Novel expectations to novel evaluations.

Abstract

Teaching "popular" novels--ones about which movies and television shows proliferate--offers a unique classroom opportunity: to probe the power of readers' expectations over their interpretations of novels. Using this as a guiding issue for an introductory literature course, I created a class that moved students to explore genre and to question what readers really ask of novels and novelists. This essay examines the steps I asked students to take to meaningfully answer "what do I ask of works of fiction?"

**********

"The monster should be green, and we should get ALL the details about it coming to life." "I thought Alice was a much nicer little girl than the one we're reading about." "Dorian Gray isn't supposed to murder people ... and this sex stuff?!" "There should've been more gore when they finally kill the vampire--what a rip-off." When teaching Frankenstein, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Dracula, I have often received such comments, ones that pinpoint what students wanted or thought they would get from these novels. The force with which such pronouncements are made, indeed the actual frustration that some students experience with these novels suggests that this well-known, yet often unread fiction offers a unique classroom opportunity: to probe the power of readers' expectations over their interpretations of novels. Using this as a guiding issue for a "Reading Fiction" course--an introductory literature course offered to English majors and as a general studies course--I created a class that moved students to explore genre and to question what readers really ask of novels and novelists. [1]

The first step in making students' expectations about these novels central to the class was refusing the urge to help them forget everything they thought they knew about this fiction. Correspondingly, many of our early discussions of the novels focused solely on what they expected these novels to give them. (A related advantage was that these conversations allowed students to read further into the novels before beginning our discussions of the texts.) I kept these conversations as free-ranging as possible. This freedom encouraged students to discuss the many different versions these stories had assumed. We talked about the variety of Alice pictures they had seen. Some students even brought in well-worn childhood versions of Alice to illustrate their vision of Carroll's protagonist. Before our initial discussion of Stoker's text, we filled a three-section chalkboard with present-day vampires ranging from Sesame Street's Count to video game vampires. My students also gave amazingly precise accounts of how Frankenstein's monster was composed and animated--not surprisingly, none matched Shelley's account. Eventually, these expectations provided material for comparisons and contrasts. For example, positioning the students' Alice books alongside Tenniel's and Carroll's illustrations as well as Carroll's photographs of the Liddell sisters opened discussions about representations of children. My ultimate goal, however, was to use these discussions as a springboard to conversations about genre and the interrelated question of what readers ask of and expect from novelists.

My most obvious step in introducing students to genre occurred during our discussion of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Unlike our earlier Frankenstein discussion, in which our "prior knowledge" conversation lasted one day, I extended such discussion of Alice over two class periods. I did so by supplementing the original query--"what do you know about Alice and/or what story and characters do you expect to meet in Carroll's novel?"--with "how do you define 'children's literature' and/or what characters, themes, morals, etc., do you expect to find in 'children's literature'?" With a classroom highly populated with education majors, this secondary question took flight. We talked about not only the storylines and characters on which these students grew up, but also the cognitive and psychological stages of childhood toward which such stories are geared. These expansive discussions complicated the students' definitions of children's literature, as they brought up questions about whether Dr. Seuss's books fit the criteria they had composed and if texts such as the Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys' mysteries should be categorized as children's literature. In other words, their discussion led perfectly to definitions of genre that acknowledge the fluidity of generic categories. To wrap up this class period, I offered students the following notes on genre:

   From Alastair Fowler's Kinds of Literature: Genres are ways by
   which an author communicates; one needs to know the genre to
   understand the work. A literary work has to belong to at least one
   genre to remain literary. A literary work's relationship to genre
   is not passive membership but an active modulation; to mean
   anything in a distinct way, a work must modulate or vary or depart
   from its generic conventions.

   From Todorov's Poetics of Prose: A reader must see how a work
   resists, complies with, and implicitly comments upon the general
   signifying practices of literary discourse. A work can only be
   viewed as "literature" if it resists or does something other than
   obey the "rules." "One might say that every great book establishes
   the existence of two genres, the reality of two norms: that of the
   genre it transgresses, which dominated the preceding literature,
   and that of the genre it creates" (43).

