Fantastic Beasts Literature Course -- Week 1

[radiantfracture]

...And now we can't shut me up.

Thanks for the expressions of interest in the Fantastic Beasts debrief. Your pedagogical geekery delights me, and the process will be very useful for thinking through how I want to do it next time.


Course Overview



Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (in Literature) was a seven-week first-year literature course that attempted to cover the same material as a fourteen-week course through the expedient of having students sit in a classroom for six hours per week instead of three. As everyone knows, education is primarily a matter of total hours spent adjacent to a PowerPoint presentation.

Class fell on Mondays and Wednesdays, which meant that one of our fourteen precious sessions (that is, the equivalent of a week in a regular course) was eaten up by a statutory holiday. These scheduling restraints (and, let’s be honest, my personal struggle with tricky concepts like Time) meant some challenges in pacing the course, as we shall see.


Readings
• Excerpt from Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
• The Hobbit, Chapters 1 & 2
• Beowulf, Part 1
• Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Part 1

Assignments
“Your Stories” personal essay (C/I) – Essentially a diagnostic essay
o What kinds of stories did you like to hear / read / watch growing up?
o What stories are important to you?
o What are your thoughts about stories and literature in general?
o How about English classes?
o What brought you to this English class in particular?
o Where are you hoping this class will take you?
o What would you like me to know about you that would enhance your experience in this class?

Journal Entry
Define a “fantastic beast.” Is it the same as a monster? If not, how is it different? If yes, how do you know?

(I know this seems like a lowball, but a) I wanted them to explore categorization and b) I am pants at coming up with journal topics.)


Day 1

I’d chosen some loose themes or throughlines or pathways for the course, some of which stuck better than others.

Theme 1: Guests and Hosts

I thought an interesting way in might be through the guest/host relationship, by which I hoped to spark thought about cultural norms and, obliquely, even colonialism. The rules for dealing with strangers are in notable operation throughout the three main texts – Beowulf’s fairly straightforward code of hospitality, the elaborations of courtly love and chivalry in Gawain, and the English middle-class-heroic good-host-at-all-cost-liness of Bilbo Baggins.

The theme also ties in nicely with that “Someone sets out on a quest / a stranger comes to town” storytelling dichotomy, and the way they’re the same story – one from the perspective of the host (or dweller) and one from the perspective of the guest (or traveller).

This theme turned out to feel difficult to make concrete for the students, so I might need to do some more roadwork on the approach to the idea.

Theme 2: Beasts, Beings, and Monsters

This was the big structuring idea of the early part of the course, though I tended to give it less attention later so as not to feel restricted by its fairly simple structure.

You can’t really study J.K. Rowling's Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them – or anyway, I couldn't get any traction with it. It's a novelty book written as a Comic Relief fundraiser. It's a short catalogue of magical animals, and honestly I didn't find it very interesting.

However, there's a section of the introduction that is excellent for my purposes. In it, Rowling describes how creatures in her magical universe came to be classified as beasts or as beings. She gives a fictional intellectual history of the classification of beasts and beings: first, a being is able to walk on two legs; then, a being is able to speak “the human tongue”; finally, a being has the intelligence to understand the responsibilities of being-hood.

Well, you can see how useful this is. We can talk about why such distinctions are believed to be important. We can talk about who gets to decide. We can talk about how there's always someone who is already presumed to be a being and against whom others are measured as a standard.

I added "monsters" as a third category to Rowling's taxonomy. As my PowerPoint announced,

QUESTIONS BEASTS MAKE US ASK

• Who is a “being” (person) and who is not?
• What are our responsibilities, and to whom/what?
• What/whom can we kill and/or eat? What/who can kill and/or eat us?
• What can we learn from other beings?

Fantastic Beasts (and Beings) might help us think about
• The natural world
• The human mind
• Our ethical principles and values

Then I nattered on a bit about cultural work, trying vaguely to make a distinction between performing literary analysis, studying historical context, and looking at cultural work (cultural purposes of stories, etc.), except that I didn’t formulate it that neatly until just now, so I'm not clear that it made any sense at all.

Also, we defined “motif”, just to prove this really was a lit class.


Day 2

• Potted history of Tolkien and the Inklings
• Potted history of Beowulf and Gawain
• Beowulf and Gawain as sources for The Hobbit

Sample nonsense:

Tolkien asked the reader to consider the poem Beowulf not just as an exciting (and unrealistic) story, but as a way of thinking about human life, and particularly about fate.

We defined “elegy” and “epic poem” and immediately never used these terms again so far as I recall.

• Discussion of oral traditions
• Age of folktales

Sample pedantry:

“Oral traditional epic is not merely entertainment …It contains the ideals and values of the society.”

