Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | A | Academic Exchange Quarterly

Mapping the novel.

Article Excerpt
Abstract

"Mapping the Novel" draws on the Freytag pyramid that plotted the course of tragedy and the loco-descriptive poem that wedded the emotional and geographic circuit. By emphasizing the novel as composed object whose component parts can be disassembled and studied, the technique can be applied chapter by chapter. The exercise shows how architecture, setting, and topography can function also as markers of emotion, psychology, and attitudes about class, gender, and nation. Finally, it amplifies the traditional literature-class methods of reading, writing, and discussion.

**********

Shortage of time; shortage of attention span; shortage of skills in asking difficult questions of a form so familiar to them as to seem second-nature: these are but a few of the deficits among their classroom populations instructors who teach the novel face. These laments need no rehearsal. Most instructors now recognize that discussion of a novel, whatever the course, will occur in dribs and drabs as students digest the material in carved-up chapters. The question then becomes, how do we best help students appreciate the many-storied levels on which a novel works without undermining the delight of readerly surprise or without resorting to droning lecture?

These questions have a long genealogy. Their urgency has been intensified at state universities and community colleges where, increasingly, older student populations with multiple demands on their time prevail. Even had the age of matriculation remained constant, it would have been offset by the decrease in public funding and the concomitant rise in college costs, so that many students struggle with work and families of their own as they juggle the costs of their own educations. Today, though, educators face two more stumbling blocks: both arise, I believe, from the media culture our students inhabit. Trained to be passive consumers, many students lack confidence or interest in expressing their opinions, thus hampering buoyant discussion. Worse, the cult of personality cultivated by talk shows, MTV, E, and the music and movie industries have caused our students to fixate on character: depending on their bent, what I call either the Springer or the Oprah effect. This technological pre-conditioning corresponds to the existence of mental frameworks such as those identified by Piaget, which can hamper critical thinking. As a result, what discussion does occur seldom ventures far from a kind of literary gossip about the characters' actions and attractions.

As a specialist in 18th-19th-century British literature, I wrestle to make the very remote in time and sensibility immediate and to make palpable all the possible levels of strong interest. All the lecturing in the world will not reach those students dedicated to living fully in the twenty-first century....

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!