Operating on the assumption that it's never too early to think about syllabi, I'm contemplating what to do with the return of Brit Lit II in the fall. My syllabus for this course has always been unapologetically old-fashioned, in the sense that I treat it as an introduction to major authors only; I've never seen the intellectual point of "canon-busting" for students who have never encountered the canon, and therefore don't understand the stakes of the busting, let alone what's being busted. (My students soon grow familiar with my eternal "And look, here again is why you need to read Paradise Lost" refrain, which goes along with the "please read The Pilgrim's Progress in your copious spare time," "yes, Shakespeare is necessary," and "if you're an English major, you need a Bible" refrains.) However, I also ask students to write papers about works that are not on the syllabus--or, sometimes, works that are on the syllabus, but were deliberately not discussed in class--and here's where the less-familiar authors creep in, even at the introductory level. There are two primary pedagogical reasons for this approach: a) it frees students from the constraints of pre-existing classroom discussion; b) it opens up opportunities for them to show that they can translate reading skills from text to text.
One of my favorite ways of sneaking other authors into a course is to work with texts that revise, appropriate, respond to, and otherwise rework those on the syllabus. Thus, we get Felicia Hemans on Lord Byron, Mary Robinson on S. T. Coleridge, half of the known galaxy on Shakespeare, and so forth. A variant is to have students read/watch adaptations--which, of course, pose their own set of problems, the most serious of which is the dreaded "fidelity" issue. As anyone who has ever taught adaptations knows all too well, students with no experience in this area sometimes default to conjuring up long lists of similarities and differences (cue instructor: ARRRGH) without an argument. Yes, yes, differences, but what are they doing there? Ergo, the poor beleaguered instructor needs to somehow head the default off at the pass. And that means...demonstration day!
Paragraph three, and I've yet to address the title of this blog post. (Hmmm. My grade appears to be dropping.) I've never taught any Lewis Carroll in Brit Lit II--in fact, I've never taught Carroll at all--and I thought it might be fun to a) get a little Alice in Wonderland into the mix and b) do some work with adaptation/appropriation. What I think I'll do is pull the "Mad Tea Party" chapter along with a brief extract from a Victorian etiquette manual, and then have the students look at some clips before they come to class. But which ones? Many of them will have seen Disney's Alice in Wonderland (1951) as children, but it can't hurt to have them look at it again (although I suppose I'll have to explain that the Hatter has somehow been amalgamated with Humpty-Dumpty). There are some extremely surreal versions out there: e.g., Gavin Millar's Dreamchild (1985), with scary muppets (Dark Crystal mode, not Sesame Street) as Hatter and Co., and Jan Svankmajer's Neco z Alenky (1988), with battered, primitive-looking toys. Equally surreal is Jonathan Miller's dreamy Alice in Wonderland (1966), although it risks sending viewers off into a different kind of dreaminess. I'd like to sneak in a couple of ballet adaptations, Christopher Wheeldon's (2011) and Glen Tetley's (1988) (not YouTubed), both of which pose more extreme difficulties for talking about adaptations of Carroll; as reviewers of Wheeldon's ballet kept pointing out, it's awfully hard to confine an Alice to dance and mime. And there's the 1999 TV adaptation, I suppose, but I really dislike it--possibly because I find Martin Short grating, possibly because it just seems to drag on forever. Whatever their approach, both the straight-up adaptations and the more revisionist appropriations tend to bring out what U. C. Knoepflmacher calls the "unremittingly hostile" (173) quality of the Mad Hatter and the March Hare; the chapter's humor has a habit of deflating when visualized. In any event, I have the summer to make up my mind...
Lucky students, getting to romp through the Tea Party! I think the Miller version is most faithful and most useful for students, the Disney version is useless except for a technical analysis of modern plotting techniques.
The key to the Tea Party is its aggression, as you noted. In a recent issue of the Knight Letter, (journal of the LCSNA), Chris Matheson pointed out that LC is best understood as a comic writer and that the Tea Party is probably his masterpiece. Basically it's the Marx Bros plus Three Stooges vs. phenomenology … and guess who wins?
If you wish to read the relevant KL issue, feel free to contact me.
Excellent blog.
Posted by: mahendra singh | June 25, 2012 at 09:40 AM