It's a great concept. It's a concept I should like. Fairy tales recast in contemporary settings, but in such a way that they still engage with good and evil, and from a specifically Catholic perspective. Regina Doman's fairy tale novels are novels I really want to like. And yet, every time I read them, I encounter difficulties--first with The Shadow of the Bear, and then with Alex O'Donnell and the 40 Cyber Thieves--I find myself enjoying some parts of the stories, but rejecting others so firmly that the experience of reading is seriously impeded. So when I read Sarah Reinhard's review of Rapunzel Let Down, I was intrigued. I was interested! And I was cautious. But from the review, and from Regina Doman's web site, it seemed that the tone was different in this book--more different from the other two than Shadow and Alex were from each other. So I started reading. I am still reading. But the resistance is definitely there--and building. So I'm blogging about it.
Resistance is something I've thought about quite a bit. When teaching composition, I teach audience resistance as a way of getting students to consider audience when they are writing, and to consider what rhetorical appeals they can employ or what strategies they can evoke in order to minimize the resistance that an audience might feel when reading a persuasive essay on a particular topic that happens to be written from a particular perspective. Often (but not always), it has been a matter of helping a very religious undergraduate student consider how an academic audience will react to a position based in Christian morality, and to strategize reaching an audience that might not find certain arguments convincing--or who might find them offputting. So resistance is absolutely about the reader, and as a writer, negotiating reader resistance depends on whom a writer sees as her audience (more on this in the next post).
I have thought about resistance in teaching and training contexts as well. Most recently, I have thought about ways in which "soft skills" trainers really don't help themselves because they are completely unaware of what aspects of a sensitive topic might make class participants bristle. As a literature teacher, it occurred to me that not only were many students resistant to fantasy, whole classes could be resistant to reading literature in particular way (reading children's literature as literature rather than for its potential as a teaching aid, for example), individual students could be significantly resistant to particular works. My favorite example of student resistance has to be the student who told me that he refused to read Plato's Symposium on the basis of my introductory lecture on the historical context--and Greek homosexuality. I talked him through his resistance by pointing out the influence of the "Ladder of Love" on Christian philosophy, and he actually wrote his final paper on the Symposium.
When I assigned "rhetorical blogging" in my most recent/last children's literature course, I was hoping that the blogging, which specifically acknowledged the "rhetorical situation" of reading, would help students to overcome any resistance they might have to 1) fantasy or 2) reading children's literature as scholars and critics. As it turned out, those particular students were not generally resistant, but certain things emerged: some female students were resistant to books that they identified as "boy books"; some (also female) students felt betrayed because they expected Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH would be about the little mouse named (by her married name) and depicted on the cover; some were resistant to books about rodents (a lesson I didn't learn, that cost me a job in New Zealand); most were resistant to Roald Dahl because of what they felt was a cruel and warped sense of justice. So in fact, we did engage with resistance in that class, and often by way of the blogs.
My purpose in having the students blog and identify areas of resistance was so that by acknolwedging the resistance, and analyzing the reasons for that resistance, students might gain awareness of their reading that would permit them to read to the end of the book, and move out of their comfort zones, and also to help them to identify these points of resistance as areas for analysis. If something bugs you while reading--figure out why!!
So having the blog, and relizing that when I read Regina Doman's novels, I have that bristling that makes me want to argue, even if I know that I basically agree with her underlying point, I need to pause and ask why, especially as I want to like the story.
So that's the theoretical part. I have some ideas, but I'll save those for the next post!
3 comments:
You've given me something to think about this morning - why we resist certain works. I look forward to your next post on why you feel resistant to those fairy tales though, I admit, I have not read them. I, myself, have resistant to retellings of fairy tales. I just don't like re-reading stories I've read before?
Off topic, but you remind me that the reason I was deeply disappointed when I took a children's literature course in college was because the class treated children's lit primarily from a teaching perspective and not really as literature at all. It was so disappointing and I couldn't get very engaged in the class. I almost failed in part because I was over-extended and in part because I was battling depression, but mostly because the class wasn't what I wanted to be taking. And the part where we had to write a children's book-- torture.
There were the children's lit courses at my university taught in the Education department, and then the ones taught in English. In English, the sophomore-level courses *could* addredd teaching a *bit* more, depending on who taught the class, but that wasn't really supposed to be the focus. Our junior-level chilcren's lit, which this one was, was supposed to be a literature course like any other. I much prefer it that way. My mother had a HORRIBLE experience trying to take a children's lit class as an undergrad at the school where I got my B.A. (this was when I was getting my M.A.). She had to drop the class. They were resistant to everything she had to offer. When the class that I taught was dominated by education majors, their expectations were always different--and almost impossible to negotiate.
Post a Comment