Emma Jensen and Haifaa Al-Mansour, 2017
no votes for Best Picture but rated #225,
2018 Skandies
Three years ago today—2020, March 12—was my last full day on campus as a high school teacher. That evening, the administration sent out an email declaring that classes the following day were canceled due to the novel coronavirus, and that we likely wouldn’t be coming back until after spring break. That projection turned out to be extremely optimistic. Classes ended up being canceled for the rest of the year. Then the entire following school year was conducted via distance learning. (A few weeks before the end of the year, teachers were ordered to come back to campus, but only once or twice a week, and generally only a couple of kids were in attendance.) I actually didn’t mind the distance learning, and so now I pay the rent by teaching AP courses online. The last lesson I taught in person to my AP Literature classes was about the life of Mary Shelley.
Why? My next unit needed to be about a canonical novel, but my workload was so overwhelming in those days that I was only getting two or three hours of sleep a night. I just did not have time to figure out how to teach a novel with which I wasn’t already deeply familiar. As an undergrad, I had read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein for the required survey course in British literature and had loved it, so much so that the following semester I signed up for a course titled “The Frankenstein Complex in Literature and Film”. The second half of that course covered cinematic adaptations of Frankenstein itself and such Frankenstein-adjacent movies as Edward Scissorhands. The first half covered the novel, of course, but also virtually anything in its orbit. We read Caleb Williams by Mary Shelley’s father, and Mary, Maria, and A Short Resonance in Sweden by her mother. We read poems by her husband, Percy Shelley, and other key figures of the Romantic period. By Mary Shelley herself we read Mathilda, along with some of her letters and journal entries. Put it all together, and even twenty-seven years later, I figured I could bang out a Frankenstein unit, complete with plenty of supplemental material, without too much effort. And heck, when I had interviewed at another school the previous spring, I had been told that Frankenstein was a required text for all seniors, so I didn’t even have to worry about whether I’d judged the grade level correctly. So I took my kids down to the textbook room to check out copies of the book, each of them signed up to give a presentation on a chapter, and then I kicked off the unit with a 58-minute presentation of my own on Mary Shelley. You’re not supposed to deliver 58-minute presentations to a high school class, even if it’s AP. But that always irked me—like, three months after they graduated, most of my seniors were going to be sitting in lecture halls listening to professors holding forth for eighty minutes at a stretch, so they’d better get some practice in, right? So I basically said fuck it and went for it, and to my surprise it actually went over really well—the kids stayed focused from start to finish. “And then she got pregnant, and the father abandoned her, and she attempted suicide” is lurid enough in isolation, but when there are five or six women in the mix and that story applies to all of them, even the most jaded teenagers’ jaws will drop.
And here’s that presentation in cinematic form! This is a standard biopic, and I really only have one thing to say about it. The curriculum professor in my credentialing program would have been appalled at the way I started my Frankenstein unit—not just because the first session was a 58-minute presentation, but because it was biographical in nature. “NEVER start a Shakespeare unit by talking about Shakespeare’s life and times!” he demanded. Why the proscription? We actually explicitly covered that in my class. Following the lead of Elizabeth Abel, who taught my honors course when I was an undergrad, I built my units around different schools of literary theory. The first one she (and therefore I) covered was New Criticism, which is ironically the oldest of the bunch—it might better be termed formalism. It’s the school that insists that the way to get meaning out of a work is to do a close reading of the text, looking for, say, moments when form reflects content, resolutions of ambiguity, etc. Talking about anything outside the text itself is off limits. For the middle third of the twentieth century, this is the chief way that literature was taught at the university level, until it was gradually pushed aside by other schools of thought: reader response, psychoanalysis (Freud and his followers), political criticism (Marx and his followers), structuralism, post-structuralism, feminism, queer theory, cultural studies, etc., etc. At the high school level, formalism held sway for a lot longer, and is still a major influence over the AP Literature test. By the 1990s, a bit of very basic reader response had begun to creep in (not affective stylistics, but just “How did this story resonate with your life? Let’s do a quickwrite!” and such). So my first big unit of the school year was on formalism as applied to poetry, but before diving into that, I asked, “Wait—if this was termed the New Criticism, then what was the old criticism? If we were taking a literature class a hundred years ago, what would we even be talking about?” And the answer, my research indicated, was a bit of philology, but mainly biography: looking at how a story might have been shaped by events in the author’s life, how it might have been influenced by other authors the creator of the work had been reading at the time, and so forth. To my curriculum professor, still stuck on the New Criticism’s insistence that all this be swept aside, this approach to literature was anathema. But the text I used to prompt a discussion about these topics was Cat’s Eye, a book recommended to me by Katherine Morayati, which challenges this notion directly. It’s about an painter who transmutes the events of her life into art, with every element of each piece carrying deep personal meaning, only to find that her adoring audience doesn’t actually care about her at all—they just like to use her art as a track on which to run their own hobbyhorses. A literary work is indeed an assemblage of words, as the New Critics contended, but it is also a human being’s attempt to communicate with other human beings, and to take steps to erase the author from consideration in discussing a work is to dismiss the importance of this aspect of literature. We were actually doing psychoanalytic criticism when I assigned Frankenstein; I was hoping that my students might be able to read the monster’s account of his first days of life and find parallels with Freud’s stages of development and Lacan’s mirror stage. Mary Shelley makes the case that a better way to think about the novel is as the work of a young woman who had known little more than loneliness, abandonment, and loss, using the story of Victor Frankenstein and his creature to speak to us about loneliness, abandonment, and loss. My opening (and, it turned out, closing) presentation was an attempt to suggest the same.
 |
 |
 |
 |
||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Tumblr |
this site |
Calendar page |
|||