Critical Approaches to The History of Love by Nicole Krauss

Here are some notes on selected themes from The History of Love by Nicole Krauss. I wrote them two years ago when the University of Texas at Arlington selected The History of Love as its OneBook. You can download the UT Arlington The History of Love study guide and consult other resources by clicking here. The following analytical fragments are (c) Christopher Conway, 2009. Go here to learn how to cite web pages.

Thinking About Paratexts

In Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation (1997), the literary theorist Gérard Genette defines “paratext” as “a zone between text and off-text, a zone not only of transition but also of transaction: a privileged place of pragmatics and a strategy, of an influence on the public, an influence that … is at the service of a better reception for the text and a more pertinent reading of it.” Plainly speaking, book covers, introductions, dedications and epigraphs are paratexts.

Which brings me to one paratext of The History of Love that I’d like mention here: the dedication page. The script reads “FOR MY GRANDPARENTS who taught me the opposite of disappearing and FOR JONATHAN, my life“

There’s a row of photographs in the middle of the page. They look like passport photos and we may safely assume that they are photos of the grandparents of Nicole Krauss.

This paratext teaches us something about what this book is about, specifically, the struggle to be visible or to be in a world where disappearing, forgetting or being forgotten is all too easy. The struggle to remember origins is at the center of this novel, as is Leo’s attempt to be visible.

The use of photography here is very significant because it is a recurring motif in the novel, as other posts will show.

Writing is Life

“At times I believed that the last page of my book and the last page of my life were one and the same, that when my book ended I’d end, a great wind would sweep through my rooms carrying the pages away, and when the air cleared of all those fluttering white sheets the room would be silent, the chair where I sat would be empty.” (9)

The passage is full of literal and more figurative literary allusions. First, the final page of One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, where the end of the magical manuscript of Melquiades spells the end of the town of Macondo and the very man reading the last page. (Spanish language literature is the dominant matrix for literary allusions in the novel: apart from García Márquez, Jorge Luis Borges, Nicanor Parra, Miguel de Cervantes.) In a more figurative sense, the passage takes us back to The Arabian Nights, where story-telling is intrinsically tied to survival. (A theme developed by Manuel Puig, the author of the classic novel The Kiss of the Spider-Woman, in which the telling of movie stories is key to a seduction intended to result in the continuation of life).

Thinking about this, we realize the less-literal significance of the comment “You stopped writing. I thought you were dead” made by Alma when Leo shows up at her door after arriving to the United States (13). Thinking about this, we remember how Zvi folds Leo’s self obituary and keeps it with him, in an attempt to extend his friend’s life (118).

Life Demanded A New Language

“The words of our childhood became strangers to us– woe couldn’t use them in the same way and so we chose not to use them at all. Life demanded a new language.” (6)

An interesting passage that literally refers to the loss of Yiddish. But on a more figurative level, it evokes something broader, a way of thinking that is lost when children grow up. You can call it the loss of innocence if you want to be short about it, but it is about something more active than inert innocence. It’s about the transformative powers of the imagination when it is free. What I am getting at is best summed up by Krauss herself, in Leo’s voice, when he says a few pages later:

“Once upon a time there was a boy. He lived in a village that no longer exists, in a house that no longer exists, on the edge of a field that no longer exists, where everything was discovered and everything was possible. A pebble could be a diamond. A tree a castle.” (11)

The power of writing in this novel is tied to this power of childhood, the power to transform reality into something else, into stories and truths.

And it’s very interesting to think about the ways in which different stages of life demand new ways of thinking and being in the world.

Truth and Believability

Leo begins writing as a child in the mode of fantasy. His writing is the exteriorization of his inner world, but as such it appears to reinforce his loneliness. So, he decides to write about the “real” world, and in the example he gives us, this kind of literature proposes to depict the world as it is, to map places, etc. Alma is nonplussed with this new mode of representation, and Leo returns to the fantasy mode. “The she said maybe I shouldn’t make up everything, because that made it hard to believe anything” (8 ).

To which Leo begins again: “…I didn’t write about real things and I didn’t write about imaginary things. I wrote about the only thing I knew…I continued to fill pages with her name” (8 ).

