Brazen serpents for Students of Literature (General Sources for Literary Study)

Moses erects the brazen serpent
to heal the snake-bitten Israelites

Students of literature need to have clear, familiar, and occasionally miraculous sources for help. They need brazen serpents to which to turn. Do you have yours?

Numbers 21:6-9 tells the story of the Israelites getting bitten by fiery serpents. Their cure: a serpent made of brass that Moses affixed to a pole. The bitten could simply look toward the brazen serpent and they would be healed.

I didn't know that story, nor how it could apply to literary study, until I was slogging my way through Shakespeare for the first time in my 9th grade English class at Brighton High School. The teacher, Richard McAllister, had us read Julius Caesar aloud in class. We'd come across a word, like "carrion" and give him that blank stare that only a 14-year old can give.

"Where is your brazen serpent?" he would intone, maybe even looking upward.

We had no idea what he meant. So he would sigh and open the dictionary, read to us that "carrion" meant "dead carcass" and back we'd go to Shakespeare. We'd hit another word like "betimes." Again, the blank stare from us, and again Mr. McAllister sighing and looking up woefully to ask, "Where is your brazen serpent?"

Finally, one of us got brave enough actually to get up, go to the back of the room and consult the huge dictionary from the shelf. "Betimes" meant "at once." Over time, we got better at being "betimes" in seeking the brazen serpents we needed. Going to the effort to consult a worthy source would earn the student what Mr. McAllister called "anti-philistine points." We had to look up "Philistine" to realize getting anti-philistine points was actually a good thing. But we could, now, because we knew at least one reliable brazen serpent to which to turn--the dictionary.

The dictionary is a core source for literary study, but certainly not the only "brazen serpent" to which one may turn. I'd like to introduce just a few.

Nine Ways of Developing a Literary Analysis

As my literature students are grappling with drafting their analyses of various literary works, I want to help them do so by suggesting some concrete ways by which they can develop an analysis. In a finished essay, the analysis portion should be tightly ordered in support of a central argument. However, during the drafting process, analysis really has to be less organized. The clearest expression of ideas often emerges from a critical mass of meaningful mess.

What follows are directions for making that mess (and making it meaningful). It may seem strange to emphasize messiness, but I want my students to feel comfortable in letting their provisional writing be much less ordered and clear than their finished literary arguments. I am not at all pulling back from the need to move from fuzzy ideas to clear claims. I strongly believe students should arrive quickly at a working thesis statement and circulate that claim for early feedback (as described in my previous post).

But a working thesis statement does not a finished paper make. And even though a good thesis statement provides a kind of outline for developing one's complete argument, that outline can at first feel pretty sparse.  A working thesis works if it does work -- and often that work is a meaningful return to the texts so that one can support and improve that claim.

A messy mass is needed during drafting because you need stuff through which your thesis can take its evolving shape. You need something that you can revise and order into a more detailed outline for a finished paper. You need some meaningful accumulation of relevant material. Here, then, are some starting places for the student who is already into his or her topic, but who still needs to do the heavy lifting of coming up with stuff to say in their evolving analysis.

From Ideas to Claims in Literary Analysis

Literature provokes thought. It animates discussion. It brings people into conversations that require us to discern what we mean and defend what we think.

Our writing about literature should have the same effect. This is why we need to move from the informal and somewhat aimless nature of "response" to the incisive and decisive mode of a persuasive claim. In short, students of literature need to learn how to evolve their responses to literature into compelling thesis statements.

Here's how:

Is it Nonfiction? Is it Creative Nonfiction?

As my students study creative nonfiction this week it has raised certain issues of classification. Some things are not very clearly either fictional or nonfictional. Which are they, and does this matter? Other works are clearly not fictional, but just because they are nonfiction, does this mean they are literary? I pose these examples as problem cases:

Personal Essay: In an Open Field, Near a Gravel Pit

I had a wonderful English teacher at Brighton High School in Salt Lake City, Susannah Kesler. She was one of those special educators who cared equally about words and about us students. She took the time to review with me multiple drafts of the short essay below (which finally appeared in a student journal in 1982, Runes).

