Fresh Takes on Teaching Literary Elements: Lessons and Activities to Deepen Comprehension – Part III Connecting Life to Literature And Literature Back to Life Jeffrey D. Wilhelm Boise State University

“His Last Bow” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle “It was nine o'clock at night upon the second of August--the most terrible August in the history of the world. One might have thought already that God's curse hung heavy over a degenerate world, for there was an awesome hush and a feeling of vague expectancy in the sultry and stagnant air. The sun had long set, but one blood-red gash like an open wound lay low in the distant west. Above, the stars were shining brightly, and below, the lights of the shipping glimmered in the bay.” Circle all of the sensory details you see in the paragraph. Choose four details/words that you think are the most interesting or descriptive, and list them here: Sensory Details/“Moody” Words  Resulting Emotion/Mood

Setting as rule setting A setting “sets” or determines rules, constraints and possibilities, as well as consequences for conflict and characters. In essence, the discussed levels and dimensions of setting work together to define and confine all of the possibilities that might follow.

We must help students Attend to the appropriate levels and dimensions Attend to the salient features of these aspects of setting Use their prior experience to figure out the rules of how these levels and dimensions work with texts Attend to the interplay of the dimensions—especially to assess the effect of this interplay on character and actions, and to make predictions and interpretations.

Reading and composing activities for understanding setting Movie Reviews: which level of setting will be most important? How will it interact with other levels of setting? Responding to photos and paintings

The importance of teaching setting We hope you are convinced that setting—in both human contexts and in literary texts—is very nuanced and very powerful. Spending time understanding setting has many benefits to students as readers of literature and as writers and composers of various genres. Understanding setting deeply will enable students to be wide-awake researchers into the power of setting in reading and writing, in their own lives and those of others, helping them to be more democratic citizens and lead more cognizant and, possibly, fulfilling lives. These are goals well worth going after.

Teaching for Theme A general heuristic: Identify the general subject Identify the key details and the PATTERN of key details – trajectory and consequence Identify the point made by this pattern of these details about this general subject

Kenneth Burke’s Parlor Metaphor Imagine you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself against you, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally's assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress.

What makes a theme more than an aphorism, a main idea, or a moral is that theme is a rich understanding, expressed through a crafted work of art but applicable to life beyond the work, and situated in an ongoing cultural conversation that tests and complicates it.

Authoritative vs. Internally persuasive discourse Internally persuasive discourse, on the other hand, according to Bakhtin, “is affirmed through assimilation” (p. 345). When we live through characters, we do that kind of assimilation. In Booth’s (1988) words, we “stretch our own capacities for thinking about how life should be lived” . . . “it is . . . applied to new material, new conditions; it enters into interanimating relationships with new contexts. More than that, it enters into an intense interaction, a struggle with other internally persuasive discourses. Our ideological development is just such an intense struggle within us.” (Bakhtin)

If reading is part of an ongoing cultural conversation then. . . We must know the topic of the conversation and care about it We must know HOW to discern what others are saying and respect this, looking for deeper patterns and what points they imply We must decide the extent to which we wish to embrace, reject, resist or adapt what we have heard And we must provide evidence throughout (How do we know? What do we have to go on? So what?)