Blogging Pedagogy - literary analysis

A Course of Ice and Fire: on Literary-Critical Pairings

Aaron Mercier — Mon, 25 Nov 2013 17:42:49 +0000

Author:

Aaron Mercier

Image Credit:

Aubrey Beardsley

When I was getting my B.A. at the University of British Columbia in the early 2000's, the English professors there assigned primary text readings almost exclusively. There are things to recommend this approach, but one result was that students were left to discover and master literary criticism, theory, and history (or not) on their own. Professors used their expertise to fill in the blanks and keep class discussions focused and productive, but a lot of my papers were kind of unfocused and wandering. When I got to grad school, I quickly came to understand that tendency to wander as a lack of critical framework and self-consciousnesses of methodology.

So, when I finally got to teach literature, I was really interested in getting my students invested in the idea of using secondary materials to create critical frameworks that would allow them to see things in the primary text that they would otherwise have missed. As it turned out, I was dogged and lucky enough to secure myself a teaching assignment that raised a lot of eyebrows. I was to teach an introductory lit course entitled simply "A Game of Thrones." I mentioned to the powers that be that since I'd actually be teaching both the novel A Game of Thrones and its sequel A Clash of Kings, and would not be referring at all to the HBO series Game of Thrones, that the course title should be A Song of Ice and Fire, but the powers that be didn't really care.

It didn't matter, either. As my class filled out, I filled out my reading list, and decided that I wanted to introduce a basic notion of the aesthetic and thematic rules of thumb for the books. The idea was that if my students had that common ground to work from, the class discussions and, by extension, their written work, would have a kind of critical framework that would productively direct attention to significant moments in the text. In class, the next step would be to unpack those moments with the analytical tactics of close reading. In papers, students could use those habits of mind to direct their own research and interpretive synthesis.

So I'm a medievalist, and 14th-century English romances figure prominently in my dissertation. As a result, I've come to view the five currently extant volumes of A Song of Ice and Fire not so much as a series, but as a cycle, in the manner of Malory's great compendiums of Arthuriana. This observation, which was long a source of private, nerdy enjoyment for me, led me as a teacher to Eugene Vinaver's two groundbreaking essays on medieval literary aesthetics, "The Poetry of Interlace" and "Analogy as the Dominant Form." Without going into too much detail, Vinaver argues that romance cycles have these two features as the operative center of their aesthetics. So in romance, enjoyment is created and thematic meaning is established on the one hand by the analogy of disparate persons and events, which reflect and distort each other in meaningful ways; and on the other by entrelacement, the interweaving of seperate but related adventures or narratives, whose course spans the whole cycle, whose whole unfolding we do not see because as one narrative strand is foregrounded, the others are backgrounded, in a continuous interweaving pattern. The novel's "plot arc" is an irrelevancy in romance: one is better off imagining something more like a celtic knot design.

If you've read ASoIaF, this aesthetics should sound familiar, which is weird since it was published in the '50's and meant to describe literature published in the 1490's. Nevertheless, I assigned these two essays in the first three weeks of class and have been stunned by how often, in class and in writing, my students have referred to Vinaver's arguments, and the essays I've been grading have been startling in their evidentiary scope and incisiveness of argument.

The conclusion: assigning criticism is good, in moderation. Even if you're setting out to teach close reading practices, pick the one or two essays that best suit or describe or speak to a text, and encourage your students to apply criticism ... well, critically. It's just like food and wine. When you have the right pairing, the experience becomes more than the sum of its parts.

Video Games, Queer Studies, and Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:34:15 +0000

Author:

Kevin Bourque

Image Credit:

Fallout: New Vegas

Since early 2006 – when Blizzard Entertainment met with criticism and controversy for threatening to oust a player advertising a lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT)-friendly World of Warcraft guild – queer visibility in the world of gaming has exploded. Grand Theft Auto IV: The Ballad of Gay Tony gave the world of gaming its first eponymous queer character, “Gay” Tony Prince, just last year; and, as though mirroring America’s slow shift in public opinion from “separate-but-equal” solutions to full-fledged marriage equality, mere same-sex cohabitation in the Sims 2 graduated nine years later to gay marriages in the Sims 3 (2009). Dragon Age: Origins, from that same year, includes a memorable elf-on-elf scene which, in the words of the conservative World Net Daily, “depicts two men in various sex positions in a secret scene of homosexual seduction.” And finally, ongoing controversy over the possibility of same-sex coupling in Mass Effect 2 has prompted Bioware to lock down any forum discussion on the subject – perhaps in a misguided attempt, similar to Blizzard’s five years ago, to protect sexual minorities from abuse by mandating their invisibility.

