James Bond Guest Lecture #1: Historical Context & Role-playing the "Angry Young Man"

I was given the opportunity this year to do a number of guest lectures on Ian Fleming's Casino Royale. In this first lecture, I discussed the historical context of that first James Bond novel, focusing on the widespread poverty and economic destruction following Britain's losses in the wake of World War 2. I argue that this creates both a personal and a national identity crisis which Fleming seeks to address with this novel.

One of my favourite aspects of this lesson is the opportunity for role-playing for the students. For many traditional instructors, this type of activity might seem silly. Even I acknowledge that such an activity could become too much about the novelty and not enough about actually learning the material. However, I like to use role-playing activities as a means of getting my students to engage with characters. In this case, it enables the students to create a personal connection to the cultural context. They do not just understand the economic perils of the British people from an intellectual perspective, but rather they come to understand those social ills from an emotional perspective, also. This engages students with kinesthetic learning preferences, as well as students with high emotive intelligence. In that this activity it different from their usual learning devices, the historical and emotional context of the novels enters their longterm memory more fully because they connect these feelings of disenfranchisement and national insecurity into their own perceptions.

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The historical context of postwar Britain is both geographically and intellectually remote for our students, so grounding them in the historical background is a must.

We talk about the interrelationship between personal and national identity. This is an interesting concept for them: they do not usually consider how national identity influences personal identity, perhaps because Canadians are so wishy-washy about their national identity.

John Osborne's "Look Back in Anger" (1956) is another contemporary text that explores the engagement of individual identity with historical context, so I like mentioning it here.

There are two parts to this role-playing section: the first one could be omitted if you had a smaller group of people who were very comfortable already.

So what do you do to respond to the world when things seem to be falling apart? Write fiction!

I think this is a good way into talking about Ian Fleming: his personal experience is definitely part of his writing, and I think this ties into the idea of personal identity very nicely.

I love this chart from The Economist: 

So this is the introduction to the novel: they understand historically, socially, and emotionally how people would respond to Casino Royale in 1953. 

Creative Writing Prompt: anthropomorphism

I have ALWAYS loved words. I love learning words, and I love using words. My dad and I like to impress each other with excessively pompous and excitingly lengthy new words. (His favourite word is sonder: the realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own; mine is probably serendipity or elucidate). So, I just love anthropomorphism, because I have to slow right down just to say it. 

I had a collection of writing prompts that just didn't seem to fit into a lesson plan, but suddenly it occurred to me that we could talk about inanimate objects, and then all of these little ideas I had been having had a home: it turned out I was just itching to hear stories about things and objects, and how they feel about stuff. (I think the next iteration of this lesson plan will include a discussion on apostrophe, but this is it for now!)

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Anthropomorphism Stories (an-THROW-po-MORPH-is-m)

Anthropomorphism is a type of figurative language where you ascribe human values onto non-human things. This can include animals, seasons, furniture … almost anything! As soon as you write that “the sun smiles,” or the “dog feels betrayed,” you are giving the objects the characteristics of humans. 

Usually, we use this type of figurative language to express an idea: we aren’t actually saying that the sun is smiling, but we are saying that the sun is round and warm and bright. Anthropomorphism is a creative way of describing something metaphorically.

In today’s activity, you will use more than just a few descriptions to create a metaphor: instead, you will write a story where you continuously personify a single object. For example, you might write a story about a lost marble. You would give it human qualities in order to express its sadness, as well as its determination to find its home.

Choose one of the following scenarios, and write an anthropomorphic tale to describe a very human story using non-human objects.

1)      Tell the story of a day in the life of the planets in the solar system.

2)      Tell the story of a young person who suddenly meets the days of the week … and they act just like people.

3)      Describe the kinds of conversations that happen in your kitchen when you’re not there.

4)      Describe what trees say to each other, and think about how long a tree conversation might be!

5)      Tell the story of a dusty old record player that just wants to play his favourite song.

6)      Tell the story of an old house with many picture frames on the walls: the people in the paintings often speak to the inhabitants!

7)      Darkness and Light are friends; what do they do together?