These passages are key and need to be unpacked with care because what Leo is writing is the manuscript of The History of Love, something which we do not discover until later. (The fact that Alma’s name is a repeated motif in The History of Love tips us off to the meaning of this passage).

These passages underline that it is not a question of picking between the real and the imaginary, but a different category altogether, one that escapes both registers and which Leo describes as “what he knows.” What is it that he knows? The fact that he continues to put her name in the book, over and over again tells us that what he knows is his love for her. Writing about his love for Alma is a transaction with something sacred, in light of the analogy of Bird’s obsession with writing the name of God in the survival book later on in the novel. The name of Alma is a vast canvas for Leo.

What is the representational register of the manuscript of The History of Love that Leo is writing? If the fragments of it that we see in the novel are any indication, it is a blending of the real and the imaginary, a register in-between reality and fantasy. This interstitial, in-between register is also the modality of writing that fills in the spaces between what is known and what is not known–as in the case of Rosa’s writing about Zvi in the introduction to The History of Love that is published in South America: it is a mode of writing that is beautifully imprecise and inexact in depicting the facts and realities of Zvi, but marvelously effecting in evoking the truth about who he was, because she invites the reader to see things through his eyes and get a sense of him.

Another example of this is Leo’s evocation of the writing of Isaac Babel, whose writing he describes as surrendering to “commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence…where silence gathered…the deep bowls of the family silver. When people spoke to him he heard less of what they were saying and more and more of what they were not” (115). And this description of Babel, like that of Rosa, applies to Leo’s style of writing as well, as Zvi reflects that Leo’s writing captures “the field of hesitations, black holes, and possibilities between the words” (116)

The novel by Krauss titled The History of Love invites us to think about how we know the world, and the different ways in which representation affects our knowledge of the world.

Leo’s Invisibility and the Threat of Extinction

The threat of extinction is spoken about literally in the novel, in evolutionary terms (51-52, 139).

It is also a driving force for more than one character:

• The threat of Leo’s extinction drives Leo to write and live and try to connect with the world that surrounds him.
• The threat of Leo’s extinction drives Zvi to keep Leo’s book alive, and to keep Leo’s obituary in his pocket, thinking that he is thus preserving his friend’s life. By placing Leo’s obituary at the end of The History of Love, Zvi tries to perform an act of memory and truth. Alma has been preserved in the book, but so has its true author.
• The threat of her father’s extinction, who is banished from material memory by Charlotte, who throws out all of his stuff, drives Alma to know the book The History of Love.

The process of Leo’s extinction is carried out by his erasure from photographs, the erasure of his authorship of both The History of Love and Words for Everything, and his isolation or disconnection from family. Ultimately, however, thanks to Zvi’s inclusion of Leo’s obituary in The History of Love, and Bird’s love for his sister, Leo can ultimately connect with another and be remembered back from the brink of extinction.

Another interesting question is whether or not plagiarism is a form of extinction or not. By making Leo’s manuscript his own, is Zvi stealing something from Leo? In examining his own feelings toward Leo and his writing after reading the obit for Isaac Babel, Zvi concludes that no one can fully possess or own the dead (115).

Love in The History of Love

What does love got to do with it? In the section “Until the Writing Hand Hurts” (119-134) we learn of Leo’s reaction to his uncle’s death. “Suddenly I felt the need to beg God to spare me as long as possible…I was terrified that I or one of my parents were going to die…The fear of death haunted me for a year…I was left with a sadness that couldn’t be rubbed off” (125). But meeting Alma brought that all-permeating sadness to an end. Leo puts a wall around those thoughts of mortality as he loves Alma. “Only after my heart attack, when the stones of the wall that separated me from childhood began to crumble at last, did the fear of death return to me” (129).

