Hala Herbly's blog

Reading Like a Detective

Hala Herbly — Wed, 06 Feb 2013 04:17:33 +0000

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Hala Herbly

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Close reading is a cornerstone of literature classes, but it can be a drag to teach. The excitement I sometimes feel about finding new and contradictory meanings for words a little difficult to translate to the average non-major (and even the average major). So this semester I decided to frame my close reading lesson in terms of detective work. Specifically, I decided to show them about fifteen minutes' worth an episode of the BBC drama Sherlock.

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Here's my reasoning. Sherlock is a rather eccentric "private consultant" with an uncanny ability to interpret crime scenes. He is able to do this through his well-honed powers of observation, which allow him to infer a shocking amount of information about people, places, and things. For example, upon his first meeting with his partner Dr. Watson, Sherlock is immediately able to tell that Watson is an Iraq war veteran who suffers from PTSD and has an estranged sibling. This close attention to detail makes Sherlock interesting to us, but intolerable to those around him (and this of course is the pleasure of watching the show).

Like detective work, close reading requires a sharp attention to detail. The opening lines and stage directions of a play like Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession, for example, tell us almost everything we need to know about the main character. But it is a skill to be able to infer this much from just a few details. For one thing, it takes a lot of patience with the text. It also, as I mentioned above, requires the ability to focus in on details that might appear to be insignificant. And finally, it involves a kind of confidence--confidence in the text to be able to produce meaning that goes "deeper" than initally apparent, and confidence in one's own reading ability and "sense" of the text. Though I would have hated to hear this myself in my late teens and early twenties, I always tell my class to follow their intuition or "hunches" about the text. Without the willingness to take this kind of interpretive risk, you end up with the dreaded "um, I think we might be reading too much into this." I try to discourage that kind of thinking by telling my class that any kind of interpretation, no matter how wild, is valid as long as they can back it up convincingly with evidence.

I guess, then, that I try to teach my class to assume a particular kind of attitude toward the text. While I am always careful to lay out the historical context of any work that we're reading, I also think it's important to encourage them to "read into" the text. This demonstrates to them that meaning is something that they can learn how to create, rather than something they've simply inherited from the critics and readers before them.

Timelines, Trauma, Temporality

Hala Herbly — Tue, 02 Oct 2012 03:58:44 +0000

Author:

Hala Herbly

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The Great Books List

I'm teaching Banned Books and Novel Ideas this year, and most of the books I've chosen focus on the experience of trauma, whether on the level of the individual or the mass. One of the ways that I explain the concept of trauma to my class is by referring to Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle, in which he explains the concept of the repetition compulsion as a response to traumatic experiences. The repetition compulsion manifests as a constant reliving of the trauma, often taking the form of dreams or nightmares, daydreams, or even subconscious actions. These symptoms, Freud reasoned, were ways for the subconscious mind to rid itself of the psychic pain of trauma. By constantly reliving the intial trauma, perhaps the mind can figure a way to escape or resolve the traumatic incident.

Most of the texts we're reading focus on incidents of trauma and their aftereffects, and thus tend to present temporality as anything but linear. This is where timeline appications come in.

In my class we read The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, and Beloved by Toni Morrison. Both these novels are pretty creative when it comes to temporality. During our discussions, students would often admit that they were confused by what had happened in that day's reading--which was completely understandable. Instead of relating the events of the novel point by point ("then this happened...then this...") I have my students log into their computers and congregate on a timeline-creating web application. I chose to use Dipity, which allows everyone to log in and edit the same timeline. For The Handmaid's Tale, this excercise allowed them to visualize the monotony of everyday life in the Republic of Gilead, the distance between Offred's present and her much-treasured memories, and finally, the shocking gap between her writing and the discovery of her recorded diary far in the future. This visualization led to a discussion of the mundane experience of everyday time, and the less accessible monolith of 'history."

Like The Handmaid's Tale, Beloved is structured by the intimate thoughts of three characters, Sethe, Denver, and Beloved. Because these womens' experiences tend to strain against the coherence of formal narrative, it was essential for my class to have a forum where they could discuss what happened when. Once they understood who Beloved was, and how she came to be, they were able to recognize why Beloved would seek to relive her early, traumatic experiences. Once again, the timeline enabled them to visualize this. Additionally, they were able to augment the novel's timeline with historical events--the end of the Civil War, for example.

