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.

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