Updating how we teach (French) literary movements.

Abstract

Our students who increasingly appear daunted by literature can benefit from understanding that the definition of literary movements presents a challenge for established critics just as it does for them. This article presents pedagogical strategies with a ludic twist that involve students directly in the conceptualization of literary movements, thereby moving them away from rote learning toward critical thinking.

Introduction

Defining literary movements has always been a shifty business. Scholars have long been acutely aware of the resistance to definition of even the most 'established' -isms.[1] Yet undergraduate literature and culture textbooks tend to support a more static view of periodization through the use of timelines, charts, indexes and/or a chronological organization of chapters by period. Courses with titles such as 'Problems in Periodization' are generally reserved for the graduate level. An inclination to gloss over or deemphasize these difficulties in undergraduate courses may reflect a well-intentioned attempt to render literary study less intimidating in order to offset declining enrollments in literature courses. Nevertheless, as instructors we must 'h'emain concerned about implementing a curriculum to train students in the necessary skills of critical and creative thinking" (Stivale 1). I believe that an explicit focus on the problematics of defining and conceptualizing literary movements not only helps students to develop these skills, but may even lessen the intimidation factor by showing students how literary movements are essentially artificial constructs rather than set in stone. The activities presented below were developed for a course in French civilization, but may be adapted to literary studies in other languages.

It's in the Cards

All literary and artistic movements share the same fate: they end up on index cards, an -ism on the front; dates, names and adjectives on the back. Students generally like to make index cards; the discrete items are reassuring, particularly in the daunting realm of literary studies. They can offer the cards as proof that they have studied, and isn't that really what the teacher wants? For those teachers who instead want students to think, it can be disheartening to see the content of a course reduced to a pile of index cards, however accurate, detailed, or brightly highlighted in neon they may be. Indeed, in retrospect, some of the better teachers I had pointedly avoided labels, and yet many -isms still made it onto my index cards (much the same as one finds mnemonic devices and verb charts scribbled on language tests by students no matter how committed one may be to orthodox communicative language teaching). The question for me then is not whether to teach movements such as modernism (the example I will use primarily below), but of course how, since part of the work of a student, like that of a critic, is to categorize. I suggest that we might begin by redeeming the very act of compiling index cards and other related cognitive strategies used by students. When done thoughtfully, such strategies are neither easy nor necessarily reductive and they reenact some of the critical processes that "create" movements in the first place (organizing, comparing, synthesizing, defining, and so on).

Recreating the Past

As can be noted, I have chosen to approach this topic first from the perspective of a student rather than that of a teacher. Recent studies in reflective teaching practice remind us that: "The story of learning to teach begins actually much earlier than the time one first decides to become a teacher" (Britzman 26). Our own experiences as students invariably inform how we teach. We often attempt on the one hand to reenact our own positive learning experiences and on the other to reverse the negative ones. In short, we sometimes try to teach the way we wish we had been taught.[2] For my part, I try to share with my students how I learned (or didn't learn) as well as how I continue to learn. By reflecting on my own experiences as a student, I pinpointed a number of the difficulties I encountered in trying to understand specific movements and the concept of periodization in general. Like many students, I became only gradually aware of the complexities behind the simplifications promised by course titles. I wondered how two such disparate authors as Becquer and Zorrilla could be on the same syllabus for Spanish Romanticism, or what was so 'natural' about Zola's flight of fancy fairy tale Le Reve. But not until I reached modernism did I fully understand the limitations of-isms. To be precise, I never did reach modernism per se--already outmoded and still ill-defined, it no longer seemed to figure in my course catalogs and I was launched, unprepared and wistful, into postmodemism. I never quite recovered. Does French literary modernism begin with Baudelaire and Flaubert, is it a twentieth-century deliberate break from the weight of the past, does it represent a totalizing and pessimistic impulse, or, as I am coming to believe, is it an expression of the desperate need to exist (through art)?

The basic lesson that modernism teaches, more clearly perhaps than any other -ism (in French studies, at least), is that one can and in fact must define each term one uses each time one uses it.[3] By wrestling with the definition of hard-to-pin-down movements (see suggestion 1 below), our students can find out for themselves that knowledge, like index cards, can fade, get misfiled, or be thrown out. We are left to think and rethink, to write and rewrite what we (think we) know.

