Teaching Literature in Times of Crisis

Sofia Ahlberg

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781000396225
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism History & Theory
• Index: Literature

Teaching Literature in Times of Crisis looks at the range of different crises currently affecting students – from climate change and systemic racism, to the global pandemic.

Addressing the impact on students' ability and motivation to learn as well as their emotional wellbeing, this volume guides teachers toward strategies for introducing both canonical and contemporary literature in ways that demonstrate the future relevance of sophisticated and targeted literacy skills. These reading practices are invaluable for framing and critically examining the challenges associated with crisis in order to help cope with grief and as a means to impart the skills needed to deal with crisis, such as adaptability, flexibility, resilience, and resistance. Providing necessary background theory, alongside practical case studies, the book addresses:

• Reading practices for demonstrating how literature explores ethical issues in specific and concrete rather than abstract terms
• Making connections between disparate phenomena, and how literature mobilises affect in individual and collective human lives
• Supporting teachers in considering new, imaginative ways students can learn from literary content and form in online or remote learning environments as well as face to face
• Combining close and distant reading with creative and hands-on strategies, presenting the principles of a transitional pedagogy for a world in flux.

This book introduces teachers to methods for reading and studying literature with the aim of strengthening and promoting resilience and resourcefulness in and out of the literature classroom and empower students as global citizens with local roles to play.

1

Case study one

Discovering the weird and the wonderful in a changing world

Texts: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland; Parable of the Sower; Southern Reach trilogy

In this case study I bring Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland into proximity with Octavia E. Butler’s speculative fiction, Parable of the Sower and New Weird author Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy. Though the works span more than 150 years, they offer didactic opportunities to speak to a post-anthropocentric age. They question hegemony and normativity, they encourage critique and systems thinking through the adaptation of myth and storytelling, they also confront rational thought with alternative logics. In this case study, I show how literary analysis can further an appreciation of complexity – “staying with the trouble” (Haraway). Specifically, I show through student participation techniques, collaborative reading, and writing, how literacy, including critical and creative thinking, plays an important role in improving knowledge about how to adapt to new challenges. Literacy, broadly speaking, and sophisticated reading practices are integral to the development of the reading skills needed in a classroom that can adapt to a rapidly changing environment. This method of reading creates a fluctuating and flexible space for closely reading texts in dialogue with one another and the world of the reader. As will be seen, I read these texts as quest narratives not necessarily to define them as such but rather in order to affirm to student readers in times of crisis that they can see themselves as embarked on a quest and that their reading is part of this.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll’s well-known children’s fantasy begins during a time of leisurely boredom for Alice that is soon interrupted by the first of a series of very strange encounters. While sitting with her sister on a riverbank, wondering if it is worth her while getting up to collect daisies for a daisy chain, Alice sees a rather anxious White Rabbit hurrying off to goodness knows where. Without a moment’s hesitation, Alice follows him into a rabbit-hole. What happens next concurs with the experience of many people during an accident or other emergency when the passage of time seems to slow down. Almost immediately, Alice is falling vertically down a deep well and yet this takes place in such slow motion that she can observe with curiosity the sights she sees as she descends while also reflecting on several other matters as well. She tries to apply the geography she has learnt at school to determine if she might fall right through the earth. It is significant for this case study that, although Alice wonders what her present latitude or longitude is, she “had not the slightest idea what Latitude was, or Longitude either” (5).

Even in the early stage of her adventures – crises marked by curiosity or wonder more than anxiety – Alice’s lack of accurate bearings means she applies the principle of heading for the open-ended spaces of the unknown. In this, she employs Langer’s principle of “horizons of possibility” rather than simply building on what she knows. Her quest, so to speak, is for what she has little inkling of. Also of interest for us, Alice soon discovers that throughout her adventures she will need to adapt her scale or stature to fit into the situations she wishes to explore, the means to do so always fortuitously appearing when needed. This is a reminder that one cannot expect to endure the passage through a crisis without undergoing significant changes in oneself. This feature of crisis becomes evident soon after Alice begins to explore the strange world around her when she reaches a double impasse. First, she enters a hall full of locked doors and a tiny key that fits none of them and then she notices a tiny door that will open but that she cannot fit through. She knows she needs to be smaller but has no idea how to become so (8–9). A feature of the bizarre situations that confront her is that they awaken in her a belief in unheard-of capabilities – such as shrinking and growing so as to be able to fully enter into the world she discovers down the rabbit-hole.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland provokes questions to do with scale and knowledge or, more precisely, how to chart a course for the unknown. A crisis can make us feel bewilderingly small or, for that matter, disconcertingly large, even though our actual size remains the same – and it can render everything we think we know rather insignificant in the light of the changes it brings. I was once in conversation with a colleague about the #MeToo movement and we concluded that the recognition gained by it has made us, as female, middle-aged scholars feel vindicated, a little taller and stronger, more capable of entering into a new stage of debate on and activism for women’s rights. Conversely, so many aspects of the climate change crisis make many people feel small and powerless. However, Alice’s adventures teach us that strange new events do not happen independently of us as observers – they bring with them reasons and pressure for us to adapt, either for or against.