As I stayed after school to review each version, she was encouraging but demanding. She made me be accountable for each and every one of this essay's 773 words, weeding out the extraneous adjective and pinning down the core of my experience with just the right image, just the right rhythm in the phrasing. She required of me an almost religious respect for expression and for the rigors of revision. As I complied with her coaching, the writing became more authentic, more interesting to me. I felt connected to things bigger than myself as the little experience I was relating achieved focus, shape, and depth. I realized the joy of being a writer. 

What a beautiful thing it is to discover the poetry of prose, the power of personal expression, and the way literature connects people. The writing of this essay made as much of an impression on me as the experience I describe in that open field. 

Thank you, Miss Kesler.

Creative Nonfiction - An Introduction

Here's a quick overview of the genre of literature known as creative nonfiction.

For the longest time, literature proper (at times termed belles lettres) has been restricted to poetry, drama, and fiction. But it's become clear over time that much writing that falls outside of these kinds of imaginative writing still possesses qualities valued from the more traditional literature. In short, something need not be fictional to have aesthetic appeal. There is a refreshing variety of such literature.

The personal essay is the most prominent genre of creative nonfiction. But even it is part of a larger category which we might call life writing. That category includes not only the personal essay, but also autobiography and biography, as well as memoir.

Phillip Lopate's anthology, The Art of the Personal Essay, is a good starting place for exploring personal essays. In autobiography, one can go back to St. Augustine's Confessions or to The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, and contemporary examples include Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes or Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat, Pray, Love. A classic biography is Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson, and a well written contemporary biography is David McCullough's John Adams.

Annotating a Poem for Analysis

How can annotating a poem lead to interesting literary criticism?

I recently required my literature students to analyze a pair of poems for an exam. They were to write out the poems by hand and then annotate these as a step in their analysis. Those annotations typically took one of two forms:

1. Simple identification of ideas or formal elements
2. Attempts at interpreting or synthesizing

The first of these is a very primary level of analysis and reflects one's ability to understand and represent the content (paraphrase) or to identify basic components of literary form (character, setting, diction, rhythm, rhyme, imagery, metaphor, repetition, figures of speech, etc.). The trick is to move from the first to the second of these levels (on the way to more developed literary arguments). Here are some examples.

Emerging Genres of Video Poetry

As poetry intersects with online video, we are seeing the emergence of new hybrid genres. Here is an attempt at surveying those genres. But before I get to my categories, I invite you to dive in and watch a video poem. Later on, at the end, I will come back to it for analysis. If you don't watch the rest of the sample video poetry in this post, watch this one. It matters. And it's done so very well. It's called "To This Day" and it is by Shane Koyczan:

To This Day from To This Day on Vimeo.

Without any analysis, I think it fair to say that a video like this proves that poetry is more than alive and well online in video form today. It's actually quite amazing. What did you think made it work so well?

Astronauts and the Otherworldliness of Poetry

I just tweeted to an astronaut.

He probably won't tweet back, since he's busy getting ready to return to earth tonight (which I plan to watch). But I had to thank him for pioneering the use of poetry in space. He has done the first-ever zero-G music video -- aptly performing David Bowie's "Space Oddity":

This is fascinating on many levels, but let me say a few words about how this represents a minor triumph for poetry -- something more than a mere publicity stunt. Let's think for a minute about how poetry itself has always been otherworldly.

The Personal Literary Narrative

Example of a personal literary narrative

My previous post, "Fully Empowered by Poetry," models a hybrid genre I wish for my students to imitate: the personal literary narrative.

This type of writing is a combination of three kinds of writing:

1. The personal essay
   It is framed as a personal narrative, and not as a detached academic analysis. It emphasizes individual perspective and attempts to convey the emotion of authentic, lived experience.
2. Literary criticism
   At the same time, integrated within this reflective piece, is literary analysis which fulfills the traditional function of literary criticism: it identifies and interprets both literary methods and themes -- form and content.
3. The blog post
   It has the casualness, brevity, and immediacy of online writing. It also is visually composed, with an accompanying image and text that is set off and spaced for easy consumption. This writing is also embedded in social media (links to the post were disseminated via Google+ and via Facebook, and these elicited immediate responses -- see below). 

