My methods

The Bean book is swell: it's intelligently and cleanly laid out, succinct, organized for maximum tool-grabbing. And it makes me feel good about my own teaching, because I'm already using many of the methods he advocates. The old head's not swelling, though – there's still plenty of stuff I'm not doing yet, or not doing well. So I'm going to organize this blog in two categories: methods I'm already using, and methods I'd like to try.

METHODS I'M ALREADY USING

• Writing at the beginning of class to probe a subject. One of my favorites.
  
• Guided journals. Also a standard of mine – I use guided freewrites at the beginning of class a lot. I used to collect journals, but found it too daunting to read all of them. These days, I don't collect them at all, and award my students participation credit for writing when I tell them to write. I like the idea of sampling, though – may have to try that.
  
• Double-entry notebooks. I use these for my own research, and I have my 101 students make 'em for their own research.
  
• Exploration tasks to guide "invention" for a formal writing assignment. Also use this one in 101. Great for idea-generation. However, one thing I need to do better with is teaching students how and why
  to do exploratory writing, since I've encountered resistance from the closure- and grade-oriented students like what Bean describes on pp. 99-100. I might just lift his tidy explanation of exploratory writing from pp. 101-02.
  
• Explanation of course concepts to new learners. I'm trying a variation of this one in my 402 class soon: small groups of students will each read a single chapter of the textbook, and then prepare a wiki and a short presentation to the class that summarize the useful concepts from that chapter. We'll see how it goes.
  
• Summaries or abstracts of articles. Always a good one for tough readings, especially in 101. I'm especially a fan of the one-sentence summary, and I'd like to try the 25-word précis.
  
• Using small groups for problem-posing, believing/doubting, norming, and workshops. Some of my most-used methods.
  
• Group papers. A staple of 402; an intriguing possibility for my Dream Course.
  
• Wikis. Not in Bean, obviously, but a method I'm trying to use more and more. I just used wikis in 402, having my students list advice on resumes and cover letters. I liked the idea that because there's so much advice on job application stuff out there – much of it contradictory – my students would have to research and think critically about which advice they wanted to follow. I don't think they were as happy as I was with this approach, though – I got the sense that they wanted me to just tell them how to write resumes and cover letters. Maybe I should have explained my purpose more thoroughly first. For my Dream Course, I'm toying with using a wiki as a course website, having my students discuss games and game analysis methods on it.
  

 

METHODS I WANT TO TRY

• Writing during class to refocus a lagging discussion or cool off a heated one. I like the idea of this, and I need to store it in my repertoire of "things to do when stuck" – a mental basket that's usually sparse or empty, because I'm better at planning than thinking on my toes.
  
• Writing at the end of class to sum up a lecture or discussion. I've done this a couple of times, and I like it: it keeps students working and thinking right up until the end of the period. Usually.
  
• Open-ended or semistructured journals. I'm going to have the students in my Dream Course keep a blog, and it'll essentially be a journal. I know it'll have some structure, but I haven't decided how much yet. My current thinking is that there'll be a consistent structure, something like, "Each week, you need to be playing games outside of class and blogging on your experiences. In your blog, you're welcome to write about whatever experiences, thoughts, and questions come to you, but I also want you to try applying the critical theories and methods we're reading and talking about in class to the games you're playing. Play with these tools – see how they work."
  
• Metaphor games, extended analogies. I don't quite know how I'd use this method, but it sounds like a lot of fun.
  
• Thesis statement writing. Bean's proud of this one, and I'm intrigued by his enthusiasm. It seems useful as a summary exercise, but I worry about students then thinking that all theses have to be just one sentence.
  
• Tasks linking course concepts to students' personal experience or previously existing knowledge. Scaffolding! I really need to do this more.
  
• Thesis support assignments. As Bean suggests, this method can be combined with small group debates. I can see it being really useful in my Dream Course – I can have students take part in some of the big game studies debates (e.g. whether games are games or stories).
  