It is the power of love that keeps the manuscript of The History of Love alive and brings it into print. In speaking for Leo, whom Zvi believes to be dead, Zvi brings a magical book into the orbit of people’s lives. The book results in the naming of Alma Singer and her subsequent quest to know her origins. The book memorializes Leo Gursky’s name as proof of his existence fades away. It connects Isaac to Charlotte. It becomes a pretext for Bird to do something loving for his sister. The linchpin of all of these possibilities is the fact that Alma’s name remains intact at the center of the book. Without that clue, all might have been forgotten and The History of Love would not have had the impact it had.

Is sentimental love successful in this novel? As in the case of photography, sentimental love is loaded with the promise of meaning and transcendence, but it is continually troubled because Leo loses Alma, Zvi is closed off from Rosa emotionally, Charlotte does not fall in love with another man in spite of Alma’s efforts, and Misha and Alma’s budding love in interrupted.

There are other kinds of love, however, that are successful: Leo’s love of Bruno and of writing; Alma’s love for her mother and absent father which provides her with an impetus to explore her origins and ‘connect’; Bird’s love for Goldstein, who mentors him and helps him come up with strategies for survival.

So what does the title mean? The History of Love is a book within a book, but it is also a phrase that calls up a progression in time, beginning in childhood and culminating in old age and death. The title may be read as referencing the pathways of memory and creation that are driven by one man’s love for one woman.

The Dark Biosphere

The title of Daniel Eldridge’s book, Life as We Don’t Know It, echoes the theme of knowability mentioned in previous posts. But what the book contains, an account of unlikely life in an unlikely place, is an affirmation of survival and diversity, and of our ability to know the origin of our lives. In the case of Eldridge, it is specifically a key chapter in the history of evolution that leads to humanity, but in the novel as a whole, characters struggle to maintain memory against the threat of extinction.

“The idea of evolution* is so beautiful and sad…ninety-nine percent of all the species that have ever lived on earth are extinct” (51-52).

Some connections worth remembering: Zvi thinks about life on the bottom of the ocean floor as he crossed the Atlantic (154) and Henry wants to be Jacques Cousteau (200).

*Cross reference with discussion of whether or not happiness and sadness coexist or cancel each other out on page 91.

Photography in The History of Love

Photography is proof of existence. This is troubled by the fact that when Leo is with his cousin the locksmith, he cannot get any photo of him to appear properly, whereas his cousin is representable (81-82). And yet, Leo keeps a photo of his cousin as proof of his existence because he knows that he took the photo, and as its author, he knows it proves his existence.

Photography is used as a substitute for human contact, as a way of knowing others, as in the case when Leo admits that he has studied all known photographs of his son and when wants to yell at the photograph of his dead son, pictured in a newspaper at Starbucks: Isaac! Here I am! Can you hear me? (77).

Photography is a way of knowing the world that we see. Note the distinction between knowing and seeing. This is best illustrated by the blind man who has been to Antarctica and who takes a photo of Charlotte Singer so that, when he recovers his sight, he can know what he has been seeing (39).

Photography is also the conceit of a perfect memory, and of the promise of memorializing change, as in when Leo wishes he could photography Alma every day of her life, trying to capture her growth and change over time (90). (In fact a man tried to do this, photograph himself every day of his life, and produced a poignant record of it, right up until the moment he died of cancer: full collection here; overview account here).

Photography is also the illusion of clarity, as when Alma refers to vivid memory as a photograph. But faded memories are also photographs, just photographs of other photographs (192).

And yet... to use Leo’s favorite expression, in all of these examples of photography, the novel undermines the authority of photography. Photography is supposed to do those things. The characters want it to do those things, but photography fails. As an act of representation that is supposedly authoritative and complete, never lying, always transparent and self-evident, photography is peculiarly insufficient as far as the characters of the novel would have us know.

The Trouble with Thinking

The section The Trouble with Thinking (110-118 ) is a revealing look at the theme of communication in the novel. The chapter begins with Zvi’s nightmares and his inability to tell Rosa about them. We are presented with a failure of communication. The eruption of silence into what might have been a revelation of the self.

