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Thinking outside the book: comparing life and lit.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

This essay outlines a unit on the novel that requires students to read a fairly formulaic text and keep two reading journals and write one position paper. One of these journals bids the students to reflect on the reading process that accompanies their efforts to negotiate the novel; the other involves applying the same interpretive strategies to an actual issue or event unfolding in real time beyond the book. The students then produce a position paper that addresses the surprising similarities and/or differences between life and literature.

Introduction

Oftentimes at the outset of a unit on a particular novel many of us have read a page or two aloud, paused, and then enlisted our students' help in predicting what will occur in the narrative. Commonly, we are surprised by their ability to forecast the manner in which the plot will play out, and we are impressed by how well they identify heroes and villains, anticipate turning points, and draw parallels between the text in question and others they have read previously. But should we be surprised by these demonstrated skills and abilities? Perhaps not. Here's why--

When we consider that today's students are born into a culture dominated by the genre of the novel and educated in classrooms where a reader-response approach to interpretation commonly crowds out other hermeneutic methodologies, such scenarios that frequently come to pass in these situations should not be all that shocking. Nearly every work of written art our students encounter is somewhat novelistic; and, furthermore, when offered the chance to choose, our students often select novels over other genre. They do not, for the most part, read poetry or study drama, nor do they commonly take in a documentary or attend a play. Thus, as a consequence of this immersion into the world of the novel, they quickly become sophisticated readers of this type of text long before they, and even we as teachers, realize it. In fact, I would contend that our students are so deeply immersed in a culture informed and infected by the nuances of the novel that alerting them to this fact is not unlike informing fish that they live in water. I would also argue that a failure to apprise them of their situation and correlative mindset is potentially problematic. Their immersion into the not-so-novel works they consume prevents them from learning to untangle and truly interpret texts and even, at some level, from distinguishing between life and literature. What's more, because they begin to project novel-like and frequently fixed narratives onto reality and thus conclude peremptorily that "things will just work out," their misunderstandings can lead to a sense of apathy and even powerlessness.

To wake the students up and,...

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