If It's Tuesday, This Must Be Waterloo

Let me turn now to consider my recent attempts as a teacher to present literary movements effectively to my students. The chronological French civilization survey course I was assigned to teach is the last in a series of three, stretching from Napoleon I through to De Gaulle, and "covers" an -ism in a day or two (the academic equivalent of a frenzied bus tour through Europe). To compensate for an overambitious syllabus, I began to underscore whenever possible the processes involved in the conceptualization of movements in order to show that they are fairly easy to name, harder to define, and impossible to contain.

Rather than relying on a textbook written for foreign language students, I opted to focus on readings and activities drawn from textbooks and study guides used by high school students in France such as the scholastic series Histoire-geographie (Magnard) and Reperes pratiques (Nathan). These materials function at several levels: 1) they deliver content (and serve to motivate students who may be surprised to learn they can handle the language level despite their non-native status); 2) they are rich cultural documents that can be analyzed as such, providing, for example, valuable insight into the transmission of cultural values; and 3) because they are pedagogical materials, they heighten the students" awareness of the processes involved in organizing, delivering, and assimilating content (French students after all do focus on periodization, movements, -ism s, etc.). As a result, my students tend to appreciate and benefit more from the explicit practice of using index cards, notes, dates, or facts to anchor an analysis. In this practice, it is essential to convey the full sense of anchoring as dwelling temporarily in one spot, in order to help students acknowledge that the analysis is never final, but one must move on (and with luck perhaps return).

I outline below a number of other related activities that I developed for this course, for use in class or as out-of-class assignments. These activities emphasize the challenges of defining literary and artistic movements. Note, however, that this load is lightened by incorporating playfulness as much as possible.[4]

Suggested Activities

1) (P)recognition: Before any formal discussion of an -ism, students are asked to use the image option offered by the search engine "Google" in order to find images they think best represent the term and morphologically related terms: for example, modernism, mod, modern, modernist, modernistic, etc. (one might also include French spellings of the terms). In small groups, they can then discuss their choices (and any difficulties they may have encountered in locating images) in order to propose a working definition or description of the terms. In this specific example, several of the terminological difficulties of modernism surface: it is an -ism that appears rooted in a time period that cannot be precisely delineated; "modern" as an adjective loses its descriptive value because it is too widely used, etc. For example, students may find it easiest to identify an image representing "mod," only to realize that they have chosen it because, in fact, it appears dated. Or the large quantity of 'hits' for modern in a variety of retail / commercial websites (e.g., '.com') will underscore its enduring currency as a synonym for contemporary, in stark contrast to its use in non-commercial sites (e.g., '.edu'). A related activity is to show a number of works of art, several of which belong to a specific-ism, and ask students to identify which ones they think belong to that category and why. Both of these activities, like any pre-reading type of tasks, ask students to access prior knowledge. The focus on visuals may help them to recall more than they might otherwise and to become more aware of any preconceptions they may have even if they cannot yet fully express them in words. In this activity, if they are able to identify works representative of a specific -ism successfully, the experience may validate for them that style/period classifications are not arbitrary (although they may not be able to define satisfactorily which elements in the works helped them in their classifications). Ground is also laid here for a later discussion of the connections between modernism in the visual arts and in literature.

2) Title search." Students are asked to print out pages from a library database title search on "modernism" (or other term) and use the titles exclusively to arrive at a working definition of the movement, its historical period, and its adherents. Here the focus is on (short) texts, limited to titles. The concept of a working definition is not always clear to students. They may even resist it, having come to rely on instructors to provide them with "the answers" (and, alas, often "the questions," too). This activity allows them to explore and to practice research skills they can use in a number of contexts. Because they will be working through some of the issues surrounding how to define modernism (and movements in general), they will more fully grasp the challenges. The tables are turned: students formulate both the questions and the (provisional) answers.

3) Avant/apres la lettre: Students are asked to find examples of works that share affinities with a movement from a different historical period (for example, students could be asked to find lyrics from the rock era that are reminiscent of qualities they have noticed in romantic poetry). Pointing out to students that music lyrics are akin to poetry is an old ploy. (My fifth-grade substitute teacher wowed us by having us first study a "poem" and then revealing the record album it came from as Carole King's "Tapestry.") Still, given the large number of our students who are phobic where poetry is concerned, it can be helpful to have them make this connection.[5] Here, notions of high and low culture become more evident to students since, for example, they feel much more comfortable analyzing their rock collection or their favorite movies. The question of whether -ism's are time-bound is also raised in a context that may be easier to grasp for students.