This is immediately followed by the parable about the string, which may be read as an allegory about the difficulties in guiding the meaning of our words so that they reach the proper destination. “There was a time when it wasn’t uncommon to use a piece of string to guide wors that otherwise might falter on the way to their destinations…The physical distance between two people using a string was often small; sometimes the smaller the distance, the greater the need for the string” (111). But the world grew vast, the telephone was invented, and it became more difficult to make words arrive to a destination. The parable ends with a comment about how silence is a form of communication: “Sometimes no length of string is long enough to say the thing that needs to be said. In such cases all the string can do, in whatever its form, is conduct a person’s silence” (111).

But silence is not purely a negative force, a missing piece. It is also an inclusionary code, a space of knowledge, creation and connection. What follows the parable of the string is the tale of Zvi and Leo and the obituaries they wrote for Isaac Babel. Zvi had tried to “rise to the material, to struggle to find words for a man who had been a master of words, who had devoted his entire existence to resisting the cliché in the hope of introducing the world a new way of thinking and writing; a new way, even, of feeling…”* (113). But he realizes that he has failed to find the new way of expressing truth after reading Leo’s version of the obituary. Reading Leo’s obituary for Babel, Zvi realizes that he is common and ordinary in comparison to Leo. But before dwelling on the meanings of this, let’s consider what exactly Leo does in his obituary for Babel.

Leo’s version of the obituary stresses the ways in which Babel “gave himself over entirely to commas and semicolons, to the space after the period and before the capital letter of the next sentence. He discovered the places in a room where silence gathered….He learned to decipher the meaning of certain silences…Daily he turned out whole epics of silence” (114-115).

What is interesting is that Zvi’s account of Leo’s writing style and its superiority over his own essentially makes Leo a double or analogue of Babel: Where he [Zvi] saw a page of words, his friend saw the field of hesitations, black holes, and possibilities between the words” (116). The passage goes on and is worth looking at. But it is also worth remembering that this description of Leo, which is equivalent to Leo’s description of Babel, is the same description given of Rosa’s writing style in her introduction to The History of Love, her writing is characterized by “pauses, suggestions, ellipses, whose total effect is of a kind of half-light in which the reader can project his or her own imagination” (66-67).

Body Parts and Gesture

One of my favorite passages is the one in which Leo speaks about how he experiences the world through his body and its parts (10). The passage suggests the belief that bodily sensation can register human experience, even those intangibles which might seem to be unrepresentable, such as “dreaming of my childhood” and “being struck by all that has been lost” (10). An echo of this kind of immediacy, this kind of continuity between experience and the self, is mentioned in the inner tale about the history of gesture (72-73). Once upon a time, writes Leo and Zvi in their manuscript, there was “No distinction between the gestures of language and the gestures of life” (72). These passages are a contrast to the key section in Alma Singer’s narrative, “What I am not”, in which there is a gap between the sign/symbol of something and the real thing, as in “THAT IS NOT A KETTLE” etc.

The Title Words for Everything

Is it possible that there be words for everything?

This is a central concern of the novel, which keeps on raising the issue of how to know the whole of something (everything) when only a fragment or shadow remains. Paleontology is about reconstituting a narrative that has been torn up by time (50). Taking one piece and trying to figure out what was attached to it, and so on. As Uncle Julian tells Alma Singer “Alberto Giacometti said that sometimes just to paint a head, you have to sacrifice the whole landscape….having a quarter of an inch of something you have a better chance of holding on to a certain feeling of the universe than if you pretended to be doing the whole sky” (45). Experience, life histories, family history are full of gaps and tears, patches of invisibility that threaten to dissolve the whole. In a way, the novel answers that there are words for everything, because what we do not know we can create. That is why writing is life, writing is visibility, writing is survival.

Another example of the fragment that tells the whole is the way in which the language of gesture is decoded. From one sampling of 79 gestures, the whole language emerges intact, in a thousand different combinations (73). Also consider the notion that Alma Singer remembers her father in parts, as if he too were an archeaological record torn into pieces and cast in the window. Her memory is paleontology in action: it joins the fragments into a whole (37).

The notion of there being or not being words for everything is admirably raised in the passage “what I am not” passage of part II “My Mother’s Sadness” (36). There are other passages where the issue of what is representable and what is not is invoked, such as Bird’s resistance to the prohibition over uttering the name of God (37).

