Connecting With the Classics: Dracula

I stole the title of this blog post, and my post on Beowulf, from an episode of the NCTE/IRA podcast Text Messages about ways to engage students with classic stories. You can play that episode right here.



All-Action Classics: Dracula by Michael Mucci


My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I thoroughly enjoy reading books from the Victorian Era in England. Dracula was one of the novels I taught during my student teaching. I love the graphic adaptation as an introduction to the story. Bram Stoker's original used correspondance to tell the story -- Jonathan Harker's journal, telegrams, newspaper clippings, letters. Mucci's adaptation takes the big events and makes them visually stunning. The colors he uses are dark and subdued, giving the graphic novel a gothic feel that mirrors the book.

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Connecting with the Classics: Beowulf

Beowulf by Chris Ryall



I wasn't aware that Neil Gaiman wrote the screenplay for the live action/animated theatrical version of Beowulf. I get the sense that things changed from the epic poem to the film (and this graphic novel based on the film) but I can't remember. Reading this graphic novel makes me want to go back and reread Beowulf and maybe find a copy of Grendel.

I think this graphic novel would be a intro to the more difficult Beowulf text. Teach with graphic novels, anyone?

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Wuthering Heights x 4

Picture from http://goo.gl/BdoK

However any of us may feel about the Twilight Saga by Stephanie Meyer--which I admit, I have read--it is interesting to see how the release of the novel has an effect on what teens are reading. According to an article in the Telegraph (it's been in my inbox for a week and I've just now had time to get to it), sales for Wuthering Heights has quadrupled over the past year because Edward and Bella refer to it in Twilight. These teens are beginning to do what I do, as an avid reader: go read whatever it is characters are referencing so they have a working knowledge of the references. This is the first step to understanding allusions.

Publishers are taking flak for changing the cover of Wuthering Heights to this, which appeals to the vampire romance-loving teens. According to the Albuquerque Examiner article from April 11, 2010, the covers of Romeo & Juliet and Pride and Prejudice have also received a Twilight make-over.
Rachel Harcourt, a buyer at Tesco, which seems to be the Wal-mart or SuperTarget of the UK, says,

The new sleek black gothic-style covers of Wuthering Heights clearly appeal to lovers of vampire romance stories and are helping them to try out a different read. Anything that encourages teenagers to read good books is welcome as there are so many distractions which prevent today’s youngsters from developing reading as a hobby.

I'm inclined to agree. Anything that encourages teens to read at all is fantastic in my book, whether it be the newspaper, or graphic novels, the Twilight Saga, or captions on the television.

RDG 514 Portfolio Piece #2: A Novel

            Gone, by Michael Grant (2008), is Lord of the Flies *(Golding, 1999) for the current generation. In Perdido Beach, California, everyone over the age of fifteen disappears in an instant. Everyone else is left to fend for themselves without adult supervision. But there’s a barrier between Perdido Beach, rechristened The FAYZ (Fallout Alley Youth Zone) and the outside world. No one can get out and no one can get in. No one knows what caused the disappearances. And everyone looks to Sam Temple to lead them, to figure out what happened and keep them safe. But the kids from Coates Academy, the private school on top of the hill, have other ideas and their own agenda. It doesn’t help that some kids are developing strange powers and are using them to control those without. Take Golding’s story, mix in some of NBC’s hit show Heroes and add a force field and you’ve got Gone by Michael Grant.

            School Library Journal, on Amazon.com, recommends Gone for students in Grades 7 and up, the same grade levels in which students read Lord of the Flies.

            Why read Gone, especially since it’s a longer read than most students are willing to sit through? Gone can be a vehicle for discussion of who has power in society, why those people are in power and how they remain in power. In the novel, the kids begin to divide themselves into factions—those who have powers against those who don’t, those who rally behind Sam Temple, who has a power, because he has saved them before, and those who rally behind Caine from Coates Academy. Caine also has a power, but his motives are self-serving. We could discuss how Sam’s leadership differs from Caine’s leadership, and how different students in school are leaders and how they became to be viewed in that role. We can also make a connection to current politics and how the political system works.

            If read in conjunction with Lord of the Flies, students could draw parallels between the two texts, comparing the characters of Sam and Ralph, and Caine and Jack in terms of personality, situation, willingness to lead. One discussion topic often linked with Lord of the Flies is the nature of man, or the idea that man is inherently evil. This argument could be discussed in the context of Gone as well. The two leaders of the FAYZ, Sam and Caine both carry secrets that they do not want exposed. How these secrets play into their leadership roles and the choices they make would make an interesting addition to the Lord of the Flies discussion of man’s true nature.

            In his profile on Goodreads, Michael Grant said that his goal in writing Gone was to “creep [people] out. To make [them] stay up all night reading, then roll into school tired the next day so that you totally blow the big test and end up dropping out of school” (n.d.). I want students to have the satisfaction of completing something bigger than they thought they could. I want them to be able to say, “Yes, Michael Grant was right, I didn’t want to stop reading,” or “No, Michael Grant was wrong, and this book didn’t remotely interest me,” and be able to use the text to support their reasoning on either side.

