Teaching

Brief statement of teaching philosophy

Composition classes, and to a lesser extent, literature classes, offer opportunities to move from discussing a text directly to discussing approaches to writing about the text. Students are sometimes assigned to come to class with working thesis statements, and class time is devoted to having students refine these statements in small groups. Reproducing excerpts from exceptional student writing in workshop settings serves to praise the writer as it gives his or her peers an opportunity to learn from the writer's successes, and a chance to detect the writer's flaws. I focus on the process of writing more than the final product, allow revisions of assigned essays, and encourage constructive peer criticism. While students who are formally instructed in rhetoric and argumentation sometimes fail to put these skills to work in written compositions, students who find themselves stimulated by a topic often instinctively seek the clearest and most concise means of gaining agreement from their audiences. I need merely to assist them in finding an appropriate form for expressing their convictions and to compel them to follow those instincts as they develop them in their writing. Each text is an occasion for developing critical thinking, each defensible student opinion is valid, and each paper is an opportunity to improve upon student writing in the long term. My role as a teacher, then, is to develop and challenge these opinions, to facilitate students' ability to express them, and to respond constructively when they successfully emerge in student essays.

A Sample of Paper Topics

Describe an event or a person from your childhood in a style that is similar to Tobias Wolff's approach in This Boy's Life. Try to employ different narrative voices, as we'll discuss in class, by considering the child's point of view, the child's emotions, the adult's retrospective point of view, and the adult's emotions in remembering. That is, see if you can weave together the perspectives of the innocent child experiencing something, and the reflective adult working through the attendant emotions as he or she writes about that particular memory. It's up to you to decide how to organize the memory and how to integrate these different voices.

Tobias Wolff Topics

Respond to one of the following topics in a well-crafted and structured essay of at least four complete pages. Remember to include a thesis that puts "SPIN" on your topic and to employ transitions that hook your subtopics together and that move us gradually toward proving your thesis. References to specific episodes in the book and quotations of telling, pivotal passages will make for solid, anchored essays.

Each topic below includes a list of "prompts" that are designed to provoke thought on the subject, and to encourage you to narrow your thesis toward a specific and unusual approach. Do not feel overwhelmed by the prompts for your topic. You do not need to address every prompt, and indeed you might ignore all of them in your essay. Think of them as stimuli for your thought processes, provocations for creative, but critical reveries, rather than as lists of requirements for your essay.

1.) Discuss whether Jack gradually becomes his own person as he grows up, or if he adjusts with each occasion to be the boy people want him to be, or some mixture of both processes. That is, show how he gradually forms an identity of his own as he grows up, or how he seems to perform whatever role his friends, family, or teachers expect him to perform. If he does a little of both, try to describe a nuanced relationship between the two processes. Prompts: To what extent do we have multiple Jacks, who fit the occasion and perform the role he needs him to perform at the moment? How do the demands of performing what's expected, and the demands of gradually forming a steady personality, interact in Wolff's special case? Would the various homes Jack has lived in and the various roles he's played with his mother cause him to be more flexible in his personality than someone else might be at that age? What is Jack really "like" if he's writing graffiti on bathroom walls at one moment, and winning boy scout merit badges the next? Does Jack's mother's tendency to believe the best about him always perhaps encourage him to perform in accordance with her beliefs?

2.) Discuss the way the group in Chinook (Jack, Jack's Mother, Dwight, Skipper, Norma, and Pearl) manages to be, or fails to be, a real family. Wolff says they imitated real families, but that the model they imitated didn't actually exist. Explore this in an essay that examines what keeps this step-family from being "real," what would motivate people to try to act like such an idealized super-family, and what the implied definitions and requirements seemed to have been for families at the time. Prompts: Do we see other families functioning more or less normally, against which we can contrast the way Dwight's and Jack's families are interacting? To what extent does Dwight lack what is necessary to be a father to the whole group, and is he in some way responsible for them not taking on the qualities of a real family? Or is it perhaps Jack or Jack's mother that keeps them from attaining this goal?

