A Story: Motive : Work :: Motif : Way, but "there is fiction in the space between" 1
From the mouths of babes astonishing insights appear: "'School is like a staircase; each new grade is one step higher!' Such a joyous moment of enlightenment is, in its humble way, an insight comparable to Poincaré's joyous insight into abstruse mathematical phenomena." 2 Likewise, I hope, I set before you this track of thoughts, voiced by poets and authors, literary critics and cognitive scientists, family and friends, that explores theories of interpretation and cognitive science as well as life that exists in literature, while attempting to model how to make relevant what they reveal. It is hoped that in reading this curriculum you will find your own meaningful interpretations of life and literature, from the literal for the revelational. All aboard!!
The people that I am entrusted to teach English and Film Literature to, primarily high school sophomores and seniors, arrive with diverse but mostly limited reading, writing and interpretative skills, being either on the cusp of discovering their motivations to keep reading and experiencing personal revelations or accepting the lie that reading deeply is beyond them, thus begetting or continuing a premature and metaphysical moribund state. My motivation for negotiating this precarious turning point for these students is twofold: (1) to help propel those of the first disposition into the heavens while keeping their feet on the ground, with their senses primed and working; and (2) to assist those of the second disposition with dispelling the lie by finding its root and severing it in hopes that they will join the others and regain their identity.
In striving for this, I hold to the dictum "do no harm," though I know that even with all my best efforts, I have too often missed the mark—but I know too that young people are capable of deep understanding and forgiveness. In the words of my friend and colleague, Mr. B, I give my best in showing up for, working diligently with, and paying attention to those whom I face during the school day and beyond. 3 And yes, my goals are lofty, as I am a dreamer and 'speculative theorist,' but my work is grounded and effectual, though admittedly not as I hope it will become. I am only one of many villagers with thousands of other people's children whom we are expected to raise up through education. Still, we keep faith.
This curriculum unit comes out of years of seeking and striving to improve, with assistance from numerous people who have enabled a revelation in me that people and all forms of life matter, and not books or school subjects (though they do matter in turn as means of transformation). Since I teach youth and want to see them become their mature selves, the texts included here are about them, though only abstractly. Our task is to discover the relevance of the texts to our selves and to each other and to our worlds through individual and collective interpretation(s), finding footing in the day-to-day.
Specifically, though, each text for this curriculum (though not the images) has a child or childlike protagonist, and all the works focus upon some aspect of understanding one's experiences or regaining identity. What follows is a list of works, though not comprehensive, which are held together by an invisible thread, and will be taught beginning with smaller texts up and through larger ones in a spiraling manner while always invoking memories of each:
- Images (posters and pictures from my classroom walls): Photomosaic of Grant Wood's American Gothic, Michael Schofield's Midsummer's Search, excerpt of Michelangelo's ceiling mural of the Sistine Chapel (man and God's fingers nearly touching), xendless_xurbia, a Radiohead poster, and an original photograph I will refer to as Gray Matters.
- Poems: Unfolding Bud by Naoshi Koriyama and To Look at Any Thing by John Moffitt and Fifteen by William Stafford, as well as other poems found in Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle… and other modern verse.
- Short Stories and an Essay: Grisha by Anton Chekov, No One's A Mystery by Elizabeth Tallent and Salvation by Langston Hughes.
- Novels: Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury and The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger.
If these works are familiar, then the invisible thread may be almost visible. At any rate, by the end of this essay I will have attempted to make it visible or, put another way, to make the strange familiar. I also interpreted in greater depth, further below, three other literary texts as they have revealed themselves, I believe, to be of the same spirit: a poem/song, Strange Fruit by Abel Meeropol, a short story, The Flowers by Alice Walker, and a book, Secrets of the Cave, by Anah Weathers (yes, a relation: my mother!). First, I provide necessary groundwork related to interpretation, revealing one more vital text, Dave Pelzer's A Child Called "It". Then, I gradually stitch together concepts of analogy, metaphor and especially simile as a way, via a fourfold reading of texts in the spirit of both Dante's fourfold theory of allegory and Pardes, or Jewish exegesis, to interpret the literal for the revelational. 4
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