We listened to Benjamin Bagby perform Beowulf in scopful Old English and then Seamus Heaney reading his translation.

Freewriting ensued. It often does.

Further literary definition infodumping then occurred. I just want people to get their money’s worth.

Close Reading

In our first (and arguably only) concrete skill lesson, we snuck up on the idea of close reading through a passage from Heaney’s translation of Beowulf:

Then a powerful demon, a prowler through the dark,
Nursed a hard grievance. It harrowed him
To hear the din of the loud banquet
Every day in the hall (84-87)

So: demon, prowler, grievance, harrowed, din – all this yielded good stuff.

Then another passage, figuring out what the rules of war were that Grendel wouldn’t follow:

He would never
Parley or make peace with any Dane
Nor stop his death-dealing nor pay the death-price.
No counselor could ever expect
Fair reparation from those rabid hands.
All were endangered: young and old
Were hunted down by the dark death-shadow (154-60)

All leading towards this sort of business:

We could say that Grendel embodies the threat of the unknown, and especially threats like

• Human culture being overwhelmed by nature
• Human desires destroying order and peace
• The outsider or “other” who doesn’t follow the rules

Obligatory discussion: What is Close Reading Anyway? (etc)

Images are a nice quick way to practice hunting for and interpreting details. Since we needed to practice close reading a lot in a short time, we looked at many images.

In groups, we examined two different images of Grendel – the corpselike version from the animated film and a more catlike version from a comic book, and talked about what kinds of threats they seemed to represent.

Then we examined this delightful cover from the 1970 Dutch paperback of The Hobbit, cover by Cees Kelfkens:



(I feel like someone pointed me to this image, but I can't remember who. Was it you? Thank you.)

…and a couple of other covers (Tolkien's own and the movie tie-in). What Kind of Book Would You Expect from This Cover? Etc.

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

Then on to Gawain! I know it sounds exhausting, but there were THREE HOURS to fill. We establish the plot of our first excerpt, and then close read the description of the Green Knight.

One of my students offered that the Knight is “Sort of hot.” My happiness is complete.

We discussed whether the Green Knight was a beast, a being, or a monster; then I proposed secret option #4: IS HE A PLANT???

Brief discussion of the Holly King.

Then, by way of comparative literary analysis, an in-class writing assignment:

Who would win in a fight? The Green Knight or Grendel?

Followed by spirited debate.

--Well, friends? I open the question to the Dreamwidth floor. What do you say? WHO WOULD WIN? And who do you think the students chose?

END WEEK ONE

...I believe I need a teaching icon of some sort.

{rf}

Comments

[sovay]

Who would win in a fight? The Green Knight or Grendel?

Grendel dies of having his arm torn off, but the Green Knight can survive being decapitated, so in a protracted battle I'm afraid my money is slightly on the Green Knight.

On the other hand, if Grendel just eats him, he's going to have a hard time coming back from that even if he is some kind of wild-man, Jack-in-the-green, dying-god plant-dude.

[edit] I have no idea who your students chose. I think I am prepared for Grendel to lose.

[radiantfracture]

The students were primarily with you, unless Grendel could make a salad out of the Green Knight first. I found this curiously cheering.

[sovay]

unless Grendel could make a salad out of the Green Knight first. I found this curiously cheering.

Please write the salad.

[tylik]

...I now want to see the paranormal romance version of Grendal eats the Green Knight salad...

[sabotabby]

I would concur, except do we have any indication that he dies if eaten? What if it's like that thing your mother always told you would happen if you ate watermelon seeds—they would just continue to grow inside you and eventually spring forth. I feel like this would happen if Grendel ate the Green Knight.

I have also perhaps not had enough coffee.

[sovay]

—they would just continue to grow inside you and eventually spring forth. I feel like this would happen if Grendel ate the Green Knight.

Oh, I have seen something like this! In a movie, I think, not a book. It was dramatic, too.

[edit] It's in Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain (2006), an ambitious mixed blessing of a movie braiding three versions of a story of a man and a woman and a tree; at the climax of the historical-mythical strand, a Spanish conquistador who has fought his way through a Mayan temple on a mad Herzog-style quest for the Tree of Life drinks the sap of the tree he believes will render him immortal and instead his body bursts forth into flowers and fruit and butterflies—it grants him the creation of new life, not the perpetuation of his own.

I wonder if Grendel would get butterflies.

I have also perhaps not had enough coffee.

I've been awake for twenty-seven hours; you sound fine to me.

[radiantfracture]

Side note: I liked The Fountain a lot.

[sovay]

Side note: I liked "The Fountain" a lot.

I am not sure all of it works as well as the most striking scenes (like Hugh Jackman exploding into flowers and leaves), but I really enjoyed it and I think it remains the only one of Aronofsky's films I've seen that I would actually watch again.