3.) Explore what it meant to be a young man, or what it meant to be "macho," for Jack and his peers. Account for the sorts of behavior that people seem to have approved of, and for the actions or attitudes that made one fall short of some goal of ideal masculinity. Prompts: What does the violence and toughness that seem to be everywhere in Wolff's world tell you about the expectations people placed on young men? Was machismo simply an act, to be abandoned at a particular moment when it no longer suited, or was it to be adhered to at all times, in any event? Does the need to be macho, and the lack of a steady father figure demonstrating the right way to do it, cause Jack to overcompensate, and to be more pompous, tough, and unyielding, than he really needs to be?

4.) For at least two specific scenes or passages, try to analyze the interplay of the child character and the adult narrator, including the emotions of both figures as the scene goes on. See if something in each passage answers to the child's way of seeing, the adult's way of remembering, or the adult's way of avoiding remembering something that might be painful for him to reexperience. Find a telling gap, or a place in which the memory seems edited or incomplete, and explain what tale that silence would tell if it could. Prompts: What would cause the adult writer, coping with the demands of his book, to see an event differently from the way he had originally experienced it? Would anger, exasperation, embarrassment, or pride have gotten in the way of objectively reporting what had happened in your chosen passages? What would cause someone to block out a particular memory while they were telling a related anecdote, or to discount the emotions or the meanings of part of the tale?

5.) Discuss the way Jack and his mother seem to go about making decisions. Discern which traits they share, or which roles they play, each time they're called upon to relocate, to run away, or to make plans for the future. You might explore how these characters show fatalism, or how they show what we might call learned helplessness (convincing one's self that one has no choices or cannot make a decision, even when one obviously does or can) when called upon to make a choice. Prompts: As a pair who've been through a lot together, Jack and his mother have made many decisions together and have lived with the consequences; to what extent to they decide things as a pair, to provide for each other's happiness, and to what extent do they try only to fulfill their own needs or to chase after their individual dreams? Do they avoid decisions altogether until something or someone compels them in one direction or another? Do they agree not to see something obvious, or not to consider something important, when they choose?

Response to Video Adaptation

Discuss the adaptation of the memoir This Boy's Life to the movie version. Try to evaluate the choices that the screenwriter and the director have made in casting Wolff's narrative in visual terms. I'm not looking for a generic "Thumbs Up!" review, but a sensitive and focused consideration of the effectiveness of this adaptation of Wolff's book. You might develop the topic you explored in your second paper by contrasting treatment of that subject in the book and in the movie. You might discuss the episodes that are left out of the movie and that would cast the characters in a different light, or would make viewers feel differently about something, if these episodes had been included in the movie. You might also consider the transformation of a first-person, internal book into a third-person, external movie, and decide whether anything vital is lost in that transformation. Whatever you choose, provide a focused argument with a clear thesis, and sensitively consider where the movie does justice to the book and where, if anywhere, it might leave fans of Wolff's work disappointed.

Respond to one of the scholarly critiques of Ethan Frome listed below. Quote liberally from the passage and find evidence or comments in Wharton's novella that support or refute the critic's statements. Convince your reader that the critic has the right idea about Wharton's work, or show your reader the error in the critic's ways. Above all, do not take the critic's words as gospel, so to speak, but work his or her words carefully into your commentary. You're in control, and you can arrange and evaluate Wharton's work and the critic's pronouncements on that work as you see fit - provided you're attentive to proper methods of citation. Each entry below is followed by scrambled data as to page references, bibliographical information, and publishing history. Cite the critics according to the information provided, and list the scrambled data correctly in a Works Cited page to be included with your essay. Consult your Bedford for help with citations and with Works Cited pages.

Title: On Native Grounds: An Interpretation of Modern American Prose Fiction. Publisher: Harcourt, Brace, and World. Author: Alfred Kazin. Publication year: 1942. Publication city: New York.