• Problem-posing assignments. It should be obvious that this one's worth trying, since it's what we've been talking about in class. The tricky thing for me is coming up with the right problems – ones whose answer I'm not already committed to. Or maybe it's inevitable that I'll have answers to problems in my field, and thus I just have to keep from forcing my answers on my students and stifling their thinking.
  
• Assignments requiring role-playing of unfamiliar perspectives or imagining "what if" situations. This is another creative one that I'd like to try but am not quite sure how/when to try it.
  
• Cases and simulations. My 402 textbook – George Kennedy's – is chock-full of these, and I've been leery of using them because they're so long. I'm going to try one, though, in the next week. We'll see.
  
• Using small groups for question-generating. This seems like a great one for getting into a difficult text, and even for responding to a presentation. I'm going to try it in 402, where I have a lot of student presentations coming up.
  
• Using small groups for evidence-finding. This might be an interesting way to encourage research – I might try it in my Dream Course. Bean's note about giving students several days for this type of activity seems worth remembering.
  
• The metacognitive strategy. I really want to remember this one, because it seems like a brilliant way of responding to odd answers in class – something I'm not very good at (again, the thinking-on-toes deficiency).
  
• Various strategies for making groups work well together. Like the pre-teaching Bean does for exploratory writing, the stuff he tells his classes about group work – especially the "empathic listening," learning-style differences, "egothink" and "clonethink" – is the kind of stuff I need to spend more time with at the beginning of each semester. He's also right about how gender, race, nationality, etc. affect interactions, of course; but despite Bob Eddy's efforts in 501, I'm still not real confident about how to talk about this stuff with my students without encouraging essentialist thinking.
  
• Early in the course, hold a discussion about discussions. Same thoughts as above.
  
• Classroom debates. I've done this before, but I'm going to use Bean's handy debate structure on pp. 176-77 in the future.
  
• Fishbowls/paper presentations. I'd like to try these in my Dream Course as a combination… I'm thinking something like a conference panel discussion, in which a small group of students would present short, previously-prepared papers/presentations to each other, and discuss them.

Cowboys, Language, Power

Maybe it’s the effects of sitting in an airport on two hours of plane sleep, but the “language and power” section seems inappropriately named. Maybe it’s because language and power are pretty much the specialty of all English majors – whatever our subdisciplines – but this section, of all we’ve looked at so far in WLMA, has a title that’s too far-reaching. It needs narrowing. I realized after I finished all of the pieces in it that they’re really all about gender and language and power – a still-massive topic, but at least there’s one more circle thrown into this particular Venn diagram.

One question I could see tying these pieces together under would be: How do men use language to attempt assert power over women? “My Last Duchess” is full of that, of course, as is “Sweat” and of course Hamlet. However, the obvious corollary question – How do women resist men’s linguistic (and physical, and psychological, etc.) control over men? – is equally present in “Sweat” and “Gertrude Talks Back.” I especially liked how Hurston’s Delia essentially defeated Sykes through silence: she stands back, says nothing, and lets him bumble his way into the snake. (Couldn’t help but think of the trailer sequence in Kill Bill II, though I’m not sure if it relates significantly.) I really see Delia’s well timed silence resonating with Lorde’s arguments about speaking up. “Gertrude Talks Back” was hilarious. It’d be fun to bounce that off of Mel Gibson’s way Oedipal version of the Hamlet/Gertrude relationship.

Jane Tompkins’ essay was spectacular. There are so many good things to play with here, from the ways history is written (a new historicist could have a ball with this piece), to the ways museums either do or don’t culturally resonate, to the simultaneous love-and-dominance-of-nature, to genocide. Her passage on page 880 about hunters who are also conservationists described an interesting ideological paradox, and thanks to CNN’s incessant braying in the Houston airport,* I found out that this ideology still obtains today: as I was reading this passage, Mike Huckabee was giving a speech of Republican hunter types, claiming his subscription to this very belief. That speech would be a perfect little text to bounce off Tompkins’, though I’m not sure if the fact that Huckabee is soon to be a historical relic himself would make it more or less poignant. Back to Tompkins, the passage on the p. 881 about how, in museums, we “look at the objects in the glass cases and at the paintings on the wall, as if by standing there we could absorb in to ourselves some of the energy that flowed once through the bodies of the live things represented” rang very true to me, and reminded me of the Holocaust Museum. Which would resonate with Tompkins’ essay perfectly for a class, if one had the means to take them to it. Alas… what happened to field trips?