8)      Silence is lonely, but one day he meets a little boy, and …

Creative Writing Prompt: Sign-Language Recipe Stories

A recipe is a collection of ingredients that you collect together in a particular order and certain amounts in order to create a story. You can create a recipe story by combining random objects, different numbers of characters, and a variety of settings. The story you write comes from how you imagine these objects working together.

Today’s class will take that premise of the recipe story and add a twist: you will be given a random assortment of flashcards, each containing a letter or word. You will combine these together into a story of your design. For example, if you are given the letter “t,” perhaps that will make you think of the word “tulips,” which you can add to your recipes. You may think of the letters as a wild card where you can introduce your own additional creative elements.

What’s the twist, you ask?

The flash cards are all in sign language. This shouldn’t affect your story-writing, but when you share your story in the circle, every time you mention the word from your recipe, you should give the sign for it. (You can sign the letter “t” for “tulip,” for example). Since we don’t all know sign language, and it would take too long to look up and translate an entire story, this is a good way of giving us practice in telling a story using sign language.

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This creative writing prompt was inspired by a class visit from Adam Pottle. Thanks for everything you do, friend!

Creative Writing Prompt: Soundwalk in the Spring!!!

Writing is such a visual exercise. Not only is it physically written in front of you, it also deals in imagery, attempting to capture the visual experience for the reader to imagine. We use the word “image” to talk about the ideas that the writer creates with his or her words. Inevitably, this means that writing often struggles to capture other senses, including touch, smell, taste, and sound. When a writer takes the time to note these other senses, the experience of reading becomes much more textured.

However, in order to write about these senses, we must become fully aware of them.

For this activity, we will immerse ourselves in sound. We are going to go on a soundwalk.

A soundwalk is where we walk around listening to the world around us. We write down the sounds we hear. We also write down when the sounds change, how loud they are, and where the sounds occur. We let the sounds make us think about where we are and our associations with those sounds.

Soundwalk rules:

1.       No talking is allowed. You must stay perfectly quiet so that you – and those around you – can listen to the sounds in your environment. There will be plenty of time to talk afterwards: the soundwalk is a silent activity.

2.       You must stay with the group. While you are listening to the things around you, you must stay with the group: we cross the road as a group, we stop as a group, and we walk down sidewalks in single file as a group. Safety is one of our major concerns in this camp; if you are found to have broken this rule, you will be escorted back to the classroom, and you will not participate in the rest of the soundwalk.

3.       You must write down what you hear. Once you start listening, you will be surprised by the things that you hear around yourself. Stay quiet and listen to every tiny movement around you. Write down as many of the sounds as you can as you hear them. We will stop periodically so that you do not have to write and walk at the same time J

When we come back from the soundwalk, you will have 15 minutes to write a story about the sounds you heard.

You don’t have to write a story about the walk, per se:

You may have heard a bird on the walk that made you want to write about it.

You may have heard a car horn honk at a pedestrian, and you want to write about how that person might have felt at being honked at.

You might have moved from an urban space to a residential space and noticed how the sounds changed: you might want to write a poem comparing the two spaces.

The choice is up to you!

The Yellow Wallpaper: Science & Women's Health

I gave a guest lecture on "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and I wanted to avoid discussion of the wallpaper. I knew that the professor would likely want to talk about all of the shifting imagery of the paper, so my purpose here was to take a different approach. 

Throughout the lecture, I referred to several passages which I neglected to write down in this lesson plan, but in reading these notes, I largely thought that the arguments were still fairly sound. The notes in box brackets [] denote an action item or item for discussion.

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The way that I read "The Yellow Wallpaper" is as a fictionalized discussion of women's health in relation to science and medicine.

In order to clarify what I mean, we need some background information on how science and medicine have treated women's health in the past, and there is no better example of that than in the word "hysteria."

What does hysteria mean?

[they define] 

They actually have difficulty defining it beyond "highly anxious," which is interesting: they can give examples of hysteria, and they know it when they see it, but to define it proves difficult.

[I define]

So when we hear the word hysteria (or its cousins, hysterical, hysterics, etc), we have this impression of what the word means. However, the root of the word is latin, and means "wandering uterus."

