The unit
The unit will take place over three weeks-four weeks, allowing for time to collaborate on a larger project at the end. My classes are multi-aged, but I intend to use this unit with my 10th-12th grade students as closely as possible. This may mean one class; it may mean three, depending on the make-up of the student body at the time.
Genres
Each of these definitions is distilled from Harmon and Holmon’s A Handbook to Literature. There are similarities among them, especially their extra-imaginative elements.
Fantasy: There is in this genre a “conscious breaking free from reality.” More specifically, it takes place in an unreal world or non-existent one. Characters may be fantastical, incredible characters. Fantasy may be written for reasons ranging from “whimsy” to serious social criticism. The term may be inclusive to science fiction or utopian/dystopian fiction.
Magical Realism: A more modern and specific form of fantasy, in magical—or magic—realism “the frame or surface of the work may be conventionally realistic,” but contain elements such as “the supernatural, myth, dream, fantasy” which distort the nature of the real.
Science fiction: “Scientific facts, assumptions, or hypotheses form the basis” of these adventures that take place often in the future, beyond the earth, or in “other dimensions of time or space.” I would add that themes in science fiction are often very human and/or cautionary about the outcomes of human progress.
Installation art: a non-literary term, installation art is three dimensional art that for its duration occupies space that may itself be part of the art or its meaning.
Other literary and art applications
Allegory: A work of literature, or part of it, in which characters, setting, and events represent parallel meanings, often abstract qualities.
Installation art: A non-literary form, installation art is three-dimensional and may invite exploration from all sides or even participation from the viewer. Often its setting has significance.
Texts and art works
The high turnover rate of our students requires special attention to lengths of texts and projects. Shorter pieces allow transient students to complete or catch up without frustration. This unit is intentionally based on shorter works and visual media to reach students who may enter the classroom at any point. Text selection comes from previous research on best texts for at-risk, unmotivated readers and new research on reaching the same readers through works of fantasy and imaginative fancy. It is intended to challenge them academically and emotionally—especially to the end that they may find a sense of escape and entertainment in works that bring them horror, joy, and curiosity.
A key text will be The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (L. Frank Baum). The novel offers possibilities for unsettling students, who think they know the story from the 1939 movie or The Wiz. When the seminar was first introduced, I knew I wanted to use The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. I assume that most of my students have seen the film at least once. It has been ubiquitous in pop culture for almost eighty years. I also can be fairly certain that none have my students has read the original text. One first venture into the unexpected may come from the discovery that the movie has deviated from the novel. Assuming they have seen the movie at least once, transient students can at least step in mid-read knowing most characters and a basic plot. However, we have new characters and settings, including the Quadlings, the china country, the fighting trees, and the field mice. Green glasses and a golden cap complicate the story. Each main character has his or her specific resolution, complicating and extending the book’s resolution. After introducing Freytag’s pyramid and briefly tracing what we remember from the movie, I will lead close readings of the two settings with which we begin the book, Kansas and Oz. There is very purposeful language describing the two. The word gray is used at least nine times in the first two pages, for example. I want them to see up front that we’ll be using textual support and close reading throughout. Along the way we’ll do visual analysis of screen shots of the film and compare/contrast them to the novel, if only to keep them visually engaged. Throughout, we’ll continue to trace the plot elements on our large-scale pyramid on the wall.
The original movie poster announced the movie as “the happiest movie ever made”; I still hope that Oz will have the ability to be a gratifying read decades later with a modern and more cynical audience of teenagers.
Other Oz pieces may find their way in. It is possible that we may add The Wiz, time permitting, to see variations on the same journey, which is one of the four story types they’ll chose from when they create their own. In seminar we read critical interpretations of the text, including exploring the conscious and the unconscious, the book as cultural parable, and one looking at the political-historical context of the novel. We have the option to discuss the last briefly and maybe look at excerpts. Their own narratives have the opportunity to be richer with consideration of their own historical or cultural contexts. Their realities are defined by many factors.
Octavia Butler’s “Bloodchild” is an unsettling short story taking place on an extra-solar planet where humans (Terrans) have been allowed to settle on preserves by local civilized creatures (T’Lics). They find a symbiotic relationship in which the T’Lics—unable to host their own eggs—need Terrans for hosts, and Terrans need T’Lics for their land and accommodations. The protagonist Gan is a young man who is to be the host for his family’s close T’Lic and is exposed to the gory and painful operation that produces a batch of grubby worms who will grow up to be T’Lic. One reason Butler wrote this story was to explore male childbirth. (Another was to face her fear of botflies.) I like this story for its total impossibility but adaptable conflicts. After tracing the plot on Freytag’s pyramid, we’ll work on narrative voice by modeling writing and reading for voice. We will use close reading practices and finding supporting text in our search for theme. We’ll get out our art supplies for activities that bridge language and image to lead to comprehension and new realities.
Butler is an African American author—unusual in a genre dominated by white men, and we will explore her life briefly. The story is race-neutral, but some of the problems in the story are very relatable to my students, yet turned upside down. Males give birth. The “creatures” tend to the humans in a manner not unlike we do our pets, but to a more complicated end. The protagonist deals with conflicts of affection and loyalty in an unusual relationship that might mirror that of a non-traditional household represented in my classroom. I predict my students will be a little freaked out but will have plenty to discuss. They cannot not be engaged by this story.
A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings is a well-known example of magical realism by Gabrial Garcia Marquez. An elderly man with wings like an angel’s arrives in a small fishing community on what is probably the Columbian coast. Here, poverty and religion are two driving forces. The poor family he “adopts” has an ill infant. As if in answer to his illness, the old man with decaying wings appears in the child’s family’s courtyard. He is celebrated then dismissed, bringing alternately wealth and shame then finally disgust and fatigue to his host family. One spring after the child is better, the man (angel?) also begins to gain strength and grow new feathers. He takes off without ceremony. The story, though, is very much about the family and the community. This is another visually stimulating story for its rich descriptions, especially of the old man. With this story, we will explore the mix of the real and unreal and the possibilities of writing or creating magical realism, which takes a greater suspension of disbelief, I think, than pure fantasy.
The final work is Kara Walker’s installation The Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby. I had discovered Kara Walker before this unit, and when my seminar leader suggested her as a pairing with Kindred, I was committed. But Kindred was not the correct choice, nor were Kara Walker’s cut-outs, which are too explicit for my high school classroom. In my looking more deeply into Walker, though, I found her installation piece The Subtlety or the Marvelous Sugar Baby. A giant, almost glowing white, mostly sugar sphinx fills the center of the soon-to-be demolished Domino sugar refining plant in Brooklyn. But the figure is not a sphinx; she is a sugar picker of African descent. The installation’s layers of meaning parallel the layers of sugar from the construction of the central figure to the decades-old molasses still seeping from the building’s crevices. The title word, subtlety, by the way, was the quaint name for carved sugar sculptures used as edible table decorations for the rich.15 (Times/Smith) The subject is, as in the other works, a transplanted protagonist, and we see her reality through layers of fantastic artistic expression.
From the installation sponsor’s website: “An homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant.” This was Kara Walker’s first large installation piece, its end coinciding with the demolition of the Domino Sugar refining plant in Brooklyn in 2014. We’ll watch the Art 21 video of the creation of the installation which includes interviews with the artist and traces the creation of the piece. The Creative Time webpage for the installation has links to images, stories, and information about slave history in the sugar trade that may be of interest to other teachers. To end the unit, I want us to create our own installation piece after selecting an issue they want to feature—a reality, remade with their imaginations.
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