I think these timeline excercises really helped my students, not only to "figure out" these novels' complex plots, but also to understand the cyclical nature of trauma, and to really inhabit the subtleties of narrative.

N.B.: Dipity sometimes moves excruciatingly slowly--the website, for some reason, takes forever to load, and any addition to the timeline we create often doesn't show up until long after it's been published. The site seems to be working a bit better these days, but I would still test it out if you plan on using it in class. A quick google search reveals other timeline-making web applications as well.

Bringing the Uncanny into the Classroom

Hala Herbly — Wed, 15 Aug 2012 15:56:01 +0000

Author:

Hala Herbly

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Holly

As cliché as it sounds, as an English teacher I've always thought it one of my tasks to make literature come alive in the classroom by sustaining a sense of engagement and connection in class. While generally this entails rather obvious things like talking to students rather than lecturing at them, and engaging on a one to one level, I find it takes more than this to really drum up interest about our texts. To this end I try to show them how literature that may be one or two hundred years old still lives on, in important ways, in our own lives. One of the reasons I love teaching Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) is because it makes this task easy. The novel opens itself up to a number of different interpretations and pedagogical approaches, and so I found it a good choice for some interactive pedagogy.

This time around I was struck by one passage in particular, which occurs toward the beginning, in Victor Frankenstein's narrative. It describes the "birth" of his creature.

How can I describe my emotions as this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!--Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same color as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion, and straight black lips. (39 in the Oxford UP edition.)

Historically, my class interprets this passage as evidence of Victor Frankenstein's folly, and in the past I've accepted this reading. Despite, however, the metaphorical resonances the scene strikes (paralleling Victor's response to his creature to an uncaring god abandoning his own creation), it still strikes me a curious inconsistency. Why, after toiling for months creating his creature, would Victor have such a visceral response to his creature the second it breathes its first breath?

It helps, it seems, to think of his response in terms of the uncanny. A common trope in Gothic literature, the uncanny is the sense that something is both familiar and unfamiliar at once. I realized that the creature's birth provokes Victor to an experience of the uncanny--the thing that was a moment ago composed of various dead body parts is now alive, or perhaps rather "unalive." To illustrate the concept of the uncanny I showed my class a video I found on the New York Times' website, about modern robotics and artificial intelligence. In the video, a reporter interviews Bina48, a robot modeled on a real human being. The interview, however, leaves her with a strange and lingering sense of unease.

Bina48 seems mostly confused and disoriented, and tries to apologize for her condition, explaining that she's having "a bad software day." She asserts that she "wants a real life, you know," and laments the fact that she cannot be more like her original model. My class's response to the video varied from pity to disgust--they cringed through the video and seemed to experience a weird kind of sadness in response to Bina48's flickers of self-consciousness. It was just very strange for them--more than anything else, they just wanted Bina48 to go away. We then compared this reaction to Frankenstein's response to the creature: perhaps they, like Victor, were struck by the uncanniness of the situation.

Another way we worked to make Frankenstein three-dimensional was through Google Maps. Using this tool encouraged students to think about a text in terms of its geographic broadness. As a novel that takes place across continental Europe (and beyond), Frankenstein seemed a natural fit for a Google Mapping assignment. The novel's frame narrative also seemed to benefit from a geographical analysis--mapping the novel helped my class unravel the tight coils of the narrative, viewing it spatially instead of textually. For the activity, I had students map Victor Frankenstein's progress through Europe, pinning flags in each city mentioned. These flags should described happened at that particular place and when (if discernible).

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The day of the activity, I talked a bit about the idea of the "Grand Tour," an eighteenth and nineteenth century phenomenon in which the (male) children of the wealthy tour Europe as a way of gaining a worldly education. We mapped the novel and then discussed the ways in which Victor Frankenstein's search for a peaceful place to create a female companion for the creature, and then subsequent self-destructive pursuit of the creature, reads as a kind of debased grand tour--a sort of perversion of the original.

My hope was that by geographically tracing their journey across Europe, students get a better sense of Victor Frankenstein's and the creature's embodied experience in the novel. Further, connecting the characters' journey to discrete points in the book helps students to think about how the text represents movement and geography, and I think helped them close-read the text. Though I had tested Google Maps beforehand, the day I chose to do the experiment we couldn't figure out how to attach notes to the flags, so next time I'll be sure to jot down some directions. Despite that, the class told me later that they enjoyed the activity.