–Christopher Conway is an Associate Professor of Spanish in the Department of Modern Languages at the University of Texas Arlington, where he teaches Latin American literature.

Web Teaching Journal (Week 2) “Failures in Communication”

This is the second in a fifteen part, weekly journal on my experience teaching a web class. Each post explores how things are going in the current week and ideas for future revisions of the course. For my first post, see Web Teaching Journal: Week 1 (Why do it, My class, Moodle, Message Board Worries and Drops). To see entries posted after this one, you can also just pull down the categories menu on the right and select the Web Teaching Journals category.

When I used to have bad dreams about my teaching, they usually went like this: I’m teaching in a huge quad and my students are so dispersed that they are mixed with passersby and out of the reach of my voice. A variation on this dream had me teaching in a long “L” shaped room with the students at one end (around a corner) and me on the other. I’m sorry to report that teaching web classes is often like those nightmares. In fact, the one kind of teaching that really instantiates my nightmares in transparent ways are web classes. This one, at least in week 2, is no exception. Let me tell you what’s going on.

Students are not using the message boards as much as they should to talk to each other. I am still getting questions that have been covered on the boards and that’s disappointing. I prepared a SurveyMonkey survey to try to determine ways of tweaking the class but after posting it in my announcement board, even after force-subscribing all students to that board, only 5 out of 30+ students have taken the survey. (One student claims they are not getting email copies of the force-subscribed messages in my Announcements board, and I have no idea if this is occurring with other students…now you’re getting the flavor of my nightmares!). In short, I can’t get a read on what’s going on or get the students to tell me what’s going on via the survey. I put some CD-ROMs on my door for students to copy onto their laptops with a sign-out sheet next to them, and now one of the CD’s is gone and the sign-out sheet is blank. Apart from deadlines for quizzes and assignments, I’m not feeling like I’m reaching the students. Thank goodness for the 5 or 6 students who are dedicated message board users.

Apart from the first quiz, we’ve had our first assignment, divided up into separate categories. Some students had to write reactions to the readings, others had to do a web search and find, and evaluate web pages on selected topics. I instructed them to use the Berkeley “How to assess a web page” rubric but many of the students did not follow it at all.

The last time I taught this class in WebCT I did not have a lot of the feelings I’m having this week and last week. I can’t figure out what it was about WebCT that might have made the difference because, on the surface, Moodle seems so much better to me. Right now I feel frustrated, but more confident in several changes that I have made in the class. I feel more in control of elements at my own disposal. The problem is I’m not sure it will make a difference.

The crux of the issue for me today, one week since my last post is this: should I even expect some semblance of community and generalized communication in a web class? Maybe a web class should be pretty much automated and we should dispense with “community” and “interaction.” I know these are verboten concepts among teachers who prize experiential learning and active learning, myself among them, but I’m really not sure this class will work in those ways.

In closing I want to say two things. The first is that this class is not running on autopilot. I am one week or two weeks ahead of the students with regards to building the class. Don’t get me wrong: I have 95% of the components at my disposal, but I am building as I go to ensure a “presence” in the class. Perhaps this was a mistake. The second item is that this week I spent 5 or 6 hours dealing with this class, easy, that’s already double the amount of time I would have spent teaching this very same class live.

Behind the Wizard’s Curtain: Using Rhetoric to Understand Literary and Cultural Studies Criticism

Behind the Wizard’s Curtain: Using Rhetoric to Understand Literary and Cultural Studies Criticism

My friend and colleague Jim Warren recently shared two article with me that I really enjoyed and which have been instrumental in changing how I think about my research and teaching. Both articles have made me more aware of how I think about literature when I sit down to write about it, and have offered me some provocative ideas about how to better teach my students how to be literary critics. The articles are “‘The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism’ Revisited: Mistaken Critics, Complex Contexts, and Social Justice” by Laura Wilder (from the journal Written Communication, 2005) and “A Method for Teaching Invention in the Gateway Literature Class” by Joanna Wolfe (from the journal Pedagogy, 2003). Wilder defines the rhetorical underpinnings of contemporary literary and cultural studies, building primarily on the work of  J. Fahnestock and M. Secor, authors of an article titled “The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism” that was published in Textual Dynamics of the Professions: Historical and Contemporary Studies of Writing in Professional Communities (1991), and George Pullman, author of “Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Composition, Invention, and Literature.” (from the journal JAC, 1994). Wolfe similarly builds on Fahnestock and Secor, and Pullman, as well as earlier scholarship by Wilder, to explore the application of their findings to the teaching of literature in a gateway course.