The newfound visibility of queers in games serves as a kind of compelling synecdoche for our increasing, if troubled, presence in popular culture. It offers, too, a unique case study in sexual identity, complementing ongoing debates in queer activism, theory and culture as to how LGBT identity is created to begin with, and offering a compelling resource to teaching and scholarship on theories of sexual identity – in courses such as my own Gay and Lesbian Literature and Culture, or other courses grappling with the rhetorics of gender, sexuality, and identity formation.

In her foundational Epistemology of the Closet (1990), Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick traced a governing tension between minoritizing and universalizing approaches to sexual identity, the former seeing homosexuality as the purview of a minority of actual homosexuals and the latter as a possibility for all persons, across a wide range of sexualities. This tension – along with the complementary binary of essentialist (one is intrinsically gay or lesbian) versus constructionist (all sexualities are socially constructed, shaped and formed by context) models – governs our notions of sexual identity. The making of sexual identity in contemporary video games demonstrates these ongoing debates, making thorny if foundational concepts in queer studies far more apparent and intuitive to the student.

The Sims (2000), for example, takes a generously universalizing approach. In lieu of making a particular sexual identity part of the character-formation process, developers chose to populate the game entirely with equal-opportunity Kinsey-3’s, each character intrinsically bisexual. Left to his or her own devices, a Sim is equally able to form romantic attachment with either sex, and one’s sexual identity is predicated more on interpersonal connection than on any intrinsic or personal difference.

Contrariwise, the recent Fallout: New Vegas has taken a minoritizing perspective, even building sexual minority status into the process of character formation. Character “perks,” such as the aptly-named Confirmed Bachelor trait, define one’s character as gay (Cherchez la Femme, incidentally, is the lesbian version) as they offers bonuses in conversations with sexual minority non-player characters.

1. Confirmed Batchelor used in dialogue; a gay NPC's response

Finally, other video games are destabilizing sex, gender and sexuality outright. In MolleIndustria’s Queer Power, styled after fighting games such as Mortal Kombat and Soul Calibur, two players race to beat each other to sexual orgasm while seamlessly transforming in gender, sexual position and erotic activity. Queer Power is, in the words of creator Paolo Pedercini, “loosely inspired by queer theory and particularly the work of gender theorist Judith Butler,” and as in Butler’s groundbreaking work – which thinks through how the performance of gender in fact constructs the categories of sexuality, gender, and even biological sex – how you act defines what you are, not vice-versa. The concept, as well as the theorist’s notoriously convoluted writerly style, is likewise reflected in a recent release from the UCLA conceptual-design outfit Queer Technologies: TransCoder, a “Queer Programming Anti-Language” which offers “libraries rooted in theories of queerness as an attempt to sever ontological and epistemological ties to dominant technologies and interrupt the flow of circulation between heternormative culture, coding, and visual interface.”

2. MolleIndustria's Queer Power; Queer Technology's Transcoder

Why ARIS Works for Literature Classes

Anonymous — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 02:23:57 +0000

Author:

Cleve Wiese

Image Credit:

Cleve Wiese

So my Banned Books E314 class is wrapping up the ARIS project described in my recent lesson plan post, and as I reflect on the experience I find myself fending off the complaints of a reasonable (if imaginary) skeptic: Sure, games are rhetorical, so it makes sense to analyze them in a rhetoric class. And sure, procedural rhetoric is an important mode of argumentation, so game design makes sense – in a rhetoric class. And yes, given the proliferation of location based media, the creation of location based, augmented reality games is probably a valuable experience for students – again, in a rhetoric class. But why, this skeptic asks, would any of this be relevant to a literature class – a banned books class, no less – in which your texts are predetermined novels and poems? Aren’t you just driving a square peg into a round hole for the sake of a personal (read, selfish) interest?