I liked “Jimmy Yellow Hawk” as a touching coming-of-age story, though of course it presents an entirely different cultural attitude about animals than the one described by Tompkins. Another text that might be interesting if one were inclined to explore peoples’ relationships with animals is “The Carnivore’s Credo,” an essay in2007’s Best American Essays that argues that the most respectful thing us meat eaters can do to animals is not to stop eating them altogether, but to 1) make sure they’re humanely treated until slaughter, and then 2) eat them with care and reverence in social settings. That’s not a very good summary, but I don’t have the essay with me. Suffice it to say it’s an unusual argument, one I’d not heard.

Last thing, as the plane’s landing: I applaud “Stewed Beans” heartily, and recommend teaching a unit around this question: What is the social function of farts?

Then you could watch Blazing Saddles.

*where, unlike Sea-Tac, I was reminded every ten minutes that the Threat Level was Orange, and that jokes or inappropriate comments about security could get me arrested.

WLMA's lameness

I’m with Michelle, Caitlin, Andrea, and Dorothy on the general dissatisfaction with Chapters 15 and 17 of WLMA. The thematic arrangement of the texts is okay – if that’s how you wanted to organize your readings – and I like how they mix short stories, poems, essays, paintings, plays, songs, and films. Actually, the CD is great in theory but confusing and erratic in practice: for example, the “Enhanced Reading” of “Bartleby the Scrivener” contains some interesting questions that appear when you mouse over certain hyperlinked words, but the one for “The Taming of the Shrew” offers only a note at the top promising annotations to come “during the upcoming school year,” whatever that means. And it would have been nice if the CD actually contained some film snippets instead of just still images from the films (although, since the video clips that are there didn’t play on my computer, maybe it wouldn’t matter.)

Mostly, I’ll join everyone in their biggest complaint so far: that the questions that follow each of (or, I should say, most of) the readings are generally formalist, tokenizing, and just plain lame. Some of them are okay – the second question at the end of T.C. Boyle’s “The Love of My Life” could maybe lead a class into a discussion about gender, parental responsibility, and abortion – but if you were really trying to get some critical thinking going, you’d have to come up with your own questions.

Dream

2-24

Here’s a revision of my description of my dream course, as well as its goals and topics.

As videogames become a more potent cultural medium, the burgeoning field of game studies is trying to figure out what exactly these games mean to us. It’s a truly interdisciplinary field, with scholars coming from literature, sociology, anthropology, psychology, education, and economics. Each one of these disciplines has its own arsenal of theories and methods. In fact, there are so many perspectives being leveled at games right now that to try to understand all of them in a single class would be overwhelming. However, most of the discussions of games in academia right now approach the topic from one of two opposing points of view:

Games are texts.

Games are practices.

The former point of view generally comes the humanities, and the latter generally comes from the social sciences. It’s caused some bitter debates, and we’re going to look at some of them. But, as David Buckingham notes in the recent book Computer Games: Text, Narrative, and Play, “This tension between textual analysis… and audience-based research… is impossible to ignore… precisely because the game text is playable: it is only realized through play, and play is a lived, social and culturally situated experience.” We’re going to face this tension head-on – we’re going to break the dichotomy. Starting from the position that games are both texts and practices, and by studying a variety of actual games, we’re going to explore the following questions:

• What ideologies underlie these games’ visual, spatial, textual, oral/aural, and procedural design?
• How do these games borrow from their parent media, and how are they unique?
• How do these games combine narratives and rules to simulate systems?
• How do these games represent identity?
• How do players adapt to, modify, and subvert these games’ representations and rules?
• How do players construct/perform identities?
• How do players interact with each other, both within game worlds and outside of them?