This was originally a medical term that was used to explain women's extreme mood swings. We know that there are many medical reasons why women especially have changes in emotion: these can be related to pregnancy, lack of pregnancy, or post-pregnancy; menopause; puberty; depression and anxiety; thyroid conditions, and so on. Keep in mind that women are imagined to be "feminine," which means that they are soft and nurturing, not angry or excitable, or sad and detached. The inability to perform "proper" female emotion was seen as a medical condition. The answer that 17th century doctors determined to explain all emotional issues that a woman can experience was... their uterus: in particular, that their uterus was detached and wandering around, bumping into stuff and causing emotional outbursts, and so on.

So you are all logical thinkers: you have discovered that an organ is wandering around bumping into stuff. What do you do?

[you remove it!]

They figure this one out right away, to general hilarity.

We know now, (in this fascinating modern age we live in!) that removing a uterus actually causes even more hormone imbalances.

This short story is about the medical methods that are used to try and "cure" the narrator.

A scientific / feminist reading enables us to see a lot more about the text than we might otherwise miss:

·        When she refers to being alone, we recognize that this is actually a medical treatment. The sun and the air provided in the room are also part of her treatment.

·        When she refers to her husband as her prescribing physician, we recognize that women's health is further dismissed because there doesn't seem to be an acknowledgement that it is unethical for him to treat his own wife. The point Gilman is making is that the husband is refusing to see her problems as authentic. The issue that we can read from that is that women's health issues were considered below thinking about conflicts of interest or the ethics of treating your own family members and so on. (Another thought: is it possible for a male doctor to be conflicted by his feelings for his patient if he is a man and has no feelings?)

·        When she refers to it being lucky that Mary is so good with the baby, but she can't deal with it because she is nervous, she is referring to her own baby and her feelings about it. This gives us a clue as to what actually ails her:

[post partum depression]

They eventually get to this; the mentions of the baby are so subtle that I missed them on the first reading, but eventually one of the students comes up with this answer.

At this point, I say that we should largely try to avoid diagnosing fictional characters, especially with mental issues of any kind, because a fictional character is just that. HOWEVER, we are cheating a little bit: we know that Gilman had a nervous breakdown following her own pregnancy, so we can reasonably assume that the similarities between the narrator's condition and actual symptoms of post-partum depression are quite accurate, at least within Gilman's experience

·        When the narrator says that writing makes her feel better, but she is told that it is not good for her, Gilman is pointing to an actual treatment that was prescribed for women of all manner of health issues: they were quite frequently kept from reading, from writing, from exercise, and from house work (but not always the latter!) in order to keep their minds and bodies from becoming "excited." The narrator's point that she feels better when she writes suggests that her feelings about her own body are being ignored at the advice of what (rudimentary) science tells her doctors.

·        As the narrator's condition progresses (the wallpaper continues to bother her, the sights and smells get more pronounced, and she suddenly sees a woman within the paper), we can see that her isolation and her lack of stimulation has given way to delusions and dissociative thinking. (If you see the woman as another being, then it's delusional; if you see the woman as being herself within the paper, it's dissociative)

Reading the short story for medical methodology is fruitful because we can see how Gilman is pointing to very specific ideas in science and suggesting that they are deeply incorrect.

However, we also cannot claim that Gilman is a scientific genius before her time: she is merely pointing out that women's experience - the patient experience - should be part of the medical process. But she is not able to tell us what the condition is, what exactly her narrator is suffering, or other details that we can read into the text given our position in time and history. We should therefore be careful of such readings.

Similarly, Gilman gives us another reasons to be suspicious of a scientific or medical explanation for what's occurring to the character. What clue does Gilman give us as to the reason for the narrator's behaviour?

[the foreshadowing of the haunted house, therefore supernatural forces at work]

I go back and read the intro to the story, and they immediately understand that there is some gothic stuff happening here. I love doing this, too, because here I've just - apparently - undermined my own reading to give them a different direction to consider.

For this reason, this text is often read as early American Gothic, or feminist gothic, because it concerns issues of the Gothic as well as feminist themes.

