes by manipulating men through their sexuality or their feigned vulnerability. Vagina dentatis, indeed. Both packs seek control of the son of a white woman and one of the "bad" tribe's men because the boy can somehow determine the entire future existence of the Indian-wolves, creating a living, breathing Manichean dialectic in this mixed-race child. His blood, if injected into a werewolf, can magically and permanently restore the humanity of the creature, as if racial identity is in the blood--a throwback to the physiognomists and phrenologists.
Granted, I am aware of the Native American concept of the spirit animal or the shaman-skinwalker who draped himself in a wolf's coat to perform certain rituals. However, as far as I know, none of the Native American myths of lycanthropy involve violence toward humans and especially not cannibalism.
It's no wonder that vampires and werewolves are all the rage again, and the twenty-first century has added a level of appeal by putting an ethical spin into their supernatural personalities. The Twilight Quileutes will always save the girl from her perils, the were will always be Sookie Stackhouse's hairy saviors, and the Skinwalker-types will work for humanity by eradicating the wolfen blood from one Indian at a time until each one can fully assimilate into white culture.
These twenty-first-century depictions of werewolves indeed project a romanticized view of the disappearing Native American, but in any romanticism of an entire population is a thick foundation of racism that the Twilighters and fans of blood-sucking, shapeshifting creatures will internalize. Vampires are still human in their undeadly presence, but the Native Americans who shift into wolves lose all humanity, including the power to speak. They are the subaltern of the supernatural world, and even when they are human, they are not allowed to speak of their primal nature. The recent depictions of werewolves serve as yet another example of removing the agency from the Native Americans.
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