2-11

The goals for my dream course are very similar to those of the five courses I’ve studied today. I imagine a course that’s an introduction to the game studies field, sampling the rich variety of theories and methods that scholars are bringing to the table. I’m interested in videogames as both artifacts and practices (though I’m better trained to look at them as artifacts). Here’s a tentative list of course goals and topics, cribbed from my “found syllabi”:

Course goals

• To explore games as cultural artifacts, understanding the ideological foundations of their designs.
• To explore gaming as a social practice, studying social and structural issues within games and game-playing behavior.
• To discuss the social, economic, and technical impact of games.

Course topics

· Identity in virtual environments; avatars and in-game representation

· Games as simulations of systems and procedures

· Rule-making, power and control; player rights

· Intellectual property; players as producers of game content; modding, hacking, cheating

· Social processes and interaction between players

· Distributed Culture

· Commodification in games

· Presence, Immersion, Interactivity

Found Syllabi

The dream course I’m going to create in this class is a game-studies course. I’m planning on pitching it to the department this fall under DTC 338 – Special Topics. My found syllabi are thus all undergraduate courses (though their levels vary).

I apologize in advance for my found syllabi, which probably won’t be very applicable for the rest of you, as their critical lenses only partially overlap with the ones in literary studies. It might behoove you to know something about the theoretical approaches in game studies. Broadly, writing about games falls into two main categories: game design and game critique. The former is mostly the games industry’s turf, and the latter is pretty much academia’s turf. Within game studies, there are many subgroups, as the scholars hail from disciplines like literature, sociology, anthropology, education, and economics. Therefore, there are a lot of different theoretical and methodological approaches.

1. Beth E. Kolko, University of Washington: http://faculty.washington.edu/bkolko/games/index.shtml

Course title: Digital Games

Kolko calls the class “an interdisciplinary investigation into digital games,” and its goals reflect a variety of approaches to understanding games. She spells out her course goals and objectives clearly:

Course goals

· This course provides an overview of digital games from an interdisciplinary perspective, including as a cultural artifact, a cornerstone of youth culture, an economic powerhouse, an educational tool, and a driver of technical innovation.

· This course introduces you to a variety of game genres, and discusses the social, economic, and technical impact of these genres.

· This course explores the design process for digital games.

· This course explores social and structural issues within games and game-playing behavior.

Course objectives

At the conclusion of the class, students will be able to:

· Describe the importance of games as an area of the software market.

· Describe the importance of games as a cultural artifact, especially with respect to other entertainment genres.

· Describe the importance of games as a driver of technological innovation.

· Describe how societal norms are reflected in game design.

· Evaluate different gaming populations and make design recommendations appropriate for those (potential) players.

· Describe how game-playing patterns reflect social codes and mores.

· Identify and explain core principles of online interaction and communication.

· Describe issues of identity and representation within games and game-playing communities.

· Describe the global scope of the games market and its implications for cross-cultural diffusion.

Each week, her class focuses on a different aspect of games:

· Identity in Virtual Environments; The User Experience of Gaming; Design

· Decisions Gender, Race, and other Audience Considerations; Issues for Designers; Avatars and In-Game Representation

· Commodification of Culture; Questions of Player Rights

· Games as Learning Tool, Informal Learning via Games

· Rule-making, Power and Control in Online Games

· Presence, Immersion, Interactivity

· Games as Driver of Technological Innovation, Input Devices

The class’s most interesting assignment is a weekly play diary, which I think would work well as a blog, though Kolko has her students hand in hard copies. I would also make the diary less directed than she does, though she asks really interesting questions in her diary assignments. She assigns specific games for her students to play.

