Novel Expectations to Novel Evaluations

Abstract

Abstract Teaching "popular" novels--ones about which movies and television shows proliferate--offers a unique classroom opportunity: to probe the power of readers' expectations over their interpretations of novels. Using this as a guiding issue for an introductory literature course, I created a class that moved students to explore genre and to question what readers really ask of novels and novelists. This essay examines the steps I asked students to take to meaningfully answer "what do I ask of works of fiction?" ********** "The monster should be green, and we should get ALL the details about it coming to life." "I thought Alice was a much nicer little girl than the one we're reading about." "Dorian Gray isn't supposed to murder people ... and this sex stuff?!" "There should've been more gore when they finally kill the vampire--what a rip-off." When teaching Frankenstein, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, The Picture of Dorian Gray, and Dracula, I have often received such comments, ones that pinpoint what students wanted or thought they would get from these novels. The force with which such pronouncements are made, indeed the actual frustration that some students experience with these novels suggests that this well-known, yet often unread fiction offers a unique classroom opportunity: to probe the power of readers' expectations over their interpretations of novels. Using this as a guiding issue for a "Reading Fiction" course--an introductory literature course offered to English majors and as a general studies course--I created a class that moved students to explore genre and to question what readers really ask of novels and novelists. [1] The first step in making students' expectations about these novels central to the class was refusing the urge to help them forget everything they thought they knew about this fiction. Correspondingly, many of our early discussions of the novels focused solely on what they expected these novels to give them. (A related advantage was that these conversations allowed students to read further into the novels before beginning our discussions of the texts.) I kept these conversations as free-ranging as possible. This freedom encouraged students to discuss the many different versions these stories had assumed. We talked about the variety of Alice pictures they had seen. Some students even brought in well-worn childhood versions of Alice to illustrate their vision of Carroll's protagonist. Before our initial discussion of Stoker's text, we filled a three-section chalkboard with present-day vampires ranging from Sesame Street's Count to video game vampires. My students also gave amazingly precise accounts of how Frankenstein's monster was composed and animated--not surprisingly, none matched Shelley's account. Eventually, these expectations provided material for comparisons and contrasts. For example, positioning the students' Alice books alongside Tenniel's and Carroll's illustrations as well as Carroll's photographs of the Liddell sisters opened discussions about representations of children. My ultimate goal, however, was to use these discussions as a springboard to conversations about genre and the interrelated question of what readers ask of and expect from novelists. My most obvious step in introducing students to genre occurred during our discussion of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Unlike our earlier Frankenstein discussion, in which our "prior knowledge" conversation lasted one day, I extended such discussion of Alice over two class periods. I did so by supplementing the original query--"what do you know about Alice and/or what story and characters do you expect to meet in Carroll's novel?"--with "how do you define 'children's literature' and/or what characters, themes, morals, etc., do you expect to find in 'children's literature'?" With a classroom highly populated with education majors, this secondary question took flight. We talked about not only the storylines and characters on which these students grew up, but also the cognitive and psychological stages of childhood toward which such stories are geared. …