If I were to write an essay claiming that Gilman is making a point about female medicine, I would use all of the arguments that I gave to you, but I would add that the author is likely adding in these supernatural and gothic details in order to prevent her text from being taken too politically: if she can wave critics away by saying "Oh it's just a gothic fantasy," critics and scientists in the medical community can't criticize her for not knowing what she's talking about. The short story is in fact the very place where she CAN criticize medical practices with regards to female health, because she is taken less seriously as a critic of the science because she is "just a writer." 

Vesper Lynd Debate: Sympathetic characters, close-reading, debating

I love debating literature in my classes. One of the key things about assigning a debate is that you should never pick a topic for which you have a biased opinion: the topic for debate should have reasonable readings on either side that are supported by the text, the genre, or critical readings.

(I mention this because I was once made to debate in a university-level teaching course where the outcome they wanted us to come to was a compromise, and I was outraged: debates are not about compromise, debates are about seeing different sides of an issue; it's about picking a side and sticking to it, which is an essential skill of essay-writing. I was thoroughly displeased with this method of teaching debate to teachers, so I have redoubled my efforts to expound on the benefits of debating in class. Correctly. /Rant over).

The second important thing to note about this particular debate is that it's explicitly based off of a quotation from James Bond in Casino Royale, where he says, "[t]he bitch is dead" in reference to Vesper Lynd, who was previously his love interest, but lost that privilege with her death and his discovery that she was, in fact, a Russian spy.

I acknowledge that the word "bitch" carries a lot of cultural baggage with it: not only is it impolite in most places, it is also a problematically gendered insult. It is not a word you want to encounter with a group of students who are both new to university and new to you as a teacher. You really have to have a group of students with whom you've worked, who you know will be able to deal with the strength of the language maturely. You have to be able to acknowledge that the word "bitch" is not just there for the shock value: it expresses a deep sense of emotion and betrayal, which is totally incongruent with Bond's character. It is a line worth delving into.

And so we delve straight into the controversy:

The scene - in addition to the controversial language - forces the reader to come to terms with "cold" and "taciturn" Bond as actually being capable of feeling both love and betrayal, which suggests a depth to his performance of masculinity, as well as the breadth of his character. 

The first term of literature that I discuss with the students here is the idea of the sympathetic character: 

Importantly, I point out, their reading of the situation is all about which character you sympathize with more. We talk about how sympathy is generated for the characters. 

For Vesper, it all hangs on whether or not you trust that suicide note (we talk about epistolary elements in a different class). If you believe that she is acting on her love for Bond, you feel for her. 

On the other hand, if you read Bond's distress as genuine, and you distrust her suicide note (or feel it is flimsy, or what have you), you are likely to sympathize with Bond. I ask to what extent she can be blamed for the events of the novel, because at first glance, it's about Le Chiffre. However, you realize that from the beginning, she was behind the machinations which constantly put Bond in danger and undermined his ability to succeed at beating his antagonist. 

There are at least two opposing ways to read Vesper's complicity within the text; thus, determining whether or not she is a "bitch" is actually a great debate for the students. In this exercise, they must do a close reading of the text to flow the instances of her complicated character and make claims that she is either sympathetic or not (of course, we can't have a motion for debate that reads "This House Believes that Vesper is a bitch," because that would be unnecessarily inflammatory). By making their reading ultimately about sympathy, they not only learn a literary term and get to play around with it, they actually get to sink their literary teeth into a controversial topic.

At this point, I should note that if you've never read my blog before, I often have my students debate. Some years, they debate more often than others, but I always introduce the mechanism for formal debate early. 

(NB 1: I have had to debate in only two instances in a classroom setting: the one I mentioned above, and another in high school which left me desperately debating against fifteen others as my teammates failed to come up with any arguments. I was so emotionally overwhelmed afterwards that I skipped the next class - the only time I've ever done so - to cry in a washroom. My teacher never tried it again, and I learned that setting up the framework for debate feels awkwardly formal at first, but it sets up the necessary rules and directions so that no student has the utterly horrible experience that I did in grade twelve English class).