The final project for this class involves designing a game and writing a theoretical justification for that game. Kolko offers several interesting suggestions for these projects, which let students work from their own programming expertise. The point is not to make fancy, polished games; it’s to apply all of the theory the class has dealt with.

2. T.L. Taylor, IT University of Copehnagen: http://www.itu.dk/courses/MSPK/F2008/

Course title: Game Culture

Taylor is a sociologist by training – her most important work so far is an ethnography of players in EverQuest – and her course reflects that approach, though it appears to be somewhat broader than her own work has been. Here’s her course description:

This course will examine computer games from a cultural and sociological perspective. Rather than focusing on tasks like level construction, it will explore the ways culture, socialization, and values are a part of gaming. Using a variety of theoretical & methodological approaches (drawn from the humanities and social sciences) a range of topics will be discussed in an attempt to understand not only the internal workings and social dynamics of computer games, but their place in the broader culture. Topics include: social processes and interaction; games as communication spaces and virtual worlds; intellectual property and commodification in games, players as producers of game content, political/ideological analysis of games; gender and race in gaming; and design & values.

Taylor’s readings are as varied as Kolko’s, and are also arranged by weekly topics. Here are her weekly topics:

· Technology & Culture

· Embodied Play

· Constructing a Project: Problem Statements, Methods, Lit Reviews, and Writing

· Avatars and Identity

· Gender & Gaming

· Game Community?

· Emergent & Distributed Culture

· Player Producers & Co-creation

· Regulating Culture & IP

· Managing Play

· Professional (Computer) Gaming

Taylor’s most interesting assignment is that she makes her students join a multiplayer space (WoW, Second Life, Xbox Live, etc.) at the beginning of the semester that will be the site of their primary field research for some kind of final project. (She doesn’t explain the final project on the website, though.)

3. Ian Bogost, Georgia Tech: http://www.bogost.com/teaching/introduction_to_computational.shtml

Course title: Introduction to Computational Media

Here’s Bogost’s description of the course’s goals:

This is the introductory course to Computational Media, a degree program at Georgia Tech jointly administered by the School of Literature Communication and Culture and the College of Computing. The degree intends to convey the history and potential of computers as a medium from the perspective of computing and the liberal arts.

Students read, discuss, and write analytically about key developments in history of digital media and the work of important theorists/inventors. They critique exemplary digital artifacts from classic programs like Zork, Weizenbaum's Eliza (an automated therapist) to the latest videogames. They also create projects within key representational traditions of computational media.

It is not often that human culture invents a new medium of representation. The computer is a powerful form of representation that is quickly assimilating older representational forms including spoken language, printed text, drawings, photographs, moving images. But the computer is not just a transmitter of old formats: it brings its own representational powers and its own new genres such as videogames, web sites, animated robots, and interactive televison programs.

This course approaches the computer as an evolving medium of expression, connected to the history of media while it is evolving its own characteristic forms. We will be exploring the unique representational properties of the computer and surveying key advances in expressive power, such as the first virtual spaces and interactive characters.

So this course, like the others, is interdisciplinary. In fact, it’s the introductory course in a cross-interdisciplinary program at Bogost’s university. Since one of those disciplines is computer science, much of the terminology in Bogost’s syllabus draws from that discipline. The course’s topics explore various “properties of the medium” of computers – special, participatory, encyclopedic, and procedural. (Bogost’s own work has attempted to combine literary and cultural theory with computational theory; his latest book combines rhetoric and computation).

The syllabus is kind of vague about the work that students have to do, though there are quizzes and a final exam. There seems to be some kind of group design project, in which past students have created simplistic games for the Atari 2600.

4. Janet Murray, Georgia Institute of Technology: http://www.lcc.gatech.edu/%7Emurray/Games04/

Course title: Game Design as a Cultural Practice

Murray states that he focus of this course is “games as cultural artifacts and on the structural and representational elements of game design, especially electronic games.” However, the first course text, Brian Sutton-Smith's The Ambiguity of Play, is clearly from the ludology camp of game studies: the folks who view games as social practices rather than as representational texts. The practice/representation divide amongst game studies scholars used to be a major one, though it’s found some resolution and synthesis lately, as all of these courses (Murray’s included) show. Other texts come from both the design and the critique camps, though Murray apparently uses the design books in order to critique their ideological positions.