The gist of the research contained in the work of Wilder, Wolf, and Fahnestock and Secor, is how literary critics use two types of rhetorical conventions, the stases and the topoi. I am not a rhetorician, and do not claim much expertise in the history of that field, so my synthesis on what the stases and topoi are and how they function in the case of my field, will be necessarily general and gestural. (However, I am infinitely grateful to know something about them, after being ignorant of them for more than my twenty years as a student or instructor of literature).

The stases are, according to Wilder, “tools of rhetorical analysis” that “characterize the question or questions an argument seeks to resolve, in other words, the issues a rhetor sees as controversial to his or her audience” (83). In classical rhetoric, there were many different definitions and classifications of the stases, but the fundamental stases Wilder et. al invoke are:

• Existence
• Definition
• Evaluation
• Cause
• Proposal

If the stases provide the speaker/author with a type of argument or arguments, the topoi provide tools for arguing the stases. As Wolfe writes: “Once the speaker has used the stases to isolate the type of questions to adress and has identified the general objective of the discourse, the topoi provide a ‘spring-board’ for launchign the argument in the right direction” (406). These are the topoi that Wilder et al. identify as pertinent to contemporary literary and cultural studies praxis:

• Appearance vs. Reality: or, as I would sum it up, a literary text is not what it appears to be. Any professor of literature can tell you that this is a vital topos in their teaching, since students who are new to literary criticism have trouble getting beyond the surface of a literary text.
• Paradox: the bringing together of points that would seem to be in opposition.
• Paradigm: the application of a theory or a way of reading literature upon a literary text.
• Ubiquity: the identification of a pattern in a literary text, such as symbolism, motifs, etc. I am always using the topos of ubiquity in my classes, to help students get beyond the surface of the text and to lead them deeper into it.
• Context/Intention: The use of historical context and authorial intent to help us understand the literary text. This instance of the Intentional Fallacy is actually quite important to those of us who work on literature that is not contemporary or for Marxist literary critics (see Paradigm category above).
• Mistaken Critic: meaning “so-and-so is wrong, and here I am to correct the record with my brilliant analysis” (irony: two years later, the same author becomes the ‘mistaken critic’ in another author’s analysis of the same text).
• Contemptus mundi: contempt for the state of the world in the present, a topos that is a bit archaic in contemporary criticism. Contempus mundi is how I feel when I read nineteenth-century classics for pleasure to escape from my day to day problems and from world politics, all the while believing that it is good for me.
• Social Justice: the updating of Contempus mundi for the politically-committed criticism, such as Marxism, Post-Colonialism, Queer Studies and Feminism, which see the use of Paradigm (see above) as a way of promoting social justice in some way.

Wilder takes the stases and the topoi and uses them to study a random sampling of 28 scholarly articles from literary/cultural studies.  Most articles (86%) could be classified as relating to the stasis of Definition. The most popular topoi are the Mistaken Critic (86%), Appearance/reality (71%), Ubiquity (71%), Paradigm (68%) and Social Justice (68%). Approximately half of the articles used Paradox and Context and a scarce 6% drew from Contemptus Mundi (which is, as stated above, an archaic idea tied to New Criticism, probably). In the diminishing influence of Contemptus Mundi and the rise of the Mistaken Critic and Context  topoi, Wilder sees a turn toward rhetorical practices utilized in the Sciences. I do wonder if the Mistaken Critic topos is a function of the proliferation or relativization of theory in the last decade or two, allowing for more posturing. I don’t know, but it’s a thought.