The Pedagogy of LOL

Hala Herbly — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 03:00:23 +0000

Author:

Hala Herbly

Image Credit:

Cheezburger

Like most writing teachers, I like incorporating informal writing assignments into my class in order to make my students comfortable with writing casually and in the moment, without the the threat of a bad grade stifling their process. One way I've done this in my Banned Books class this semester is by requiring them to post a blog entry on the day's reading at least once during the semester. (The post is graded pass/fail, which also enables them to stretch the parameters of the assignment in any way they like.) This semester, the blogging assignment has created some interesting, and I think helpful, resonances between our material and popular culture.

I should add here that even though I believe that informal writing assignments are important, I also take care to reiterate to my class that the informality of the blogging assignment doesn't carry over into their midterm, final, and assorted short papers. These I grade pretty strictly. That's why I like the blog so much--it provides what I think is a needed counterpoint to the finality of the writing assignments. Writing doesn't always have to be fraught with anxiety.

That said, the blog posts also allow my students to incorporate other kinds of media into their thoughts on the day's reading. The assignment asks them to write a post before class summarizing the day's reading. In addition I also ask them to incorporate critical observations about the reading, connecting it to themes we've already covered, or even to our other texts. They are also required to post three to five critically substantive discussion questions to guide the day's discussion. These questions can be conceptually or thematically oriented, or they can ask the class to pay special attention to a particular scene or passage in the reading, encouraging the class to perform, together, a close reading of the passage in question. The blog posts are assigned at the beginning of the semester, and it usually works out that there is one scheduled blog post per class day. This way, each student gets to lead discussion for one day during the semester--the day's blogger has to walk us through his or her post, and explain the discussion questions.

Since they are writing in blog format, I expect them to follow "blogging conventions," which for me includes incorporating other forms of media--mostly images--into the posts. It was about halfway through our reading of The Island of Dr. Moreau that I began to notice an interesting confluence between the reading and, in particular, the images that my students chose to use in their posts.

First, some background. As most of you probably know, H.G. Wells' The Island of Dr. Moreau is an early science fiction novel that dramatizes the horror of the proximity of our cruel animal natures. Dr. Moreau, an island-bound exiled vivisectionist, performs "experiments" on animals, attempting surgically to instill in them human physical and mental characteristics. The result is a grotesque menagerie of half-human, half-animal beings who both manifest the cruelty of their natures and inspire similar cruelty in their holders--Moreau and the two men who are trapped on the island with him. The idea, of course, is that it's unclear whether cruelty is inherently a human or animal instinct, and by the end of the novel we are left questioning the utility of the nominal boundary between "human" and "animal."

Here's where it gets interesting. The students assigned to blog about The Island of Dr. Moreau tended, apparently organically, to incorporate LOLcat images into their posts. Though the gesture is perhaps a bit flippant (an attitude that I don't frown upon in class, if it's in response to the content of a text--I take it as a sign of engagement) to me it suggested some kind of affinity between our cultural obsession with the comically illiterate cats and the horror of the just-barely human animals in the text. Below, a couple of examples of their images.

The first image refers to the twisted biblical allusions that the Beast-men make in their attempts to comprehend morality, and the second, whcih in our blog was captioned "A Drunken Beast," humorously reinterprets Moreau's epithet for his creations. Despite their levity, the lolcat images seemed weirdly appropriate for the text, and to me demonstrates that, even perhaps unconsciously, my students were processing the humanity/animality theme. Seen this way, their use of images suggests to me a sense of creative play with the ideas in the text, resulting in a digital archive of their personal, vernacular responses to the reading. I like to think of these posts as a collage of popular references around the complex themes in the text.

Their images were not always lolcat related. They also referenced other pop-culture phenomena, including body modification, plastic surgery, and cosplay. These images, some of which are rather shocking, emphasize the tenuousness of the human/animal divide. All depict people who, in some way, want to appear as animalistic or not human. Which led us to the question: what is the attraction of animality? In what ways can it be attractive, and in what ways can it be distasteful or even repellent?

The blog also allows them to insinuate their own political views into the post (though I don't generally tell them to do this). Below, an image in a post about The Handmaid's Tale. Needless to say these kinds of images tend to inspire interesting discussion.

At the very least, these images have led my class to make strong and unexpected connections to the popular culture they are immersed in, and allows them to make these connections in internet vernacular, in which they are very well versed. Indeed, this is a form of engagment that we teachers and writers often exhibit ourselves.