The course readings begin with really foundational stuff on gaming in general, like Callois’s Man, Play, Games. For the large project assignment, Murray lets her students choose whether to write a critical paper or to build a game prototype and rationale. Like Kolko, she makes her students play certain games. All are older (the newest is The Sims), and all are available online or in a special lab at their university.

5. Aaron Delwiche, Trinity University: http://www.trinity.edu/adelwich/mmo/index.html

Course title: Games for the Web

Here’s Delwiche’s description of the course’s goals:

In this course, we will conduct an ethnographic study of the behaviors, cultural practices, and motivations of MMO gamers. Along the way, we will play and critically analyze a variety of videogames. In addition to exploring game mechanics and video-game aesthetics, we will investigate sociological and psychological dimensions of virtual worlds as well as social controversies surrounding game violence and gender representations.

We have three objectives:

1. to explore themes of cyberculture studies through sustained interaction with other residents of World of Warcraft

2. to understand the behaviors, cultural practices, and motivations of MMO players through the use of ethnographic methods

3. to develop a critical vocabulary for analyzing all types of videogames

To accomplish all this, Delwiche makes his students buy, subscribe to, and play World of Warcraft.

Awesome.

Actually, pulling that off is tricky, not only because of the cost but also because of the technology. Trinity apparently has a lab with computers that will run WoW, and Delwiche has reserved group gaming sessions in it two nights a week. I wonder if the CUE lab could handle such a thing…

Anyway, Delwiche’s course obviously has a narrower focus than the others as far as the types of games it studies. However – and this is why I study MMORPGs – WoW is such a rich, varied game that it allows player/critics to study many of the issues common to all games – representation, identity, economics, player interaction, etc. In looking at these elements of WoW, Delwiche uses a wide variety of theoretical approaches that’s similar to the rest of the instructors I’ve mentioned, but he’s clearly coming from an anthropology background.

The Glorious but Short-Lived Proletariat Revolution of Hansel and Gretel

Hard by a great forest dwelt a poor foreman with his wife and his two children. The boy was called Hansel and the girl Gretel. Despite having a supervisory position in the local paint factory, the foreman had little to bite and to break, and when his factory began to lose income from competition with another paint factory, he could no longer procure even daily bread. Now when he thought over this by night in his bed, and tossed about in his anxiety, he groaned and said to his wife: 'What is to become of us? How are we to feed our poor children, when we no longer have anything even for ourselves?' His wife, made heartless and a little insane from years of 14-hour days at the local textile mill, said, 'I'll tell you what, husband, early tomorrow morning we will take the children out into the forest to where it is the thickest; there we will light a fire for them, and give each of them a piece of bread that is laced with paint chips, and they will fall into a stupor from the lead in the paint, and then we will leave them alone. They will be too stupid from the lead to find the way home again, and we shall be rid of them.' The foreman felt sorry for his children, but he understood that there was no way to feed them; and anyway, Gretel’s recent clamoring for a violin had annoyed him, since workers had no time for music.

Early in the morning came the woman, and took the children out of their beds. Their piece of bread was given to them, and though they wondered why it was speckled with blue and red flakes, they took it anyway. On the way into the forest Hansel crumbled his in his pocket, and often stood still and threw a morsel on the ground. Little by little, he threw all the crumbs on the path.