Recent years have been about both growing and shrinking, and not only in ourselves but also in the scale of our endeavours. In times of crisis, there is probably no point in aiming for that familiar “aha-moment” when the teacher dazzles the students by revealing a particular interpretation of a passage or a stanza as if the text encodes a deep secret and the teacher is an oracle. When exploring the unknown, such moments do not ring true since the idea of a singular reading, no matter how brilliant, narrows the field of possibilities too much. While being a valid method in itself, it is unnecessarily goal-oriented, like decoding a treasure map to find where X marks the spot where the booty is buried. A crisis does not contain a solution that someone has hidden beforehand. Rather, there may be many solutions, and many that can work together with others. Finding them requires imagination to work with what is at hand often while putting it to unfamiliar uses. To take an example, in conversation with the Cheshire Cat, when Alice declares, “I don’t want to go among mad people,” it is tempting to read the exchange that follows as a simple indictment of the human species as a whole:

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad.”

“How do you know I’m mad?” said Alice.

“You must be,” said the Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here.”

(90)

An eco-critical response to this passage would likely conclude that we must be mad since it “raises the question of whether a rational species would choose to get to the point where it is addicted to growth, consumption and other patterns of thinking and action that ultimately threaten its very own existence” (Milne et al. 802–803). I wonder, how helpful is such an observation in a crisis situation? However insightful this reading may be, it keeps to the already known binary of sane–mad to advance a proposition that is hardly controversial and not nearly playful enough.

By reading the Cheshire Cat’s remark straightforwardly as above, the unsurprising take-home message is that you, the student or reader, are mad because you are part of the problem. However, to develop resilience and resourcefulness in students during times of upheaval, we often need to eschew the overly familiar and invite further complexity on a much broader scale. In contrast to making a familiar critique of the human, one could look for something that is more of a provocation, a response to the Cheshire Cat that is more likely to offer the student the encouragement to find a range of alternative paths in place of a simple right-or-wrong fork in the road. Apart from that, the untroubled and playful tone of Lewis Carroll’s story reminds me that to be able to conduct teaching at all in times of crisis might seem to beg the question, What crisis? I mean, if there are classes being run, and texts (admittedly, some rather sombre ones too, not just Alice’s Adventures) and above all time to engage in the study of literature, then surely at least those of us involved in such pursuits are not actually facing a crisis. Well, to get a strongly worded answer to that question I could just ask some of my students.

As I have mentioned, a feature of our times is that students often themselves raise serious doubts as to the relevance of literary studies, or any schooling at all – the school strikes for the climate have taught us this. But to address the fact that the relative calm of a seminar room seems to belie a state of crisis, we need only recollect the lessons taught by Timothy Morton and Rob Nixon. They both refer to global calamities that exist presently and affect every person on earth now and for generations to come but, either because of their vast spatial distribution (“hyperobject”) or the glacial slowness of their onset (“slow violence”), they are almost impossible for most of us to see. And there are crises that should be there for all to see, such as racism and injustice, but that nevertheless are overlooked in public discourse until movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter bring them more starkly into view.

There is a strong case to be made for the value of literary studies to be taught during crises and it has to do with how storytelling cannot be silenced by crisis and nor can stories be erased. On the contrary, in times of turmoil there are more stories not fewer, and the one thing they all have in common is that they insist on being heard and for this they demand that we take the time to attend to them. To put it in Alice-in-Wonderland terms: instead of falling headlong down the bottomless well of a crisis, to take heed of stories and seek out their counsel is actively to slow down our response to crisis rather than feed its flames.

The playfulness of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland allows me to be comfortable with a degree of confusion as to what it might all mean, and this frees me to embark on a joint adventure with my students. The novel ludicrously juxtaposes the imperious Queen of Hearts and her terrified courtiers with Alice and other subversives (such as the Cheshire Cat) and is thus a light-hearted text dealing with how to sidestep real anxiety. Like Alice, I am mostly ignorant of the forces that cause a crisis to break out, yet I too follow a trail that seems relevant to me, even though I do not know from the outset fully how it is relevant. I glimpse what I don’t quite know rushing past me like a White Rabbit anxiously announcing how late it is. For whom is time short? For what might it be running out? Readings vary depending on what one makes of the Rabbit. Before rushing to any conclusion, I want to investigate the matter with my students. I apply some pacing to the Lewis Carroll seminar by setting up a primer for students ahead of a shared discussion, portioning out the seminar time to include this pre-seminar activity. For the primer I post this question for them to mull over:

“Imagine noticing #OhdearOhdearIshallbelate starting to trend on some of your feeds. Before you investigate online, you think about what it might refer to. What do you come up with?”

They are invited to record their answers in words/image/sound on a Padlet page simply accessed via phone or computer and immediately shared with the rest of the class. During the days before the seminar, I’m delighted when someone posts, “I never feel there is enough time any more – how can we slow down?” I respond by pointing out that the opening pages of Alice’s Adventures deal with speed and slowness and suggest that the group do a close reading looking for what can be learned from Alice’s slow-motion fall.