Publisher: University Press of New England. Author: Susan Goodman. Title: Edith Wharton's Women: Friends and Rivals. Publication year: 1990. Publication year: London

By far the deepest irony is that Ethan's dreams of Mattie are not essentially different from the life that he has created with Zeena; they are still variations upon the theme of dependency. . . . [Ethan's] fantasies [of Mattie] are doubly revealing. As always he substitutes make-believe for reality--loving his version of Mattie rather than Mattie herself. However, even when Ethan is given full rein, even when he can make any imaginary semblance of Mattie that he wants, he chooses a vision that has no sexual component. He does not see her as a loving wife to warm his bed in the winter. No. She is, instead, a paragon of the kitchen, a perfect caretaker, someone who can fill his stomach--not satisfy his manhood. She is, in short, just what he imagined Zeena might be. (178)

Author: Cynthia Griffin Wolff. Publication City: New York. Publication year: 1977. Publisher: Oxford University Press. Title: A Feast of Words: The Triumph of Edith Wharton.

For this essay, choose an argument that has been in the news in America in the past ten years and that provides for varied, wide-ranging debate in which clear-thinking, rational adults might come down on either side of the issue. Since you might choose to revise this essay later, and may discuss it in workshops or might be called upon to play devil's advocate to your own argument, you may wish to choose a subject which you can argue objectively, and not one which you may feel emotionally connected with. Choose something you feel passionately about, but not something for which you couldn't bear hearing someone arguing the other side, or couldn't stand examining your own premises or assumptions.

Then, make the case for your side of the argument backwards. That is, present your opponent's case fully, as he or she would present it, and then gradually chip away at your opponent's argument by exposing faulty premises, logical fallacies, inconsistent reasoning, or unfounded inductive thinking. Move us toward your side of the argument by picking apart the opponent's argument by exposing its weaknesses or its falsity. If you can put a name to the kind of argument you're examining, according to Barnett and Bedau's categories, go ahead and do so, explaining in the meantime what makes this process argument a fortiori, what makes this fallacy ad hominem, for example. But don't feel you have to put every argument or every fallacy in a category like this; I'm looking more that you can see an error in logic, than if you can put the correct Latin name to it. Quotations and statistics from someone who argues your opponent's side of the argument in print would be helpful, but not absolutely necessary, in presenting the opponent's case. Also, be sure you represent the opposite side of the debate responsibly, and that your opponent couldn't accuse you of misrepresenting him or her, or of building a straw man instead of meeting the basic terms of the argument.

W. E. B. DuBois and ineffability

We began the semester talking about ineffability, the inability of language to express a certain thing that the author wishes it to be able to express. If language cannot possibly convey experience and the reader cannot possibly understand how the writer feels, we asked, what can language do, or how do writers overcome this perceived inability of language to do the job? Much of W. E. B. DuBois' project in The Souls of Black Folk consists in making one group of people understand the plight, poverty, the "strivings," or the spirituality, of another group of people. Audience considerations often demanded of DuBois that he make readers try to appreciate the conditions of people who are different from themselves, and whom the readers don't necessarily have to take into consideration.

Poe / Emerson / Hawthorne

1. Compare and contrast the ways the characters' minds seem divided against themselves, or seem to haunt themselves, in a selection of Poe and Hawthorne characters. Build a thesis that allows for both similarities and differences, and site and analyze a few examples.

Prompts: Does the haunting always result out of guilt, or out of obsessiveness, or general psychosis? Can the mind defend itself against these haunting memories or "alter egos," or does it lose itself in guilt or in some other, stronger personality? Can readers identify with these characters' dilemmas, or is the character's consciousness so confused as to be fantastic or alienating?

2. Which author, Hawthorne or Poe, develops character to a "deeper" or fuller extent in the process of the story? That is, who comes closer to giving characters full psychological depth and complexity, and who seems to tell readers only as much as they need to know for the story to have its effect? I don't mean one author develops characters completely and one absolutely does not, but to your mind, which one probes subtle, psychological details, to better effect? A variation here might be to choose all women characters, or all "victim" characters (men or women), for the purposes of sharper contrast.