(NB 2: Now you're wondering why I use debate in my classroom because my classroom experiences were actually horrible. I was introduced to real debate in university, and I have since become a widely-recognized debate judge and coach as a result of nearly ten years with university and high school debate. Once I learned how to do it right, I fell in love :) ) 

As a reminder, I put the instructions up on a slide so that everyone is on the same page. I try to make the distribution of tasks as fair as possible within the groups, and I ask that if someone has debated before, that another group member volunteer. Incidentally, while I walk around the room listening to conversations, I am able to see who is participating in group work who may not otherwise participate in the larger group conversation. This gets them their participation grade.

I always have a vote at the end: the students who put a lot of thought into their work like to feel empowered by the vote of the rest of the class. Usually, it's not entirely fair because each team votes for themselves, but that's part of the fun of it for them. 

Write a comment if you have any questions about how to run a debate in your classroom! 

Deconstructing Paragraphs: two examples

One of the first things that I find I need to teach my first year English students is how to construct a paragraph. I had really excellent English teachers in high school, but it seems that the provincial standards for what constitutes satisfactory written work varies widely. (I hope this does not detract from the truly hard work that high school English teachers put in to their efforts ... I'm not sure it's their fault that the standards are so low).

In any case, I often find that my students have difficulty with their writing structure. For many, this might seem petty; however, I often find that without the structure of a decent thesis, followed by clear topic sentences, the rest of the paragraph falters. This leads to formulaic essays in the middle-range, but it often gives a base-line of structure to more talented writers to jump off from. This formula of paragraph-writing is a method I use to get mediocre to moderate writers to get much better, and for the students who put in the effort, the results are enormously rewarding. (The students who are equipped with good ideas benefit from seeing how the structure can emphasize and augment their existing arguments).

In this lesson, I used two sample paragraphs (one about Lethal Weapon, one of my obsessions!) and a topic on travel (which happened to be one of the choices for their first essay). I was thinking here in particular of my students who are visual and spatial-kinesthetic learners: the visual learners see the colours, and the spatial-kinesthetic learners see the shapes and patterns that are formed by the colours, and the construction of the paragraph becomes clearer. (These are not my best paragraphs, so use your own if you like!)

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De/Constructing a Paragraph:

Labelling the parts of a paragraph

Key:

Dark purple: topic sentence and tieback to topic sentence

Light purple: one kind of evidence: a definition or term

Red: another kind of evidence: specific examples

Green: explanation of the evidence (in this case, also linking the term with the examples)

Light grey: summary of previous paragraph (over two sentences in this paragraph, which is not ideal!)

Bold: thesis statement

Note: Your paragraphs will look different from this one, because it is a hybrid of an intro paragraph and a body paragraph.

1)      Your body paragraphs will not have thesis statements, but they do need to tieback to the topic sentence!

2)      Your introductory paragraphs will have a thesis statement, so the tieback is less critical.

3)      Your body paragraphs will have evidence; your introductory paragraphs do not need evidence, but they do need to introduce the topic quickly, as I have done here.

Sample paragraph:

The Lethal Weapon franchise may be the best buddy cop series of the 80s and 90s, but its importance in popular culture is as a pre-cursor to the “bromance” phenomenon of the 2000s. Television and movies about cops who are friends – buddy cops – featured a pair of cops who solved crimes together, often engaging with one another humorously, but always demonstrating the limits of their friendship as posed by traditional masculinity. Early examples of buddy cops include “Starsky and Hutch,” “Beverly Hills Cop,” “Point Break,” etc. Such friends could not be emotional, could not demonstrate their affection for one another – even though such affections often existed – and could not speak to one another about serious personal or philosophical issues, unless under extreme duress. The bromance relationship of the 2000s is different from a buddy cop relationship because the former tests those traditional limits of male relationships, by having more frequent interactions that are emotional or discuss personal feelings. Examples include “I Love You, Man” (as the quintessential bromance), “The Hangover,” “Hot Fuzz,” and “Scrubs.” Often in these examples, there is both comedy and drama in the situations where the male characters are forced to confront their affection for each another; despite being completely platonic, our society has a significant problem with males having emotional relationships with one another. The appeal of the bromance is both the awkwardness of that confrontation, as well as the emotional satisfaction of their genuine moments with each other. The relationship between Riggs and Murtagh in Lethal Weapon has elements of the tension of buddy cops, as they try to maintain the expectations of their masculinity within their relationship. However, over the course of four films, the two men suffer injuries, loss, and near-death experiences which bring them closer together and force them to confront their affection for one another, making Lethal Weapon an early example of a bromance.

