My teacher in my sophomore year in high school turned me on to Faulkner and the later works of Melville, and then followed me as I read Coover and Pynchon. In my history class, I was allowed to pen a term paper on the history of postmodern fiction in post-WWII American literature entitled (with all the possible pretension of a teenage litterateur) "Zeus Lands in Brooklyn." Guess it all depends on the teacher. [Brian]
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It was not as much what they were saying, but what they were NOT saying [on NPR]. The selectiveness of their reporting apparently aimed to provide "factual content" to the American morality play and leaving everything else out. If they reported on an issue, only the pro-business, pro-establishment voices were heard - I never heard a voice of, say, a labor union rep. When they reported on a foreign country, they would report only how American they are or want to be and ignore everything else. They were a more insidious propaganda tool than say, Glen Beck's babbling. [Wojtek]
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Maybe it's just me. Does anybody else see how the two quotes are related? The first is about learning (maybe resisting) the national mythos and the second is having the same mythos fed back in to the public mind and definitely resisting it.
While I was going through this pretty interesting thread, I was just thinking, okay mister knowitall (meaning me), what would you teach if you had to be an English teacher? Well in the Dante system of justice.
I'd probably use short stories, survey of selected chapters of longer works, and plays. HS and the first years of college, most students really haven't developed their reading, writing, and thinking skills. I'd also encourage students to write a daily journal of whatever they want, around some general subject, like what I did today, that wasn't too personal. Personal would be good, but usually kids are too scared to write what they really think and do. This is a lesson in itself. Because there is a certain ethic about writing truthfully, which is a very hard standard to match in practice. It is deeply involved in the art and revolution dialectic, which is still a lifetime worth of thinking and writing about for me.
Another personal problem I have is exactly what is left out of most American education, which amounts to the voices of the common and nameless people of the country who have actually created the country we have---for better or worse. These are, in my opinionated way, the true voices of history. It's only been in the last couple of centuries we have those records to draw on to write history.
I was extremely struck by Walt Whittman's naming of the soldiers, their companies, and hometowns in his daily civil war journals when he worked at the Patent Offices in DC as an orderly. I had been an orderly and I understood the way you can get attached to your work and the people. You want to tell their stories because some how you've never read as good stories as they have to tell.
Anyway, so taking that observation, that's part of what you want to develop in students who might want to be writers. Chances are good they have stories to tell. They just don't know it. It's a kind of art sales job. It's those stories that you want to become the history of the people---a combo of Studs Turkle and Howard Zinn. These amount to what Wojtek's complaint is about---what's left out.
So how do you teach something like that so it reproduces itself? This relates to the photo essay Sandy Harris posted today.
So what I've thought of doing is going back over the US canon and picking work that has as close a connection as I could find to the common voice. The earliest I know about (somebody, add or subtract some names to the list). The earliest would be Thoreau and the stories from Maine camping out with loggers going up river to cut down the forests. It's very hard and dangerous work.
Next I would pick Melville and several sections of Moby Dick to illustrate what I think that epic novel was about. I have most of Melville, but haven't read it yet. Then would come Stephan Crane and his New York City short stories at the height of the immigration period with tentements and slums. I should probably read his stories from Central America and Cuba. I would also use Hemingway and a very early collection of Faulkner short stories he wrote just after WWI. At that point Faulkner was playing around with language at the level of soldiers dialogue from different parts of the English speaking world. After that, I'd re-go through some of the second generation Jewish American writers like Henry Roth, Call it Sleep. This is a tough going book, but the pay off is great for the effort. I read it in 1964 when Irving Howe reviewed it and brought it back. Some I forgot were John Steinbeck, Upton Sinclair, etc. Then some of the emerging Black writers, James Baldwin, Langston Huges, some sections from the first biography of Malcom X, Soul on Ice is a pretty good on getting out of prison, etc. I read a review of the latest X biography and evidently its in some critical-political dispute. I've never read WEB Du Bois and should...I haven't been through the Mexican American writers like Fuentes et al. snd probably should.
What's the point. These were important parts of my radical education. I read most of them outside of school. A fair number involve some sex and were kept off HS reading lists. Some involve stereotyping and are involved in various political battles going on in the lit crit world.
I forgot Mark Twain too. Put him in there somewhere. He's been badly balderized. Oh god. I just remember I read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn when I was still mostly a kid, thirteen something. And I distinctly remember if this is a representative sample of a boy's life, I am glad I have my own to struggles to remember. Where are the sex scenes?
Later I got in a big argument with my best stepfather who was also an English teacher (that I loved. He followed Wojtek's model, English as a second language, where he taught in Tokyo) and had been a struggling writer in his US days. He loved Twain.
I later figured it out. The reason was that MOC grew up in the Mason-Dixon Mississippi states as a poor white trash kid in 1930s and the life that Twain sort of sketches was close enough for MOC to write a short story tribute work on his own boyhood hanging out at drunken gambling joints on the river where his dad earned a living as a card shark and petty con man. MOC looked after his slightly younger brother Charlie (my given name) because their mother was working as a waitress. The true grit stories I wish now I could have gotten out of MOC. They were of Irish immigrant background somewhere in the way back and kept the famed Irish drinking, gambling, fucked-up home life, lots of sex suppressed Catholic bullshit---the whole stereotype. I've got a picture of him as an old man standing next to O'Connell bridge in Dublin or somewhere in Ireland.
There is a reason they call them stereotypes, well because on average they are ofter true than not? Naw. It depends on which stereotype you look at. Was it that of the master or that of the slave? If you look at the master's account everybody but him was a lousey fuck off. And the slave's account tells you it's the master who was the fuck off sitting on the porch drinking mint juleps while they work their asses off sweating into dehydration on some version of the chain gang. Since I've never been a master, I tend to favor the chain gang narrative.
And so you don't get me wrong. I am still bitter about not making master class. The pay is better, the drinking is more fun.
Material causation effect. I just turned in my second invoice for doing essentially nothing---which means everything I enjoy---for another month. This is just too good to last. There will be hell to pay, but not today.
Better mail this before my third martinis...
CG