4) Dub your own -ism : Students are asked, individually or in pairs, to invent an -ism (whether whimsical or "serious "') drawing on social or cultural trends they have noticed. In addition to naming the movement, they might list its characteristics and provide a number of examples, ranking them from most representative to least representative. A follow-up activity might be to challenge the validity of their own movement (or those of other students) by seeking counterexamples or exceptions. On the one hand, this activity attempts to demystify the critical process of defining -isms. The difficulties students encounter, however, might inspire a greater appreciation of the process. By creating and dismantling their -isms, students also internalize the notion that movements are essentially constructs (but constructs that need to be defended and to be useful in some way!).

5) Pure fantasy: Once students begin to feel they have a clear grasp of a particular movement, they could be placed in groups and asked to imagine and describe a work that would represent the movement in its purest form and then to create a spectrum along which they could place the actual adherents in relation to the nonexistent work. The groups could then share their results and debate the order they have chosen. This final activity, like the previous one, underscores the concept that there is no pure representation of any movement, even though there are usually several highly representative works. Students are also led closer to a consideration of an essential aspect regarding literary and artistic movements: how and why trends fade, 'morph,' merge, and even reemerge.

Conclusion

As caring teachers, our first instinct is all too often to shoulder the burden of instruction as much as possible. Practice proves to us over and over that the responsibility for learning can be assumed only by the student. My experiences implementing the strategies outlined above confirm for me that students do learn by doing. They also tend to do more, and therefore learn more, when the ludic aspects of learning are emphasized, as in the suggested activities. Implicit in these suggestions is my belief that the study of literary movements is not only unavoidable, but worthwhile and enjoyable. Personally, I like labels- provided they peel off easily.

References

Britzman, Deborah P. Practice Makes Practice: A Critical Study of Learning to Teach. Rev. ed. Albany, NY: SUNY Press: 2003.

Dorel-Ferre, G., Heurtefeu, L. and F. Sirel, eds. Histoire 2e: Les Fondements du Monde Contemporain. Paris: Magnard, 2001.

Eterstein, Claude, ed. La Litterature Francaise de A a Z. Paris: Hatier, 1998.

Gamache, Lawrence. "Defining Modernism: A Religious and Literary Correlation." Studies in the Literary Imagination 25.2 (Fall 1992): 63-81.

Gardner, Howard. Frames of Mind: the Theory of Multiple Intelligences. New York: Basic Books, 1983.

Kaufman, Paul. "'Defining Romanticism: A Survey and a Program." Modern Language Notes 40.40. (April 1925): 193-204.

Ligny, Crcile de, and M. Rousselot. Reprres Pratiques: La Litterature Francaise. Paris: Nathan, 1998.

Oxford, Rebecca. "Language Learning Styles and Strategies." International Review of Applied Linguistics. 41.4 (2003): 271-278.

Stivale, Charles J., ed. Modern French Literary Studies in the Classroom: Pedagogical Strategies. New York: MLA, 2004.

Anita Jon Alkhas, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee

Endnotes

[1] I offer just two examples, out of innumerable possibilities. In the 1920s, a scholar laments: "No more persistent problem forces itself upon the student of literature and the historian of thought at the present time than the interpretation of the term romanticism" (Kaufman 193). At the end of the century, the elusive definition of modernism causes another scholar to echo the sentiment: "As with any term designating a many-faceted cultural development, the word 'modernism' is difficult to deal with" (Gamache 63).

[2] While the insights into learning that we glean from our own scholastic experiences can be of great value, it is important not to overgeneralize from one's past. We should also take into account the extensive body of research on learning styles since Gardner (1983) first outlined his notion of multiple intelligences. See Oxford (2003) for a concise overview of the application of learning styles to second language learning.

[3] Note, for example, that the tenn "modernisme" is not even included in La Litterature francaise de A h Z and other popular study guides for high school and college students in France. Instead subgenres of modernism are listed such as "surrralisme" and "theatre de l'absurde."

[4] Many other examples of ludic, but sound, pedagogical strategies can be found in the recent MLA volume Modern French Literary Studies in the Classroom.

[5] Fifteen out of twenty students in one of my recent classes admitted to fearing poetry.

Anita Jon Alkhas, Ph.D., an Assistant Professor of French, teaches courses in language, culture, literature, and foreign language pedagogy.