[radiantfracture]

This is an amazing revelation and obviously true.

[grondfic]

The Green Knight, however, is plain old Bertilak when in his castle (and transformed, it is implied, by magic not of his own making, but that of Morgan).

So, given Grendel's predilection for pre-emptive strikes at people's home-places, I would vote his method more likely to be successful.

[radiantfracture]

This is such an excellent point, and it had never occurred to me. Grendel wins on tactics.

[sovay]

So, given Grendel's predilection for pre-emptive strikes at people's home-places, I would vote his method more likely to be successful.

So not even a salad? Just lunch?

[marycatelli]

I can just see Grendel arriving at the castle and being put the test.

He'd fail within the first minute.

[radiantfracture]

I can just see Grendel arriving at the castle and being put the test.

Laughing at this idea.

Let's see. The joyful revels at Castle Makeout enrage Grendel... he descends on the hall to tear everyone limb from limb... a hastily assembled game of spin-the-bottle distracts him... hours later, Grendel wanders off in a daze dragging an empty bottle of peach schnapps...

[green_knight]

Thank you for sharing. This is fascinating stuff, and I'll have to think about the host/guest/stranger-comes-to-town thing some more.

Who would win in a fight? The Green Knight or Grendel?

The Green Knight by virtue of superior swordsmanship and superior wit.

I am, of course, completely unbiassed in this opinion.

[radiantfracture]

The students were with you, so you have the popular vote.

The key question they had for any counter-argument, I think, was how big Grendel actually is. If he's a giant (as some textual clues suggest), he might simply shred the Knight (see above under salad).

[shewhomust]

Presumably Rowling has met the Talking Beasts of Narnia? Which makes me wonder what her definition is daying about them (or about what Lewis is saying about them)...

[sovay]

first, a being is able to walk on two legs; then, a being is able to speak “the human tongue”; finally, a being has the intelligence to understand the responsibilities of being-hood.

I meant to leave a comment about this definition but got distracted by Grendel vs. the Green Knight. The first two parts feel like things that are important to humans; the third feels like the part that really matters. Specifically it chimes really well with the Jewish definition of being an adult, which I was thinking about yesterday.

[marycatelli]

One should note that the definitions are in ascending order of difficulty in determining.

"Featherless biped" is a lot better as an operational definition of human than as a dictionary one.

[moon_custafer]

As a sort of literal embodiment of the land, etc, the Green Knight is in a higher weight class than Grendel and/or his mother; the real question is how he’d do against the dragon, as I suspect he’d be vulnerable to venom and also creatures who are the literal embodiment of curses.

[sovay]

As a sort of literal embodiment of the land, etc, the Green Knight is in a higher weight class than Grendel and/or his mother

Unless you run with the flooded-fen, mere-wife motif and decide they are embodiments of water, in which case the dragon gives us fire and we've got three out of four classical elements in play.

[moon_custafer]

In that case, I'll play a long shot and put my money on the Chameleon.

[radiantfracture]

Is it air we'd be missing in that case? Now I want to find someone to embody the fourth element.

[grondfic]

Would have to be Ariel, surely. And (s)he usually 'fights' by trickery.

[sovay]

Would have to be Ariel, surely. And (s)he usually 'fights' by trickery.

All of a sudden I pictured the Grendel/Caliban support group.

[grondfic]

Yays! Amazing ideas for fanfic being engendered here!

[radiantfracture]

A very fine point. We did run three dragons off against each other later (Beowulf's dragon, Smaug, and Eustace-as-dragon), but I never thought to bring the Green Knight together with Beowulf's dragon.

[radiantfracture]

What if the Knight reproduces by pyriscence, though, and needs the dragon's flame for germination?

[moon_custafer]

Then he'd be the Black Oak Knight.

(I live near a large city park that contains stands of black oaks, rare in our neck of the woods. The park maintenance people have to set controlled fires every few years.)

[radiantfracture]

So really the Green Knight would fight the Black Oak Knight?

[moon_custafer]

I — I kind of think this metaphor may have got away from me.

[radiantfracture]

Or I'm being annoying. That seems at least equally likely.

If you mean -- very nicely -- to ask -- what the heck I am talking about -- I was thinking of the pagan cycle of the seasons in which the Holly King and Oak King fight twice a year on the summer and winter solstice.

[moon_custafer]

You weren’t being annoying, and thank you for telling me about that — do you think the mummers’ play St.George/Saracen fight is a descendant of that imagery?

[larryhammer]

the Knight is “Sort of hot.”

Whadya mean, SORT OF? The description, he's clearly meant to be All That -- in Hulkish green.

[radiantfracture]

Dude, I'm with you. 13/10 would snog.

They also spotted some fluid gender markers, which was pleasing.