Wolfe shares her experiences using the stases and the topoi in her introduction to literature classes and concludes that they are powerful and effective pedagogical tools. Students don’t know what literary criticism is and how to do it when they start taking literature classes (in any language). They must be taught the conventions, rhetorical and otherwise, of speaking of and about literary texts. As Fahnestock and Secor argue, the overarching framework for studying literature is complexity: that the study of literary texts “requires patience unraveling, translating, decoding, interpreation and analyzing. Meaning is never obvious or simple” (89). To which I say Amen, and I return to class with renewed inspiration to tell them the same thing again and again.

There’s something delightful about seeing literary and cultural scholarship being disassembled so artfully into constituent parts. It’s the ultimate demystification, and a welcome invitation (for me, at least), to think about how I write and for what ends. It’s also an invitation to all professors of literature to come clean with their students about what’s behind the wizard’s curtain.

Works Cited:

Fahnestock, Jeanne, and Marie Secor. “The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism.” In Textual Dynamics of the Professions: Historical and Contemporary Studies of Writing in Professional Communities, ed. Charles Bazerman and James Paradis, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991: 76-96.

Pullman, George L. “Rhetoric and Hermeneutics: Composition, Invention, and Literature.” JAC 14 (1994): 367–87.

Wilder, Laura. “The Rhetoric of Literary Criticism” Revisited: Mistaken Critics, Complex Contexts, and Social Justice.” Written Communication 22 (2005): 76-119.

Wolfe, Joanna. “A Method for Teaching Invention in the Gateway Literature Class.” Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to the Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture 3.3 (2003): 399-425.

Web Teaching Journal: Week 1 (Why do it, My class, Moodle, Message Board Worries, and Drops)

Web Teaching Journal: Week 1 (Why do it, My class, Moodle, Message Board Worries, and Drops)

OK, before it all vanishes into the ether, I think I will write a weekly blog about my experience teaching my current web class. Hopefully I can chart the ups and downs of this experience and get a grasp on how this class progresses or does not progress.

I got into web instruction because I saw in it an opportunity to ensure curricular stability in an environment in which qualified instructors for night classes could not always be found. Web classes, I reasoned to myself, could be a serviceable “patch”, to ensure the maximum amount of coverage for working students who desperately needed certain classes to graduate on time. What if we made decent, creative, exciting web classes to meet the needs of these students? That was the plan. That’s how I slipped down the proverbial slippery slope a few years ago. My experiences teaching these classes have been infuriating and rewarding. Sometimes I have felt like a total joker and other times like an effective teacher. In future posts on this series I plan on filling in more blanks about my history teaching web classes.

My current class, Spanish 3312: Introduction to Latin American Culture and Civilization, is being run on Moodle, although in the past I have used WebCT. This is the class description: “Spanish 3312 is an interdisciplinary introduction to Latin American society, history and culture. The course is designed to provide students with an engaging and accessible outline to the diverse and complex contours of Latin American history and culture. Topics covered include Pre-Columbian culture and history, themes relating to the Conquest of the New World, private life and customs in Colonial Latin America, race relations, important literary texts and writers, the Mexican Revolution, political controversies surrounding the Cuban Revolution, human rights in the Southern Cone and U.S.-Latin American Relations in the Twenty-First Century.” Sounds pretty cool, huh?

I made myself crazy in December of 2008 developing the foundational series of video lectures around which I would build the present incarnation of this class. In the past, my videos had been boring talking head videos (aren’t all talking head videos boring?), and I had taken the most generic approach to the material. Basically a lot of annotated chronologies of events. In December 2008, however, I developed a new approach: I picked the most “fascinating” topics imaginable around which to build my class lectures. So, for example, I developed lectures on the weapons used by the Conquistadors (including their use of dogs), on the vagaries of translation during the Conquest, on witchcraft in Colonial Mexico in relation to the Inquisition, on the Cult of Che Guevara, etc. The second change I made was to make video lectures based on animated powerpoints with embedded audio. I used ishowu, a 20$ screencasting programa for Macintosh, to overlay my voice onto the powerpoints. I am still working with this core set of videos, each of which contain a bibliography to let students know where my information is drawn from, and image source credits to teach them something about the importance of attribution. (All images I use in my videos are public domain, and a lot of them were found in pre-1900 books in google books).

