Monday, Jun. 09, 2003
Thematic vs. Chronological, again, posted at 8:50 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com Sorry I'm getting all teacher-y on you lately, but it's what's on my mind right now. I figure it's better than whiny entries about broken hearts and the girl who stomped on them.Much of what I post I originally sent out to the ncte (National Council of Teachers of English) list tonight.
Our department is still currently in the middle of a big debate about whether to frame our American Lit. course as chronological or thematic.
I'm still vehemently on the thematic side, myself. Thematically linked works can be presented chronologically, if that's what the teacher wants, but I believe thematic is better than chronological for a couple of reasons:
1. It's English, not History. I believe the only reason teachers are inclined to teach American literature chrnologically is because they know more American history than other world histories. However, by teaching an English course as something of a history course, we will invariably skip over LOTS. In my experience, the big works of American Lit as studied chronologically are, in order, the following: Scarlet Letter, Thoreau, Huck Finn, and Great Gatsby. Occasionally they'll actually be a woman like Willa Cather in the there, but usually it's works set in 1650, then 1860, then 1920. There might be some Native American myths thrown in there at the beginning (which, in my mind, if not studied with contemporary Native works, only reinforce stereotypes that Native Americans are a dead people that talk about deer and nature a lot), and some Founding Fathers documents, and maybe even they'll pair Huck Finn with some study of Frederick Douglass... but you're still not going to get it all. Those works take so damn long to study, anyway, and you tend to skip decades or even centures of work (very rarely will something from the 18th century be studied, for example).
2. Authors of color and women authors are rare for the first few centuries of American History, and more contemporary works are often "rushed in" with a feel of tokenism or not studied at all. Proponents of the chronological approach for American Lit argue that students can see the American voice form; I think it really only shows one particular (DWM) voice. This also causes many contemporary white authors to be pushed out of curriculum with the emphasis placed on Morrison or Cisneros, for example. I like both of them, but bringing one of them out to be representative writer/novel of the post-Catcher in the Rye literary era seems a disservice. A thematic approach allows for selections from the canon, as well as modern works, without any attempt to cover all of American Lit - an attempt that is doomed to failure from the beginning because of the impossibility of doing it over one high school course.
Philosophical comment - The study of literature is the search for what is true about life. It is not dependent on time, nor place. Hamlet should be a riveting play whether or not students know who Shakespeare is or what the globe theater looks like. Celie from The Color Purple is one of the most unforgettable characters in literature not because of the racism felt by black people in the 1920s, but because she stands on her own. A piece of writing should not depend on the time, place, gender, etc. That can help the understanding of a piece of literature, but it shouldn't be crucial. If we say that it is crucial, the next thing we really say is that "everything is relative," which is the same as saying "nothing is true." A hero is a hero no matter their century, and a bad book is a bad book no matter if it's written in 1492 or in 2003. I think one of the goals of literary study is to find the essence of what is true, something the defies historical circumstances. One theme, perhaps explored from a multitude of perspectives and cultures and points of view, might be more rewarding, then trying to get from Phyllis Wheatley to Sapphire.