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LITR 4632: Literature of the Future  |
Final Exam Essays 2013 Sample answers
for Essay 2:
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Rachel Jungklaus
Easy Magic
What makes a text appropriate for use in the classroom? Easy magic. Easy magic
may be simple words, but the idea is complex. In Survey of Exceptionalities,
students read Exceptional Lives by Turnbull and Turnbull. Chapter 12
opens with Richard Ellenson speaking of communication, “You need to find the
easy magic that will open the door for people quickly. After that, people will
do the work for themselves. Once people have taken an interest, building a
relationship is much easier.” Easy magic is what makes reading fun. It is what
builds into a relationship with reading, books, and learning. Mr. Ellenson was
talking about how to make relationships with disabled students, but I believe
the idea can be applied to reading as communication, both between the author and
the reader and between the teacher and the students. So the question that should
be asked is what is the easy magic? Paul Acevedo,
while talking about a former reading from high school, points out the main
criteria in his essay “The Zesty Metaphors of “Hinterlands”” from 2009: “As a
teenager I read Neuromancer, Gibson’s ground breaking cyberpunk novel.
But I did not like it. That book was so dry, so cold.
I never connected with it.” The easy magic that makes books appropriate
for the classroom is connectivity. Here is where the idea gets a little more
complex. Connectivity can be based on anything that the reader can relate to,
which changes depending on the audience and sometimes the author. Wells's Law
states that "… an sf or fantasy story should contain
only a single extraordinary assumption." The idea is that otherwise the reader
could not accept and therefore connect to the story. Future narratives build on
what you already know; starting with something simple that you can connect with.
It is easy magic.
The Time Machine has plenty of easy magic. The story being secondhand
makes it easier to believe. The reader can identify with having been told a
story that they did not quite believe themselves and then sharing that story
with someone else. It sounds like some of the gossip told at church on Sunday,
except instead of church it was a meeting of the minds. That is part of the
magic. While the words used at the beginning did not make a whole lot of sense
to me, they did sound like science, which was the point. It makes it almost
believable. The story, while wild and “out there,” did not have wizards or magic
and was based on scientific principles, some of which we still use today. Easy
magic!
Parable of the Sower
was a brilliant story filled with easy magic. I could definitely see this book
being used in a high school classroom. It was about a young woman who did not
believe in her father’s God, which is something a lot of teenagers can relate
to. The environment has been damaged by people; global warming. When her
neighborhood is destroyed, Lauren strikes out with the only other survivors she
could find. This is where I want to be her. Readers feel so connected to Lauren
that they need to know what comes next. Parable is so easy to connect
with that it makes it hard to put the book down. That is my favorite kind of
easy magic; a world that I could live in where students could join me for a
time.
“Stone Lives” has easy magic in its futuristic society that really draws readers
in. Here, it is the possibility of the gap between rich and poor, with a
vanishing middle class, growing from our own time to become this horrifying and
fascinating future. As you learn more about the main character, you begin to
feel a great empathy with him. Stone, having lost his sight, lived in the
Bungle, abandoned and watched by his “mother,” regains his sight and discovers
the other richer side of the world which is so different from what he has known.
It appeals to our need to know how the other side lives, but shows that the
grass is not greener. Stone is the flawed man
who achieves greatness through work,
chosen because of his bloodlines. The reader connects with the necessity of
struggling to survive and finding the place where you truly belong.
“Bears Discover Fire” is a sweet and amusing story, and that is the easy magic
in it. Nothing was very different from our own world, except that bears had
discovered the use of fire and were no longer hibernating. The most obvious
connecting point comes from the human-like qualities of the bears. Besides
discovering fire, an example would be like when the narrator and his nephew join
his mother in the woods with the bears. That scene is packed with examples, but
the most obvious is when he mentions that only some bears knew how to use fire
and were just carrying the others along and how that was the way it was with
everything. Bears were just like people! It is a fun and funny read, which is
why it would be used in my classroom. A reminder that reading can and should be
enjoyable would be appropriate for a class of teenagers.
“Speech Sounds” is another story by Octavia Butler that has easy magic. Butler
has a gift for making reading easy and entertaining, but I think the part I like
most is the hope she gives her readers. In class, a student said that everything
she wrote was so dark and depressing, but there is the faintest glimmer of hope
at the end of Parable and “Speech Sounds.” It kind of concludes the play
on fears, which is part of the easy magic both here with the pandemic and in
Parable with the environmental damage. The reader gets involved in the drama
of this story and endures anxiety for the safety of Rye, and later Obsidian. The
reader experiences empathy when they discover Rye lost the ability to read and
Obsidian the ability to speak and understand speech. There is a connection
through empathy and fear.
“They’re made out of Meat” was hysterical to me and several others in our class.
The easy magic in this story is something we did not talk specifically about in
class, at least not in reference to this text, but it is the purpose for science
fiction: to entertain and educate. “Meat,” in its hilarity, caters to the
entertaining quality with ease, but for the educating quality you have to dig a
little deeper. The moral of the story is to remind people not to judge others by
what they look like on the outside because to an advanced alien life form we are
simply made out of meat, and who wants to talk to meat! The easy magic is the
humor, which leads to the moral.
“The Poplar Street Study” found its easy magic in the familiarity of the opening
scene and the surprising twist. Even if the reader has never lived in a suburb
or on a block like this, the odds are pretty good that they have seen one on TV
or at least know about them. It is so obvious that this story is going to be
about some neighborhood drama between Mrs. Desmond and some other person on the
block, but then aliens show up one morning! It is timed so perfectly that right
when you are about to close the book and move on you discover that aliens are
going to run a study on the block. It is so familiar and, following Wells Law,
only one thing is out of place, but it changes the whole story. The setting, the
people, the timing, the aliens; it’s all just easy magic.
Whether it is humor, humanity, or hope, all these stories have the little extra,
the easy magic that would make them perfect for using in a classroom. Readers
evaluate, compare, and relate to the characters in stories. When more than one
person connects to a story, then discussion happens. That makes them even better
for using in a classroom. We connect and a relationship with the characters,
with the author, and with the class begins to form. That is what makes books
usable in the classroom.