My course requirements are as follows: online quizzes, a few short homework essays, message board participation, one essay and one final project, which will be an annotated bibliography of online and bricks and mortar library sources. I used to have an on-campus midterm but I’m making a go of it without that this semester to see what it’s like. I’ll return to these assignments and my thinking behind them in future posts.

So, what are my initial impressions after a few days of running the class?

My first impression is that I am happy to be using Moodle over WebCT or Blackboard. Moodle is very webpage like in its layout and I really like how it’s open. Unlike WebCT and such, you don’t have to click 5 times to navegate through the site. It looks like a big, long webpage through which you can scroll up and down. It works better for me, but I’m curious to know what students who have worked in different web environments think about it.

My second impression is that it is pretty hard to communicate with students, no matter how many instructions you write. In fact, the more instructions you write, the more they seem to get lost in a fog. Now is a key time in the class because students need to get established into a routine and figure out how the forums and quizzes work. Once they get into a routine and know how things work, then the class can run smoothly and we can tackle other challenges. But it’s a rough road to hoe so far. Students are not using the message board that much to talk to each other and to ask questions about the class, as I’ve instructed. They are holding back questions and some are sending me private emails to ask questions that relate to the whole class and its functioning, questions that need to be asked publicly for all to see. All of which is making me worry about getting on track properly. It’s as if the class was not “together” yet.

I had a review session on campus and two students showed up. To help foster community, I told the students who attended to report back to the class on the message board. And I’ve directed those students who emailed me with questions to post their questions on the message board. Maybe this will help crack the ice.

A few students have dropped, including one who cited “scheduling conflicts” with my web class! Poor guy, I should not have confronted him about dropping the class, even jokingly (as was my intent). Students don’t realize what they’re getting into often, and when they start working in a web class, they realize that they HATE IT. Although I too prefer live classes, it always bothers me a little bit when this happens. It may not seem that way, but a lot of hard work went into making my class interesting and fun. But the truth is, the more I speak to other students about their other web classes, the more I realize that mine is much better than many others. You know, those classes in which the only thing that happens is this: Read this web page, visit these web links, here’s your homework, and here’s your quiz. Goodbye. What a travesty. People actually get paid to teach that way?

OK, see you next week.

Spenser, R.I.P.

Until he died, I never realized how much he really meant to me. Robert B. Parker, the author of 37 Spenser novels, and some 30 more novels starring Sunny Randall, Jesse Stone and those lovable cowboys Virgil Cole and Everett Hitch, died on Monday at age 77. It seems appropriate that such a prolific writer died at his writing desk, doing what he’s been doing for decades. If you were a fan, Parker had the ability to get in your head and heart and never go away. He made you love his characters and fully believe in their existence. For me, Spenser, Hawk and Susan were three of the most authentic people in my life, despite them being fictional creations. After all, we had so much history together. I started reading about them, and loving them when I was fourteen years old, and I carried them with me throughout my adolescence and into adulthood. There aren’t many relationships in real life that last that long (in my case 26 years). My mother turned me on to the Spenser series and reading these books together, and talking about them, was something special that she and I shared. She’s gone too, but every time I read a Spenser novel, I thought about her. Would she like this one? What would she say about it? It’s kind of sad to think that this is an imaginary conversation I will never have again. I met Parker once (besides seeing him on a plane one time), and when I told him that my mother had turned me on to his writing he said to me: “That’s a good mother.” The comment confirmed to me that Robert B. Parker was Spenser, after all. Which is why I title this post Spenser, R.I.P, and not Robert B. Parker, R.I.P.

From Looking for Rachel Wallace (1980)

“John has warned me that you are a jokester. Well, I am not. If we are to have any kind of successful association, you’d best understand right now that I do not enjoy humor. Whether or not successful.”

“Okay if now and then I enjoy a wry, inward smile if struck by one of life’s vagaries?”

She turned to Ticknor, and said, “John, he won’t do. Get rid of him.'”