One of the most difficult aspects of teaching any literature class is determining that meaning of the work as a whole, that larger insight into the experience of being human, the truth-bomb the author's dropping in their text for us to pick up.
Readers struggle with this part because they (like all of us) want easy answers. The problem is that genuinely good literature....is not about that. It's not about easy answers. It's not there to make you comfortable. In fact, quite the opposite. This portion is largely for teachers for lecture material, though obviously students are welcome to this page as well. |
Consider this excerpt from Sylvia Plath's poem "Cut":
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Cut
What a thrill - My thumb instead of an onion. The top quite gone Except for a sort of hinge Of skin, A flap like a hat, Dead white. Then a red plush. |
The Problem
What's Wrong With Those?
The Solution: Embrace the Weird
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Avoid the Comfortable Cliché
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One of the larger issues students face when they're trying to find the MOWAW (the Meaning of the Work as a Whole) is that they stick to conventional ideas and conclusions. This isn't surprising--those ideas and conclusions "feel" right because a lot of people say them.
Here are some examples of old tried-and-true cliché ideas that might appeal (at first) to some students when they're looking for the MOWAW: |
Tired, Conventional Ideas (Definitely avoid putting these as a MOWAW!)
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But Wait! I've Been Hearing These Ideas All My Life. Why Aren't These Right?
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Great works of literature--and almost all works of literature of all kinds--exists to say something. They exist to tell you the author's truth, their understanding of How the World Works. They're not there necessarily to give you a moral as much as they are to give you the facts (as they see them) of universal human experience.
The problem with the clichés or the truisms or the this-isn't-news approaches is that we've all heard them before. We've heard them so often that we hardly pay attention to them. They're...boring. What's worse, they're usually superficial. For example, Family is the most important thing in life doesn't exactly match up with what we learn from Oedipus or Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf or even The Sopranos. |
Solution: Seek the Uncomfortable Truth
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A wise person once said that the purpose of literature is to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable. In other words, an effective piece of literature confirms the often-ugly, often-messy truths that have disturbed us. It also presents the comfortable among us with ideas that are far less comfortable--but maybe a bit more true.
Step One: Confront the Uncomfortable A student once asked me what I thought the MOWAW of the horror movie The Mist was. [MASSIVE SPOILERS FOLLOW] At the end of The Mist, a man is fleeing with his son and a small party of escapees from the horrifying, tentacular space creatures that have invaded Maine and are quickly eradicating all life. His car runs out of gas, stranding them below a slight rise. From the other side, they can hear horrifying sounds, almost certainly the approach of the tentacle creatures. The man makes the fraught and difficult decision to end the lives of those with him so that they will not suffer at the tentacles of the alien creatures. The sounds get closer and closer, and only the man is left...and then from over the hill come the Marines. Not the tentacle creatures. The man's sacrifice was completely in vain. If he'd just waited two more minutes... I realized when the student asked me what the MOWAW of The Mist was that I reaaaaaly wanted to shuffle away from that ending. I wanted to say something about making hard choices for the greater good or whatever, but...then the Marines show up. That's when I realized I had to embrace the part that made me feel uncomfortable. "Okay," I said, and admitted my own struggle. "I think the final lesson we get is that sometimes the sacrifices we make are in vain. We want them to be heroic, but they turn out to have been wrong." And yeah. That's a hard lesson--but it's also not a cliché. You won't see it on a motivational poster. Bottom line, you HAVE to embrace the uncomfortable truth or you'll miss the point. Or the tentacles. |
Example: Chapter 10 of Frankenstein
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In chapter 10 of Frankenstein, the Creature confronts his father/mother/creator Victor, whose first reaction to the Creature has been to run away in horror and dismay, leaving the Creature entirely alone in the world with his first experience being one of rejection.
1. "What's the Weird Part TO YOU?"
2. Then Follow Up
Then I'll ask them to write that idea down. And then tell them the news: They just found the MOWAW. 3. Troubleshooting
In short, they have to feel the experiences to understand the point. |