3. What would Emerson say were the right and wrong kinds of American manhood? Which traits would American heroes or American scholars share, and which traits would be relegated to the effeminate or to foreign countries? Prompts: does Emerson's definition of manhood seem to change with each essay? Does it seem like he's including one group at some times, and disparaging that group at other times? Finally, does this suggest something to you about the kind of man Emerson was, and why he would argue that certain traits were or were not "manly"?

4. The "Language" section of Nature expresses Emerson's early attitude toward language, and insists that effective speakers and writers keep fresh and uncorrupted attitudes toward the words and expressions they use: "wise men pierce this rotten diction and fasten words again to visible things" (30). Choose an essay we've studied in class and look closely at the diction, the figures of speech, and the images Emerson uses. How in this essay (or in certain passages you examine closely) does Emerson keep his language fresh; how does he keep instructive images in our minds; or how does he keep his own relationship to his language uncorrupted? It's unlikely he just uses one "trick" consistently, but rather tries different things with the slippery medium of language. How does his phrasing, or how do his metaphors make a passage more effective than it would have been in more straight-forward language?

Whitman / Dickinson

2. Choose a section of Song of Myself that seems initially conventional or "normal" (don't worry about what "conventional" meant in 1855; just choose a section that seems less revolutionary or surprising than other sections of the poem). Write an essay about how it appears unexceptional, but how it in some way ties to one of Whitman's overall projects in the poem, or repeats or expands a symbol that is used elsewhere to greater effect. How does this relatively "quiet" passage in fact answer or amplify some of the more noted passages, and how is the whole poem fuller, more developed, more complicated, because of the passage you've chosen? (Feel free to impress me by using some of the poetic terminology we've discussed in class.)

3. What attitudes do three or four of Dickinson's poems express about being alone? The famously reclusive poet obviously described this condition a great deal, but did not always have the same feelings about "being alone with her thoughts." Select carefully from the poems we've discussed in class and try to analyze in detail what kinds of emotions or challenges solitude seems to have raised for Dickinson. Some prompts: does "being alone" necessarily mean "being lonely"? Does she draw strength from solitude, or seem to want to escape to the company of others? Are there poems in which the self seems to be sufficient company for the poet?

4. For Whitman, what does it mean to have a male body, or, for Dickinson, what does it mean to have a female body? Choose one poet or the other and review the poems for expressions of what the "gendered" body (that is, a body that is expressly male or female) can do, or can have done to it. Then write an essay exploring what ownership of a male or female body (as the case may be) seems to have meant for the identities of these poets. Some prompts: Does the body make one vulnerable, or make one feel pain? Do the body's needs, as a woman or as a man, end up restricting the personalities of the poets?

5. A daring alternative to the above: in Whitman's Song of Myself, what does it mean to have a female body, or in a few Dickinson poems, what does it mean to have a male body? Follow the instructions and prompts for choice 4, with the sexes reversed.

Chief American Writers : Final Exam

Choose fifteen of the following twenty passages and supply the author's name. Then, choose ten of the fifteen passages you've identified, and give as thorough a context as possible for the passage. Giving the context might include: identifying the speakers or listeners, identifying the scene in the novel or story, commenting on how this passage articulates a central theme of the author's work, or describing how the passage typifies a literary movement or philosophical school. I will award partial credit, but again, try to supply as thorough a context as possible for each passage you choose.

1.There the moonbeams came trembling in, and fell down upon the deserted pews, and extended along the quiet aisles. A fainter, yet more awful radiance, was hovering round the pulpit, and one solitary ray had dared to rest upon the opened page of the great Bible. Had Nature, in that deep hour, become a worshipper in the house, which man had builded? Or was that heavenly light the visible sanctity of the place, visible because no earthly and impure feet were within the walls?

2.Though I than He - may longer live
He longer must - than I -
For I have but the power to kill,
Without - the power to die -

3. ". . . What all this means," he said, "is that the old world is gone. The old manners are obsolete and your graciousness is not worth a damn." He thought bitterly of the house that had been lost for him. "You aren't who you think you are," he said.

4. Pity me, and pardon me, O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law and custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another. You never exhausted your ingenuity in avoiding the snares, and eluding the power of a hated tyrant. . . .Still, in looking back, calmly on the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others.

