#literature classes

Following up on my previous post with tips on close reading. for @coffeeandpies

I grabbed a page of one of my favorite books that I read during college, My Antonia by Willa Cather, and quickly showed how I would have annotated it. You can see a couple of things here.

My notes are not perfect.

I respond to the text. “Ouch, that’s harsh. Where’s the empathy?! Ugh, Jim, why are you judging her? He’s an ass! #TeamAntonia“

I wrote down questions. What exactly is an object of pity? How do you become one? Do they have any control over that in their society / is it different from today?

How does the narrator’s perspective affect my own? Answer - it makes me hate him.

Underlining key words that show foreshadowing (even for the next paragraph, “we avoided all evening”) and emotion or perspective “bitterly, disappointed, Poor Antonia!, object, pertly, high heels”.

There are works that are seminal in their fields or genres, works which will be important for you to have read and understood, which you will hate reading and will never want to read again.  That is completely fine.  You just finish reading it anyway.

On the one hand, I want my students to learn the skills like prioritizing, which is why I’m explicit with them about the reading they can and should do--none of them are English majors, I don’t give quizzes because that’s not what my class is about, and they really only have to read one book per unit to do the necessary work. (Now, is their grade going to be better if they read all the books? Of course, and I tell them that. But they’re adults and they can decide what to read and what not to read, rather than just whine about the reading.) 

HAA oh yes. It was a 200- or 300-level English class cross-listed with gender studies and film, and was an exploration of the representations in television, movies, and literature of “alien” forms of sexuality, and the takeaway was that nobody has any originality and they were, spoiler alert, just mostly using rhetorical framing to talk about fears and concerns about human sexuality.