Though the absence of an exacting definition of genre was temporarily disconcerting to some, the preceding discussion and previous readings (such as Frankenstein about which students frequently commented that it wasn't "just a monster story")--prepared students for both the utility of identifying a text's genres) and the idea that generic combinations may create intriguing novels. Indeed, the latter idea was especially freeing for many in the class who were dreading their anticipated task: fitting Alice's Adventures into the class's definition of children's literature. Freed from the confines of that task, the students more comfortably began to identify the novel's political and social satire, to discuss the text's variety of potential audiences, and to acknowledge the multiplicity of meanings that could spin out of this "children's book." I need to temper that last claim, however. My students were more able to discuss such issues; they were not always willing to do so. I believe that, paradoxically, our discussion of "children's literature" as a genre contributed to this conflicted situation. Indeed, even after successful discussions of the critiques of education or politics created in Wonderland, students would argue that we should just "enjoy" this book that was, in my students' words, "primarily for children." This time their novel expectations curtailed evaluation.

To make the power of such expectations explicit to students and to help them evaluate those expectations, I decided to ask the students what it means to "enjoy a novel," hoping not only to show that "enjoyment" could go hand in hand with interpretation, but also to underscore the wide variety of demands they make of fiction. I did not, however, pose this question directly. Rather, i asked students to consider what the initial readers of Frankenstein, Alice's Adventures, the early Sherlock Holmes stories, and The Picture of Dorian Gray wanted from this fiction, what was necessary for their "enjoyment" of it. [2] Students undertook this exploration as their second major paper assignment, and the following is an excerpted version of the assignment sheet I provided:

   This class revolves around our reactions to fiction. This paper is
   designed to introduce you to others' reactions and to help you
   learn from those reactions what those readers deemed most important
   about fiction, that is, what those readers saw as fiction's
   purpose. (A corollary benefit of this paper may be that, by
   identifying what others value most in fiction, we will become more
   aware of the expectations that we place on fiction.)

   The reactions you will analyze are those from readers to whom
   Frankenstein, Alice, Sherlock Holmes, and Dorian Gray were new
   fictional creations, that is, nineteenth-century British readers.
   More specifically, you will read collections of reviews of
   Frankenstein, Alice, the early (1887-93) Sherlock Holmes stories,
   and Dorian Gray. [3] Your goal is, in an approximately five- to
   six-page paper, to answer the question: what did nineteenth-century
   British readers believe fiction should do? (this question could be
   variously stated: what did nineteenth-century British readers most
   value in fiction? OR what did nineteenth-century British readers
   demand of their fiction writers?)

   This assignment asks that you not just understand the main points
   made by each collection of reviews, but also understand those
   points well enough to draw significant comparisons between them.
   Questions to keep in mind: The most obvious--and essentially
   correct--answer to this paper assignment is that readers ask
   fiction to entertain them. Your job is to define what the
   nineteenth-century reader meant by "entertain." Asking how, why,
   and who questions (i.e., who should novels entertain?) will be a
   key to coming to such a definition. Further questions that should
   aid you in your inquiry include: how do these reviewers describe
   the relationship between fiction and reality ("reality" in terms
   of actual social conditions and/or the way one lives one's life)?
   What type of artistic standards do these reviewers ask of writers
   of fiction? Are these reviewers defining fiction as "Literature" or
   "Art" (capital "L," capital "A")? According to these reviewers,
   what type of audience will "good fiction" reach? What type(s) of
   effect (on readers, on "the world") do these reviewers suggest
   "good fiction" has? How do these reviewers explain current (good)
   fiction's relationship to previous literary and artistic
   traditions?

   Final Caveat: This paper asks you to make a large claim and to do
   so on the basis of a relatively limited frame of reference. While
   you should therefore be careful when making claims about the
   literary tastes of nineteenth-century readers, know that you are
   working with fiction that was extremely popular and reviews from
   equally popular periodicals, ones that had their "fingers on
   the pulse" of the British reading public. In other words, you have
   sound material on which to make some informed estimations of
   what Londoners of the 1800s were looking for when scanning the
   bookstall shelves.

Immediately following the presentation of this assignment, I turned students' attention to some snippets from the Frankenstein reviews that echoed their own complaints about the monster's spectacular educational abilities. I did this in an attempt not only to ease students into the reviews, but also to acknowledge that these reviews would demand close study because of the many literary, political, and social allusions contained in them. In other words, I emphasized the potential rewards and challenges these reviews would pose.