5. You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead - dead to the World, to Heaven and to Hope! In me didst thou exist - and, in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself!

6. "That old woman taught me my catechism!" said the young man; and there was a world of meaning in this simple comment.7. Words are the finite organs of the infinite mind. They cannot cover the dimensions of what is in truth. They break, chop, and impoverish it. An action is the perfection and publication of thought.

8. The abdication of Belief
Makes the Behavior small-
Better an ignis fatuus
Than no illume at all-

9. ". . . It's not for me to say why, in the inscrutable wisdom of God, a genius should ever have been called from this place of hatred and bitter waters; but I want this Boston man to know that the drivel he's been hearing here tonight is only the tribute any truly great man could have from such a lot of sick, side-tracked, burnt-dog, land-poor sharks as the here-present financiers of Sand City-upon which town may God have mercy!"

10. ". . . and the way they are now, I don't see's there's much difference between the ********s up at the farm and the ********s down in the graveyard; 'cept that down there they're all quiet, and the women have got to hold their tongues."

11. Did the "Paradise" - persuaded -
Yield her moat of pearl -
Would the Eden be an Eden,
Or the Earl - an Earl?

12. I have said that her young friend took his ease with her, and it is an illustration of the fact that he made no answer to her letter. He took note of it amply; but he lit his cigar with it, and he waited, in tranquil confidence that he should receive another.

13. ". . . My philosophy of life is this: make yourself as happy as possible, and try to make those happy whose lives come in touch with yours; but to attempt to right the wrongs and ease the sufferings of the world in general is a waste of effort. You has just as well try to bail the Atlantic by pouring water into the Pacific."

14. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to be timid, imitative, tame.

15. What is commonest, and cheapest, and nearest, and easiest, is Me.

16. With the sudden perception of the point to which his madness had carried him, the madness fell and he saw his life before him as it was. He was a poor man, the husband of a sickly woman, whom his desertion would leave alone and destitute; and even if he had had the heart to desert her he could have done so only by deceiving two kindly people who had pitied him.

18. The ruin or the blank that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent but opaque. The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is because man is disunited with himself.

19. "But if I don't obey you, I ought not to live with you-to enjoy your kindness and protection."

20. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, - an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.

Essay questions:

Prompts: Is the body equal or subordinate to the soul, for most American writers? Can Americans expand their souls via the earthly body, according to these writers, or does the way to the soul involve shunning or disowning the body?

Possible authors: Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Jacobs, Whitman, Dickinson, Johnson.

Prompts: In what ways do our individual points of view; our mood swings; our morality or our sinfulness; our perspective as men or women, or as whites or blacks, "color" the way we see the world, according to these writers? Is there a way to see beyond these distortions to get a pure and clear view of the natural world or of ourselves?

Possible authors: Poe, Emerson, Hawthorne, Jacobs, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville, James, Wharton, Cather, Johnson, O'Connor.

Prompts: How do writers censor their opinions or avoid certain issues, in order to appeal to an audience? Do writers who are members of minorities encounter unique difficulties in presenting themselves before a majority audience?

Possible authors: Emerson, Whitman, Jacobs, Dickinson, Johnson.

Prompts: do writers who work in realistic or naturalistic schools maintain the attitude of earlier writers, such as Emerson, toward the inherent meaning in the natural world?

Possible authors: Emerson, Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, Wharton.

Prompts: Which location places the greater limitations on the human spirit or becomes a trap for the people who live there? Do the forces of fate or evil hold greater power over small-town environments or over cities? Which setting seems to compromise masculinity or "personhood" to a greater degree?

Possible authors: Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, Dickinson, James, Wharton, Cather, O'Connor.

Prompt: How does the definition (or the implied definition) of a wife's duties, loyalties, self-sufficiency, or subservience to her husband change over time, or vary from male writers to female writers?

Possible authors: Irving, Poe, Hawthorne, Emerson, Jacobs, Whitman, Dickinson, James, Wharton, Johnson.

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