Questions emerge from student discussions. I offer questions as well. What is important is that a resourceful way to think about crisis is that it can be imbued with a spirit of quest. And let’s not forget that quest is at the root of the word question and questions are usually more important than answers when tackling the unknown. Is there some part of nature that feels time is short? Does Alice feel it? What does the speed of life have to do with power structures? These reflections become a way of linking learning about literature to our experience of the world and to get an increased understanding of how the two are entwined, or even networked. I take the students through the point I made just now about how stories insist that we slow down enough to focus on them. What do we fill the time with when this happens? I get some responses: critical thinking, pleasure of being entertained. Not everyone in the class is highly vocal so I’m pleased when some time after the face-to-face session ends I see the Padlet still receiving further responses to this.

In order to explore the quest motif in literature, I introduce students to the compare the quest activity in which I present them with a list of standard features of quest narrative so that they can assess any possibly quest-like characteristics of the text we are studying. You can compile your own list; I have adapted mine from one supplied by Jenny Grahame and Kate Oliver in their teaching compendium for Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games. In their exercise, they instruct students to note down how the quest motif is treated in that novel. The following are among the features of the quest narrative that are particularly pertinent to crisis, especially because they underscore both the challenges and rewards of change:

• A problem forces the hero (usually male) to set off on a journey with a specific goal
• The goal is a reward or a prize, often a magical object. This can be something new, or it can be something that was stolen from the hero
• The hero enters an extraordinary world, a land of adventures, tests and magical awards
• The hero brings back the prize or reward

(Grahame and Oliver 15)

Students may post reflections in a shared Google Doc or any other collaborative tool. Unsurprisingly, someone notes that Alice is female, though this does not much resemble a feminist tale and she does not have a specific goal. I point out that the absence of a goal might align the story more with an open-ended quest. We discuss this possibility – that one might be in quest for something one knows not what. Apart from that, there is general agreement that Alice seems to be on a quest because she enters a land of adventures. However, the story doesn’t seem to contain a clearly defined prize or reward that Alice brings back with her. Add to this the fact that the “problem” at the start of Alice’s adventures is merely boredom, which is not a very heroic spur to action. It occurs to me then that an often-discussed stage of crisis is when the public lose interest in it because they have been overwhelmed with stories about the problem. Boredom within a seemingly interminable crisis is itself a separate problem and – without needing to imagine what Alice’s initial crisis might have been – it is possible to review her adventures as perfectly suited to dealing with this second-order crisis.

While their findings may indicate that the quest motif as a literary theme is less pertinent for reading Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the quest as a methodology is even more useful. One example of learning from the quest motif is found in the chapter “Advice from a Caterpillar” (59) and it is most suitable for close reading. Once again, size is at the heart of the conundrum here as the hookah-smoking caterpillar informs Alice that one side of the mushroom he is sitting on “will make you grow taller, and the other side will make you grow shorter” (68). The only problem is that a mushroom being circular has no sides and, even if it did, Alice is not told which produces what effect. This lack of coordinates for reading the world recalls Alice’s earlier ignorance of latitude and longitude. This precipitates Alice’s courageous and arbitrary first step into the unknown followed by her undertaking a scientific investigation by which she samples both sides of the mushroom until she is satisfied that she shrinks when eating from her right hand and grows from her left hand. Her quest, in other words, was for a useful method of adapting to her surrounds and soon we hear Alice declare she has “got back to my right size” (74).

A few sentences more and the chapter concludes with Alice discovering a “four feet high” house that she believes will take her to “that beautiful garden” and thus she “began nibbling at the right-hand bit again, and did not venture to go near the house till she had brought herself down to nine inches high” (75). Students can be challenged further at this point. How does she know that she has reached the right size? Is there such a state as being the “correct” size (or one correct approach) especially during times of crisis? Instead, circumstances demand that one adapts to each encounter. The quest methodology provokes an ongoing inquiry that does not have a halting point. And it emerges that one of the awards that comes from the quest is the fact of Alice’s having proven that she is up to the problems encountered through her demonstrated resilience and ability to adapt. In a crisis, knowledge sometimes matters less than knowing how to comport oneself. If an unknown remains an unknown we have nevertheless developed ways of dealing with it. Thus readers of the quest methodology in Alice will develop a tolerance of error and understand the value of forgiveness. This also has a lot to do with embracing the principle of change, as seen in the next novel. Change is sometimes felt to be a problem whereas upsetting of the status quo is inevitable and not necessarily negative.

Parable of the Sower

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (2000[1993]) is more obvio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Case study one: Discovering the weird and the wonderful in a changing world
• 2. Case study two: What the coming-of-age story teaches us about the Anthropocene
• 3. Case study three: Things to do with the canon in the classroom
• 4. Case study four: Modern again: tell it from the scars
• 5. Wider contexts: Twenty-first-century skills and competencies
• Bibliography
• Index