I have a few responses for this critic. To begin with, I see the E314 course as a general introduction to a variety of ways of reading and analyzing literature. For me, that means spending part of the semester focusing on writers and their historical contexts, part of the semester focused on new-crit-inspired modes of close-reading and formal analysis, and part of the semester focused on reader response (things don’t break down quite that cleanly, of course, but that’s the guiding, tripartite framework). This assignment emphasizes the third approach: Beginning with the Aristotelian idea that people can only experience things (fiction included) through the lenses of concrete real-world experiences, memories, and images anyway, the purpose here is not to analyze what a text means, in itself or in some particular historical context, but what can be done with it, right now, at UT Austin in April 2011. The novel or poem is merely the raw material for a new creation that is literally embedded by students on the real-world space of the UT Campus via the ARIS platform.

But, my critic counters, if you so completely de-emphasize the text itself, how can this assignment possibly teach literary analysis? And what about your responsibility to focus on the bannedness of these banned books?

This assignment teaches analysis because every ARIS game the students design has to make an argument. And although that argument isn’t limited by the text, it is an interpretation of the text, inspired by the text, in response to the text. From this point of view, it’s really not all that far from the kind of literary analysis we already ask students to do all the time. The difference here is that the games students create self-consciously filter source material through their own real world concerns and lived experiences. For example, one game based on Catcher in the Rye includes an exchange with NPCs inspired by peripheral characters from Holden’s West Village drinking binge – but in the game, these characters are virtually embedded on the South Mall, and the focus of their exchange with the PC (in the role of Holden) is refocused on a particular concern of a particular group of UT readers/English students/game designers: underage drinking. These connections – between personal experiences and Holden’s fictional night out – occurred to these students in their roles as readers. And in their roles as students in my course earlier in the semester, they were expected to filter this seemingly irrelevant association out of writing assignments. But in this assignment, in the new roles of game designers, they are encouraged to put that subjective “noise” at the center of a new product focused not on the text alone, but on the intersection of the text and their everyday lives.

This may seem a counter-intuitive, or even self-indulgent, approach to teaching literature. But I find it strikingly appropriate for a Banned Books class: Most of the controversies we discuss have less to do with what disputed literary works mean in any objective sense than with what they are used for by different stakeholders in different cultural contexts. In some cases (such as The Satanic Verses, which we’re studying right now), the books themselves seem deliberately designed for this kind of fragmentation and re-mediation by a wide range of people in many places with a wide range of political, religious, or cultural agendas. In fact, this is the way books often work and have a measurable effect in the world. So I think it makes much more sense to give students the chance to engage in the same kind of openly rhetorical, subjective, irreverent appropriation of literature than to flatly condemn it as ignorant or wrong.

Finally, I think that playing with ARIS is an amazingly interesting way to get students thinking about persona and audience. In What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Literacy and Learning, James Gee discusses three levels of identity operative in a role playing video games: Real-world identity (student, teacher, etc.), virtual identity, and the intersection of real and virtual identities in a “projective identity” (what the real world ‘me’ aspires to for the virtual ‘me’). Similarly, in this assignment students first have to think of themselves in the real-world identity of game designers with the confidence and authority to play with (that is, freely appropriate) previously sacrosanct literary texts. Second, they have to design a persona for players to adopt and they have to figure out to effectively convey this role through dialogue and gameplay (as you can see below, in dialogue situations the ARIS player is visually represented by only a silhouette and the word “YOU,” a limitation that forces designers to find other compelling ways to convey 1^st person characterization). Finally, the students have to think about projective identity not so much in the aspirational sense that Gee talks about as in a closely related rhetorical sense: ‘What,’ they have to ask, ‘will players be encouraged to believe in their real world identities as a result of experiencing this game through the particular virtual identity I design.’ In other words, the projective identity becomes the interpretive thesis or argument.

Ok, my critic says, even if I buy all of what you’ve argued for here, I still think you’re trying to turn a literature assignment into a rhetoric assignment. To this I plead guilty, at least in part. But since every paper I ask my students to write requires them to make an argument for a particular audience, I’m not sure this is such a bad – or unusual – thing.