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.

Incorporating Pop Culture Texts in the Classroom

Rachel Schneider — Thu, 04 Oct 2012 23:35:03 +0000

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Rachel Schneider

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In order to improve my course design and teaching, I ask my students at each semester’s end for feedback on the assignments and course texts. When I reviewed their responses for last semester’s class, in which I taught an E314L class on Women’s Popular Genres, one text emerged as a favorite: the Destiny’s Child song “Independent Women Part I.” I used the music video during the first and second class days to introduce students to formal, historical, and cultural reading practices. It did not surprise me to see them bring this up, as popular culture provides unique material for both rhetorical and literary analysis. The various advantages and disadvantages of the material, however, I intend here to further explain.

In this specific case, I agree with my students. Teaching “Independent Women Part I” helped me disrupt students’ expectations and invited them not only to view close reading but the song itself through new eyes. I showed them the video first with lyrics, inviting them to takes notes on anything they noticed in particular: the melodies, the lyrics, the costumes, the dancing, the sets, etc. After an initial viewing, during which they also had the lyrics before them on paper, I asked them to talk about what they had observed.

The conversation that followed was wide-ranging: they not only closely read the material but also put it into larger musical and political contexts. They considered how the song’s lyrics and visuals responded to second- and third-wave feminism as well as the specific cultural experiences of African-American feminists. We analyzed how the auditory and visual elements modeled or engaged with these different “feminisms.” The students read the costumes and the performance in light of both the Charlie’s Angels movie the video promoted and the original 1970s television series. We also considered how the song’s rhyme schemes, verses, and bridge build and draw attention to various phrasings, and how lyrics like

“Question: how’d you like this knowledge that I brought
Braggin’ on that cash that he gave you is to front
If you’re gonna brag make sure it’s your money you flaunt
Depend on no one else to give you what you want”

developed tone and invited readerly engagement with the text. While the song was familiar and fun, it was also not so recent that they didn’t struggle to reconstruct some of the cultural context (particularly the late-90s/early-00s “girl power” movement). And while we did not have time to read discussions of Beyoncé’s lyrics from pop feminism blog Jezebel, I gestured to it as an example of the connections between art and larger cultural questions.

This may have been so successful in part because, as I’ve previously described on viz, I’ve taught pop culture texts many times before. I’ve planned three classes—one on the Rhetoric of the Musical and two different versions of Women’s Popular Genres—that have all involved popular culture genres: musicals, novels, songs, or television shows. Through these experiences, I’ve learned about the unique challenges that such texts create. For example, teaching my students about Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog and other musicals in my Rhetoric of the Musical class allowed us to explore the question of how popular culture has commented on and presents arguments about America and “American values” since the genre’s origins in the 1920s. We were able to read and discuss Bruce Kirle’s analysis of Oklahoma!, which argues that the show attempted to persuade people against isolationist policies during World War II. However, the students struggled with accepting the arguments—they had difficulty seeing how something “silly” or “fun” like musicals could have any sort of cultural implications or intent. When teaching them Stacy Wolf’s essay on Wicked, they were even hostile to the arguments. Their own lack of expertise in music also often left them struggling to articulate their analysis of the material: in other words, while they could characterize the melody as “sad,” they couldn’t generally articulate why. Also, while teaching women’s popular genres meant it was easy to allow the students to write their final research papers on any subject they chose, it also meant they were inclined to work on texts that had not yet been included in critical conversations, like the television show The Vampire Diaries or Katy Perry’s music.

Like I tell my students about writing, teaching pop culture texts is a choice with both advantages and disadvantages. Students are easily interested in them, but sometimes lack critical vocabularies to explore them. Their utility also depends on the assignments for which they’re included. In short, I will always enjoy using Glee to teach kairos, but will be sure to provide them appropriate vocabulary to explore how the text performs kairotically.

Blogging Pedagogy - close reading

Reading Like a Detective

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Incorporating Pop Culture Texts in the Classroom

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