The woman led the children deep into the forest, where they had never in their lives been before. Then a great fire was made, and the mother said: 'Just sit there, you children, and when you are tired you may sleep a little; we are going into town to buy paint and textiles from our company stores, and in the evening when we are done, we will come and fetch you away.' When it was noon, Gretel shared her piece of bread with Hansel, who had scattered his by the way. Then they fell asleep from the paint in the bread. They did not awake until it was dark night, and Hansel comforted his little sister and said: 'Just wait, Gretel, until the moon rises, and then we shall see the crumbs of bread which I have strewn about, they will show us our way home again.' When the moon came they set out, but they found no crumbs, for the many thousands of other abandoned proletariat children which skulk about in the woods and fields had picked them all up. Hansel said to Gretel: 'We shall soon find the way,' but they did not find it. They walked the whole night and all the next day too from morning till evening, but they did not get out of the forest.

It was now three mornings since they had left their father's house. They began to walk again, but they always came deeper into the forest, and if help did not come soon, they must die of hunger and weariness. When it was mid-day, they came upon a little house built of bread and covered with cakes, with windows were of clear sugar. 'This must be how the bourgeoisie live!’ said Hansel. Hansel bit off a little of the roof to try how it tasted, and Gretel leant against the window and nibbled at the panes.

Suddenly the door opened, and a woman as old as the hills, who supported herself on crutches, came creeping out. The old woman said: 'Oh, you dear children, who has brought you here? Do come in, and stay with me. No harm shall happen to you.' She took them both by the hand, and led them into her little house. Then good food was set before them, milk and pancakes, with sugar, apples, and nuts. Afterwards two pretty little beds were covered with clean white linen, and Hansel and Gretel lay down in them, and thought they were in heaven.

The old woman had only pretended to be so kind; she was in reality a wicked pastry-factory owner who lay in wait for children, and had only built the little house of bread in order to entice them there. When a child fell into her power, she captured it and put it to work in her factory, mass-producing individually packaged pastries for supermarkets and college bookstores. Then she seized Hansel with her shriveled hand, carried him into the frosting-mixing room, and locked him in behind a grated door. Scream as he might, it would not help him, for the other children working in the room would not allow him to sit idle and would force him to work with them. Then she went to Gretel, shook her till she awoke, and cried: 'Get up, lazy thing, and help these other children in the bakery. Today, we’re making HoHos! Gretel began to weep bitterly, but it was all in vain, for the 13 cents a day the witch was offering forced her to do what witch commanded.

And now the best food was cooked for production and distribution, and poor Hansel and Gretel and the other children in the pastry factory had to eat leftover Crisco and drink yellow #5. Hansel, however, had taught himself to read and write by studying the nutrition information on packages of DingDongs, and he had begun to write leaflets on stolen Twinkie wrappers that he passed to the other children, urging them to unite. Day by day, the children plotted the day when they would overthrow their capitalist oppressors and usher in a communist utopia.

Early one morning, Gretel had to fire up the factory’s industrial-size oven. 'We will bake Zingers first,' said the old woman, 'I have already heated the oven, and kneaded the dough.' She pushed poor Gretel out to the oven, from which flames of fire were already darting. 'Creep in,' said the witch, 'and see if it is properly heated, so that we can put the bread in.' And once Gretel was inside, she intended to shut the oven and let her bake in it, and then she would eat her as a lesson to her subversive ringleader of a brother. But Gretel saw what she had in mind, and said: 'I do not know how I am to do it; how do I get in?' 'Silly goose,' said the old woman. 'The door is big enough; just look, I can get in myself!' and she crept up and thrust her head into the oven. Then Gretel gave her a push that drove her far into it, and shut the iron door, and fastened the bolt. Oh! then she began to howl quite horribly, but Gretel ran away and the godless witch was miserably burnt to death.

Gretel, however, ran like lightning to Hansel, opened the door to the frosting room, and cried: 'Hansel, we are saved! The old witch is dead!' Then Hansel sprang like a bird from its cage when the door is opened. How they did rejoice and embrace each other, and dance about and kiss each other! And as they had no longer any need to fear her, they went into the witch's house, and in every corner there stood chests full of pearls and jewels. They distributed the wealth equally amongst the other children, and ran home through the forest to tell their father about their revolution.