Screenshot from my Google+ stream, showing quick response to post

Screenshot from my Facebook stream, showing responses
(see "likes" below)

Fully Empowered by Poetry

This is the story of the literary moment that changed me forever. And it centers on a single poem by Pablo Neruda that I stumbled across thirty years ago.

We will never have any memory of dying.

We were so patient
about our being, 
noting down
numbers, days,
years and months,
hair, and the mouths we kiss,

I was 17, taking a college course over the summer at the University of Utah while still in high school. In the bookstore I came across Pablo Neruda's Fully Empowered (from his Plenos Poderes of 1962), a slim volume with the Spanish in a thin column on the left page and Alastair Reid's fine translation on the right. The first poem I opened to was called "Births" ("Nacimientos").

and that moment of dying
we let pass without a note -
we leave it to others as memory,
or we leave it simply to water,
to water, to air, to time.

This poem cast a spell on me, starting off tamely enough as a kind of philosophical musing, taking us outside of time to a place where birth and death are somehow both nostalgically distanced and personally proximate.

Ten Prompts for Blogging About Literature

Use a quotation

• as a post title (if brief)
• to provoke thought at the start of your post
• set off in the post with the block quote feature (or a larger font or different color)
• or post a set of quotes (not too long or too many) (example 1 | 2)

Tell a story

• about finding that great read
• about a book's influence on you
• about being read to aloud
• about reading as a child or to a child
• about a specific copy of a favorite book

Write a review

• in one sentence / in 140 characters (tweet)
• as a list of adjectives
• copied from your Goodreads
• targeted to a specific audience
• as a parody

Use a picture

• show your own stack of books or your bookshelf
• show yourself curled up with a book
• take a snap of a page from your book (with your notes? example)
• find a picture via Creative Commons related to your book's content
• show a screen shot of your Goodreads library shelves

The Utility of Poetry for Dentistry

While my son underwent the filling of two cavities today, the dentist asked me what I've been reading. I told him how I'd just begun teaching an introductory course in literature and how excited I was to cover a range of works with a fresh group of students.

He recited a ballad to us
as he filled two cavities for my son

This led to him telling us about how he learned some poetry from Mad Magazine back in the day, an odd remix of "Casey at Bat" and Edgar Allen Poe's "The Raven." He even left my son with the suction running so he could ferret through his office to try to find me a copy of the poem. He'd kept it all these years.

"Has learning poetry made your life better?" I asked, fishing for some nugget to take back to my students.

"Do you know how many laughs I've gotten from reciting poetry?!"

And that led, inevitably, to his recounting the story of being a missionary in the South and coming across some toothless 95-year old man spitting tobacco into a can who recited to him the ballad of "Elmer and the Bear." Mark furiously wrote it down in a notebook and memorized it.

My son was late getting back to class because of Elmer. Our dentist took enormous pleasure at reciting the entire thing. He seriously stopped working and relished delivering the lines -- laughing behind his mask. His assistant patiently waited, with a look on her face like she'd heard this ballad a few times before.

So here's the kicker. My teenage son had been pretty down in the mouth, so to speak, about getting these cavities filled. One might even say he was surly. But by the time Dr. Fullmer had finished his bear ballad, my son was smiling.

Yep, literature is equipment for living.

Let's Analyze Literature

This blog is intended to assist students, teachers, and anyone who wishes to appreciate literature on those levels only available to those who study it closely.

The title of this blog is pun, a kind of wordplay that plays off of separate meanings for the same word. "Coming to terms" is meant literally, in the sense that this blog will invite its readers to learn terminology for literary analysis. "Coming to terms" is also meant idiomatically in the sense of "dealing with" or "being equal to" something. Another connotation for "coming to terms" is resigning oneself to something. Well, not every connotation is going to work in your favor.

There are risks in using literary form. But there are also risks in ignoring it, falling prey to superficial or even abusive uses of language and art. I'm in favor of becoming more aware of and skilled in literary method. This is one reason why I have created this blog, as well as its subsidiary blogs that my students will be maintaining:

• Coming to Terms with Fiction
• Coming to Terms with Poetry
• Coming to Terms with Drama
• Coming to Terms with Creative Non-Fiction

In this blog I will address more general issues about analyzing literature and the methods of writing informally or more formally about it. In the breakout blogs, features of each category of literature will receive more specialized treatment by my students.