A week later, when discussing students' progress--they were asked to have read all the reviews by this date and to bring in any concerns--the language of the reviews posed some problems. These, however, were usually easily addressed. The larger concern--one that I see as an inherent problem in the assignment, but one that led to some fine discussions and to some of the most interesting sections in the students' papers--was how to answer the assignment in a way that comprehensively illustrated readers' demands of these different novels. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland typically proved the primary stumbling block, for the tone and focus of this text's reviews did notably differ from the other text's reviews. Wilde's reviews also posed some concern, for, as students rapidly found, many of the Dorian Gray reviews became more personal than textual. In both cases, the questions surrounding these reviews led to genre discussions. We revisited the class's ideas about children's literature, this time opening the discussion to definitions of gothic literature and detective stories and then exploring the similarities and differences in these genres. A collateral result was a debate over the genres by which students categorized Dorian Gray, and, turning to the reviews, an investigation of how reviewers categorized that novel.

This was not an easy assignment. Some students were not able to master the reviews, and errors of interpretation and/or simplifications of the reviewers' arguments crept into such papers. Even in the weaker papers, however, students typically grappled with the question of what type of entertainment or amusement their nineteenth-century British counterparts sought. Ideas about the need for an escape from reality and the thrills of fantasy as well as readers' desire for a reiteration of social and moral ideals dominated many papers. The strongest papers began to explore the precarious balances (between, for example, realistic representations and fantastic images or "gritty" reality and the idealization of the British Empire) that reviewers were asking of fiction. One impressive paper convincingly argued that what the reviewers and public asked of novelists did not match that which they termed Art. One surprise arising from these papers was that few students discussed how their own or "modern" expectations compared to those displayed in the reviews they studied. This was especially surprising as many had mentioned adding such sections to their papers, and I had supported such plans. The omission of such explorations and the belief that students could find material with which to meaningfully undertake such discussions are the bases for one change I am making to this assignment: requiring that one to two pages of the essay address what has changed (and/or stayed the same) between nineteenth- and twenty-first-century readers' expectations of fiction. Beyond personal experience, I will guide students' attention to Amazon.com reviews of these novels as well as the class's in-class and on-line discussions of the novels. While these "reviews" will typically be radical departures from those written by the likes of John Wilson Croker and Sir Walter Scott, I expect the students will be surprised with the fervency expressed in all of these reviews. In other words, they hopefully will find that, though the issues and ideas may have slightly shifted, the passion stimulated by good fiction has maintained a fever pitch.

To foster this comparative discussion, and, even more importantly, to heighten the depth with which students explore the reviews, I also plan to require that students choose one novel about which they read and write. I do not, however, want to lose the conversations arising from students' attempts to assimilate all of the diverse reviews. I will address this potential loss by scheduling class discussions designed to reveal the similarities and differences between papers focused on, for example, Dorian Gray and Alice's Adventures. To prepare for such conversations, I will organize peer reviews during which students will read papers written on texts other than the ones they have chosen. Then, after the papers are completed, the students will give short presentations about all the review--nineteenth- and twenty-first-century--they considered and their conclusions about them. Ideally, I will schedule these presentations so that students studying the same text would speak on the same day and those writing about other texts would ask questions of those speakers as groups. The class for which I created this assignment is an introductory literature, general studies course. This fact led me to explain the course's goals on the syllabus in this general yet expansive way: "as a class, we will probe the questions: Why do we read fiction? How can we get the most out of this experience? And just exactly what does it mean to get 'the most' out of reading a novel or short story? This class will give you a vocabulary for and practice in answering those questions as well as the opportunity to ask many more of your own." Approaching these questions by plumbing the students' own presuppositions and by asking them to plumb the pronouncements of others created a classroom in which discussion flourished, because students came to recognize just how preconditioned and partial, yet still potentially unexpected, the act of reading can be.

Notes

[1] I thank the students of English 262, Reading Fiction, Fall 2003, at Penn State Altoona not only for being engaged readers and thinkers, but also for so readily participating in the "experiments" discussed in this paper.

[2] The absence of Dracula from this list arises from a practical consideration: the assignment was given before students had completed Dracula. The inclusion of the Holmes's stories was intertwined with the class's focus on genre. I asked students to compose definitions of "detective fiction" and to compare their results with "A Scandal in Bohemia." This discussion paved the way for their reading of Dracula, a novel with significant detective fiction elements, and intertwined gender issues into their generic considerations.

[3] I did not ask the students to find reviews. In this class, I used Broadview editions that contain contemporary reviews. When I did not find these reviews sufficient, I supplemented them, often from the Critical Heritage series, books that collect reviews of major authors' works. I found other texts through the Periodical Contexts Index and the Nineteenth-Century Masterfile databases.

Works Cited

Fowler, Alastair. Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1982.

Todorov, Tzvetan. Poetics of Prose. Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.

Laura Rotunno is an assistant professor of English at Penn State Altoona, specializing in nineteenth-century British literature.