Hi,
One thing I will have to cautious of when I am given the opportunity to teach
a literature course, is to take into consideration the reasons the works to
be read and analysed are being used. I am a college senior now, with one
year to go for my bachelors, and have been exposed to a variety of methods
when it comes to literature courses.
What I mean by being cautious, I want to make sure that by the time a course
ends at final exam time that my students have been able to examine a
representative body of works as specified within the genre, whether American
Literature to 1800 or Feminist Science Fiction of the late 1970s. That said,
I want to make it clear that I have to consider that the course these
students are enrolled in is a step to prepare them possibly for certain
examinations needed to be admitted to graduate school. Within the confines
or boundaries of these considerations, I need to make a representative list
of works that will represent the genre to be examined. A componant that I
wish would be all inclusive is that the representative works to be used in
the course are entertaining to my students. When you discuss the merits of
an entertaining work of literature, you know everyone has their own interests
when it comes to being entertained. You cannot please everyone. It is a
given and I have not graduated from college yet that there are works chosen
to be read in class that will be dry, sermon-like, outright boring, etc., and
yet in order to fufill the requirements for passing the course I had better
do my job as a student and analyse the text. It is okay for a student to say
this bored me or I did not like this or this is so antiquated...it could take
years to figure out why the student did not get it, why he/she did not like
it etc. Until recently, I only thought of Science Fiction as a "fun" way to
escape and never considered it a literary genre until I read Nancy Kress'
Beggars In Spain. It may be hard to take in when a student says "I thought
this was supposed to be fun," there could be a gazillion reasons why they do
not understand yet the importance of applying critical analysis to a work of
science fiction, but it wastes a lot of energy to even try to figure out. My
job I hope will be to guide a classroom of students toward an understanding
of a particular genre, not to argue the fun out of a course text.
Jo Ann
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