Second example:

In this example, I will clearly demonstrate the differences between the intro paragraph and the body paragraph, but I will use the same key as above, so you can see how the construction of the paragraph a) stays the same across all paragraphs b) looks in an essay similar to one you have already done.

               If given the opportunity to travel anywhere in the world, where cost is not a factor, I would choose to go to London, England. People choose to go to England for many reasons; they might choose its historic importance, its arts, its culture, or even its fashion. However, as a student of literature – with an inadvertent focus on the British parts of the English canon – I would go to London with the desire of seeing as much as I can about authors whose lives intersected with that city. I would go on a walking tour of the city, mapping out locations where famous authors lived or died, and where they set their stories. I would go to the Globe Theatre to see a Shakespearean play, and then fast-forward four hundred years to go to the Warner Brother’s Studio Tour of the Harry Potter films. I would want to experience both of these hallmarks of British literature in the places where they were first produced. I would go to the London Film Museum to see an exhibit on James Bond. Finally, I would go to a poetry slam, so I could witness the up-and-coming writers of Britain performing their pieces. Places often define the literature that come from them, in many unexpected ways. Now that I have experienced the literature, I want to experience the literature in the place that it originated from. In this hypothetical trip, I would choose to go on a journey of London, to experience its literature.

               I would go on a walking tour of London to see how British authors experienced the city. Plenty of maps of authors, authors’ houses, and fictional characters already exist, but I would make a new one with an eye to my favourites. I first learned about these maps from Professor Allison Muri’s Grub Street Project, an online database of mapped literature in London. Since then, I have been intrigued by mapping literature. But seeing the maps online or even making them is not enough; I need to go to the city and follow the maps to connect the places in my head and in literature with real places in the world. I want to see how British authors imagined their spaces, and how they lived their everyday lives. I would be able to see both of those things just by witnessing the space as they did. My literary journey of London would be incomplete without a literal journey through London’s literary streets to experience the lives of both authors and characters.

So what did I do in the previous paragraphs?

1)      The topic sentence of the first paragraph clearly sets out the topic, right off the top. It does not have to be a repetition of the thesis statement (and you’ll notice, the thesis statement adds the “because” part, only the word “because” is implied: “to experience its literature”).

2)      The green parts in the intro are explanation.

3)      The blue parts in the intro are what Kevin calls the “table of contents” (I call “signposting”) of the essay: you can see from this list that I will have four different sections based on things I would do, but signposting still has not indicated the argument of the paragraph; the topic sentence will introduce the argument.

4)      The thesis statement is shaded purple to show that it concludes the paragraph and ties back to the topic sentence, but it’s also bolded to indicate that it is the thesis statement. “In this hypothetical trip, I would choose to go on a journey of London, to experience its literature. ”

5)      In the first body paragraph, you discover why I would choose to go on a walking tour of London: “to see how British authors experienced the city.” For this argument, I will need to justify why going there is important to me.

6)      I justify that argument by giving evidence: the Grub Street Project, which first inspired me.

7)      I explain the evidence and how that relates to the topic by saying “seeing the maps online or even making them is not enough.  … . I want to see how British authors imagined their spaces, and how they lived their everyday lives” When you write your second essay, your evidence will be direct quotations from the text (unless you’re talking about some element of form like line spacing or stanzas, but that’s the only exception!)

8)      My concluding sentence does two things: 1) ties back to the thesis (reminds the reader why we’re there): “My literary journey of London would be incomplete” 2) it ties back to the topic sentence: “without a literal journey through London’s literary streets to experience the lives of both authors and characters..”  It might seem a bit repetitive at first, because we’ve essentially just repeated the topic sentence, however, I’ve connected it to the thesis statement simply by saying the journey mentioned in the thesis statement would be incomplete without the actions of the first body paragraph.