            A teaching activity with Gone would be to write a scene from the next novel. Gone 2 is subtitled Hunger. In an interview with Static Multimedia (Johnson, 2008), Grant said that the residents of the FAYZ would be dealing with many forms of hunger, some obvious, and some not so obvious. Students could brainstorm types of hunger, then choose one type as a starting point for their own scene.

*For my own amusement, each Lord of the Flies link goes to a different place.

Biard, J.H. (n.d.). “Editorial Review.” In School Library Journal. Retrieved from

http://www.amazon.com/Gone-Michael-Grant/dp/0061448761

Golding, W. (1999). Lord of the Flies. New York: Penguin.

Grant, M. (2008). Gone. New York: HarperTeen.

Grant, M. (n.d.). Goodreads | Michael Grant. Retrieved from

http://www.goodreads.com/author/show/1599723.Michael_Grant

Johnson, B. (2008). Michael Grant Interview. Retrieved from

http://www.staticmultimedia.com/print/features/michael_grant_interview

Classic Summer Reads

Despite the big debate between teaching classical literature, teaching YA literature or teaching a combination of the two, a Teen Fiction website that I follow has suggested a few good reads out of the classical canon for teens this summer. I love reading lists. And I love adding to my ever-growing stash of reading lists that I keep in my Evernote. I'm happy to say, that I'm not adding anything to my reading list from this list. I've read all but Joseph Heller's Catch 22, which I remember starting and not finishing when I was in high school, though I did look up the meaning of the term at some point in the recent past.

Take a look at Francine Morrissette's article to see how many you've read or to add some great classic reads to your reading list.

Jane Eyre, Chs. 1-3

Right away, instead of filling the role of soothing the savage beast of man, Jane seems to bring out that feeling in her cousin John, who beats her, then throws a book at her. There is no apparent reason for his attack except maybe his resentment that she gets to stay on at Gateshead and he's been sent away to school.

Perhaps she will turn out to be the antithesis of the ideal woman. She isn't completely submissive. Because she's threatened with the poorhouse, she doesn't react to John's tauntings as she would like, but for the first time she struggled against her punishment. The beginnings of stirrings against the station of women? This book was published under a pseudonym...

The discussion of Jane's plight and what happened to her parents reminds me of Burnett's The Secret Garden. In that novel, too, it is suggested that if the girl were better looking or more agreeable that people would take more of a liking to her. Unlike The Secret Garden, however, in Jane Eyre we can't be completely certain that she isn't disagreeable since Jane is the narrator and sometimes narrators are unreliable.

The Ideal Woman

As my next long-term project, I'm going tackle Jane Eyre. I say long term becasue I downloaded the eBook from Planet eBook, and sometimes things take longer to read when they're on the computer. My guess is it has something to do with the chair. I was looking at EDSITEment earlier and one of the lessons talks about Jane Eyre and the ideal woman.

The simple review of Victorian women:

The Victorian ideal woman was domestic and pure. She was motivated to serve others, and her main role was to "soothe the savage beast" within the Victorian man. Victorian society viewed women as "the weaker sex," suggesting that they should be nurturers. In all actuality, women in the Victorian age had few educational opportunities. Women, particularly those who were married, had no rights. Only 1/3 of all workers were women, but women made up 90% of domestic servants.

More to come.

A Modest Proposal

I recently downloaded a reading of Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal" from Librivox. When I did, I couldn't help but remembering the modest proposal parody that was published in The Exponent when I was student teaching. The Swift piece is a must read (or hear), and the parody is a must read. It amuses me how much controversy this particular parody caused, and how insane it was that people didn't get it. I suppose one could argue failure of the educational system for those who took the author seriously, not having been familiar with the piece she parodied.

"Heart of Darkness" take 10

I must preface this post by saying that it's taken me a decade to read this story. I remember that I was supposed to read it before sophomore year (English 10X, which equates to honors British Literature). I think I spent most of that sumer working in pits for various productions, so I didn't read it. There were two professors in college who assigned the story; I recall becoming bored and stopping before getting too far into it. So this time, we'll try analysis as I go, and maybe that will get me to the end.

The beginning of the story: four men on a boat as the sun is setting. The narrator sets a morose tone, suggesting that the now absent sun was "stricken to death by the touch of that gloom brooding over a crowd of men" (2-3). It's interesting that he chose to use the word "brooding" here. While brooding can mean meditative, which fits with the reflective states of the men on the yacht, it also connotes a pensiveness, suggesting a morbid type reflection on their current state.

The yacht, itself, is an archetype, symbolically a microcosm of the world. The men aboard the boat are from varying walks of life, a Director of Companies, a lawyer and an accountant. We do not yet know the occupations of Marlow and the narrator. They yacht is also symbolic of man's journey, suggesting (minus the fact that there are still about 130 pages left) that the company has quite a task ahead of them reaching the ocean at the end of the Thames, which the narrator calls "an interminable waterway" (1).

Sit back, hold on, and let's see if we can make it all the way to the ocean this time.