At length they saw from afar their father's house. Then they began to run, rushed into the parlour, and threw themselves round their father's neck. The foreman had not known one happy hour since he had left the children in the forest; his wife, however, had recently gotten stuck in her loom at the textile mill and was dead. Gretel emptied her pinafore until pearls and precious stones ran about the room, and Hansel threw one handful after another out of his pocket to add to them. They told their father about the revolution at their factory and urged him to begin one at his, but he wasn’t sure the workers at his factory, who had been reading Horatio Alger, would listen to him. So they all went out and spent their newfound money on a Model T.

Clever, engaging, critically situated title

I agree with Caitlin and Donna that the lit-crit review in WLMA separated out the theories and oversimplified them, but I wasn’t too put off by that. In some ways, the simplicity of the chapter’s summaries of the theories was refreshing, because my problem with theory lately is that I have so many of them bouncing around in my head that I can’t separate them out anymore. Dorothy’s right: we have no “naked eyeballs” when we approach texts; we’re socialized and trained in various approaches long before we recognize them as approaches. The hard part for me is that latter part.

I realized as I read the chapter that I take bits and pieces from many theories. Many of my teachers when I was an undergrad were trained as formalists/structuralists, I think, and so I’ve picked up a lot of that school’s techniques when reading lit. Barthes and the semiotics stuff have been useful as I’ve stepped into reading visual texts (though I was confused by Barthes’ inclusion in the structuralist camp, as his work was pretty historicist, I thought.) Foucault, too, is very much a historian in stuff like Discipline and Punish. Feminism and critical race theory have important places in my thinking, too, as I’m interested in what cultural texts reveal about power. Which brings me to historical criticism, which is probably the most important lens for me, a kind of umbrella under which all of those other ones fit. I think you were right to give me the presentation on Marxism, Barbara, since Marx, from what I understand, was the first theorist to hammer home the point that we’re all influenced by our place and time. The only theoretical approach that I’m not a fan of these days is psychological. I remember liking it when I was an undergrad, but it all strikes me now as a bit too pat, the confident assertions of a bunch of men about what we all think and feel way before we can articulate and remember it. Plus, there’s Freud’s own sexism. And my Victor-influenced skepticism/disdain for scientific discourse, which uses language (inherently ideological/culturally influenced) to objectively describe the mind.

Side note: the rhetoric stuff seems to cut across/through some of these other theories, but I’m not sure how. Gotta figure that out.

Onto my favorite newspaper.

Actually, I have to admit that while I read the Onion every couple of days, and love it intensely, reading all of these articles back to back kind of made me sad. I suppose that’s the danger of satire: that the serious commentary underneath the humor can be serious indeed. Most of these articles made fun of a sad reality in education: that a lot of students just aren’t engaged with literature, and that teachers aren’t engaged with what students write about it. I could go on, but Caitlin, Donna, Dorothy, and Michelle have all noted the same thing, and better than I could right now. Sadness breeds depression breeds Writer’s Block.

Caitlin captured the point of the “Radical Socialist Movement” piece beautifully.

I think Donna’s IDs of the critical lenses that each piece satirizes are really good, and she spots several that I didn’t get. About “Area Girlfriend Still Hasn't Seen Apocalypse Now,” though, I think Donna’s right to claim that feminism’s being lampooned, but I think this piece is more about how historical/cultural criticism claims certain cultural texts as “important,” and smugly derides anyone who doesn’t know them or likes other stuff. Talk to your average indie music aficionado for a taste of this attitude in real life.

I had to admit to myself that I have deconstructed a fair amount of everyday shit, and that the only thing separating me from the grad student deconstructing that menu is that he’s more articulate than I am. My wife and I do it all the time – we casually deconstruct ads, shows, movies, etc., and we have a fun time doing it. What that piece so poignantly illustrates, other than the snobbish academic-ness of this practice, is that we academics get so caught up interpreting everything that it gets hard for us to just function in everyday life. This is all too true.