Intro to Lit, Part II
Yesterday, I praised The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading. Thinking. Writing, because it contains a decent chunk of West Coast writers, my kind of people.
Today, I will damn it:
The plastic (durable) front cover of this 2,200-page, 4.5-lb, much-adopted brick shows a painting of two teenage girls on a sidewalk in SoHo. One, of course, is on her cell. The other, spare me, has her nose stuck in a paperback.
The inside cover, a pleasant off-beige, lists "resources for reading and writing about literature," among them some three dozen "sample student papers," obviously intended not to intimidate the fledgling critic. This is new in the eighth edition. Also new: three cases studies on "humor and satire" and a 26-page study of Julia Alvarez, including five poems, a chronology, a picture of the poet age ten, an interview, and two and a half pages of "manuscript."
"Class-tested in thousands of literature courses, The BITL accomodates many different teaching styles." 66 stories, 430 poems, 21 plays.
The inside back cover lists help on the "Re: Writing" "Web site" [sic]; my favorites include "Avoiding Plagiarism Tutorial," "Using your Word Processor," and "Mike Markel's Web Design Tutorial."
Let us turn quickly (just past the copyright page), to the page with the editor's bio and photo wearing a Borsalino-type hat and a coat with one of those flaps on the collar that you can button up to make everything snug. He is a Thoreau scholar who's taught at UConn since 1981. He also edited the Seventh Edition of the brick in question. He is, in short, the guardian of a cash cow, and gets to dedicate the book to his wife. (Milton also gets a page of his own, with two short poems.)
Chapter 1. Reading Fiction starts off with a photo of the late Toni Cade Bambara, who, in case you missed her moment in the sun, was an African American.
Chapter 2. Writing about Fiction starts with a photo of Alice Walker. (Are you getting the idea that the first edition came out when the canon was being reloaded with the previously disenfranchised?)
Chapter 3. Plot starts with a photo of Stephen King.
Of course, there is some World Lit: Rushdie, Mafouz, Garcia Marquez, and the late Bessie Head, born in South Africa to a black father and a white mother, who moved to Botswana in her twenties.
And eight images in full color, including a diagram of a slave ship; J.M.W. Turner's "The Slave Ship"; a poster of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," co-starring Sidney Poitier; a Bollywood poster...
It's too easy kicking a brick like this, although it is obviously a godsend for instructors at such places as Winona State, Gateway Community, LSU at Alexandria, Pulaski Tech, Paris JC, Kilgore--
All right, class, settle down now. Please open your text to page one thousand eight hundred and seventy-six (a number I picked at random): Act II, Scene II of A Raisin in the Sun.
Today, I will damn it:
The plastic (durable) front cover of this 2,200-page, 4.5-lb, much-adopted brick shows a painting of two teenage girls on a sidewalk in SoHo. One, of course, is on her cell. The other, spare me, has her nose stuck in a paperback.
The inside cover, a pleasant off-beige, lists "resources for reading and writing about literature," among them some three dozen "sample student papers," obviously intended not to intimidate the fledgling critic. This is new in the eighth edition. Also new: three cases studies on "humor and satire" and a 26-page study of Julia Alvarez, including five poems, a chronology, a picture of the poet age ten, an interview, and two and a half pages of "manuscript."
"Class-tested in thousands of literature courses, The BITL accomodates many different teaching styles." 66 stories, 430 poems, 21 plays.
The inside back cover lists help on the "Re: Writing" "Web site" [sic]; my favorites include "Avoiding Plagiarism Tutorial," "Using your Word Processor," and "Mike Markel's Web Design Tutorial."
Let us turn quickly (just past the copyright page), to the page with the editor's bio and photo wearing a Borsalino-type hat and a coat with one of those flaps on the collar that you can button up to make everything snug. He is a Thoreau scholar who's taught at UConn since 1981. He also edited the Seventh Edition of the brick in question. He is, in short, the guardian of a cash cow, and gets to dedicate the book to his wife. (Milton also gets a page of his own, with two short poems.)
Chapter 1. Reading Fiction starts off with a photo of the late Toni Cade Bambara, who, in case you missed her moment in the sun, was an African American.
Chapter 2. Writing about Fiction starts with a photo of Alice Walker. (Are you getting the idea that the first edition came out when the canon was being reloaded with the previously disenfranchised?)
Chapter 3. Plot starts with a photo of Stephen King.
Of course, there is some World Lit: Rushdie, Mafouz, Garcia Marquez, and the late Bessie Head, born in South Africa to a black father and a white mother, who moved to Botswana in her twenties.
And eight images in full color, including a diagram of a slave ship; J.M.W. Turner's "The Slave Ship"; a poster of "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," co-starring Sidney Poitier; a Bollywood poster...
It's too easy kicking a brick like this, although it is obviously a godsend for instructors at such places as Winona State, Gateway Community, LSU at Alexandria, Pulaski Tech, Paris JC, Kilgore--
All right, class, settle down now. Please open your text to page one thousand eight hundred and seventy-six (a number I picked at random): Act II, Scene II of A Raisin in the Sun.
posted by Howard Junker at 7:38 AM
3 Comments:
I remember the anthology from my freshman rhetoric class (1986) which was loaded full of insult-your-intelligence footnotes. The book I'm about to finish the Barnes & Noble paperback of Trollope's The Way We Live Now seems to have been footnoted by the same person: Among the footnotes are helpful pointers to the fact that "row" can also mean an argument or disruption, as well as descriptions of the mythological figures behind some metaphors while ignoring the question of why they would be referenced in their context. The end notes are easy enough to ignore, but these insults are at the bottom of the page and hard to get past. What ever happened to expecting readers to crack open a dictionary once in a while?
As a current Composition Instructor at a California State University, I peruse, over the course of a semester, dozens of titles like these. While it is hard to qualify, these texts seem purposefully designed to disallow free thought: there are endless interruptions to the main text: footnotes, graphics (!!!), and "reader questions", the latter sometimes inserted midway into the essay/short story/play/what have you. Perhaps this is the academic side of sociological Rationalization: the "custom" of free thought supplanted by the effeciency of the editor, who wants badly to keep the checks from the publishers coming and therefore tries to pack as many PC writings and info about them in as short a space as possible. I don't get it, and have stopped using these "academic texts" altogether; they make for lazy students and lazy teachers. Additionally, they are typically WILDLY expensive--often between forty and eighty bucks.
In short, it's a racket; the kids could go buy Walden for 99 cents at a used bookstore and learn infinitely more.
I remember a senior lit class in college (1982). We were reading together in class when we hit a particularly inane footnote. The teacher blushed and said, "I'm sorry." Until then, I had never questioned the role of the academic textbook. Worth the price of admission right there.
I also note that this "intro to lit" seems to be missing a genre. Or perhaps the self-important clutter is intended as a substitute for literary nonfiction.
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