Peter Becnel

7 December 2016

Revealing Genre Constructions

          This year I have been fortunate to work with AP Language students. It has been a professional goal of mine since I began teaching to become an AP English teacher, but I always imagined myself teaching the senior-level Literature class, which is typically focused on British Literature. When I discovered that I would be teaching rhetoric, and that typically high school juniors take a course in American Literature, I realized I would be straddling an interesting fence. My intention in beginning my Masters coursework was improving my reading and writing skills so that I could be a more competent teacher, particularly, at the more advanced levels of high school English. It was fortunate, then, that this course arrived when it did. Not only has the class provided me with a survey of genre structures, and their evolution relevant to changes in America and American literature, but it has provided me with my focus regarding classroom material and thematic classroom units that allows for a groundwork for fiction and its evolution which can then be supplemented with nonfiction, which satisfies the argumentative portions of the AP Language course, and an opportunity to include thematically linked, relevant pieces that are specifically rhetorical.

          One of the greatest values I received from this class is the context necessary to explain peculiarities in American, particularly early American, Literature. Entering the course, I was at least vaguely familiar with many of the authors. Certainly, I read Poe in high school; Hawthorne appears nearly ubiquitous; I read and very much enjoyed Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass years ago. Two things radically changed my readings of these texts due to this course.

          First, because the course focuses almost exclusively on the function and relevance of Romantic and Gothic features, I have become adept at identifying these features the texts I read. I have seen this influence my teaching ability. A short anecdote will illustrate this point. My fifth period is twenty minutes longer than all of my other classes because of lunch, and coincidentally, my fifth period is a very high-performing English I Pre-AP class. Because I have the extra time, and I feel an educator’s need to continue teaching, I decided to pick a poem a day for us to read and discuss. I chose Whitman’s The Learned Astronomer because we had recently read it in our Romanticism class, and I very much enjoyed the poem.

After an initial read-through, my students were befuddled. Then we had a brief discussion about literary periods including Romanticism, the priority of nature, the rejection of Enlightenment ideals, and the interest in a communion with nature that was about feeling, rather than purely reason. On a second read of the poem, my students were able to access meaning. I won’t claim that I exhausted the meaning of the poem, or that any such exhaustible meaning exists, but my students were generally excited about reading it the second time. That is, they had a joyful experience with a poem. This is an exceptionally rare feat for students who normally complain that poems are frustrating and that they “don’t make any sense.” The next day we read I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud, and they were much more successful. A class of high school freshmen were able to begin connecting the importance of genre and the movement of genre influences from England to America. I even had one student describe “the host of golden daffodils” as sublime.

Second, this course has helped me to develop the ability to identify romantic and gothic features much more easily when examining media in my daily life. The curriculum I’m building for my Junior AP students is greatly indebted to this course. My research paper was primarily focused on the role of gothic conventions in constructing racial identity. This is something we see in several of the course texts; but, my focus, The Marrow of Tradition indicates that the usefulness of the gothic as a form of racial coding, specifically in the media, remains a part of society today. Sadly, this was the portion of my paper that I had to remove due to time constraints; however, it is a genuine intellectual interest of mine, and it is something that I hope to continue to explore in my classroom. As a quick example, I was thinking of using this article to demonstrate the role of Gothic figures even in modern racial depictions.

Acknowledging and evaluating the change in the Gothic from Romanticism to Realism has been instrumental in my understanding of movement and evolution of genre conventions. Because of the manner in which the course is laid out, I understand more deeply the ways that genres are defined, and the manners in which genres change. I was fortunate because I also took Dr. McNamara’s American Realism course, but the layout of the course clarified the not-so-tidy transitions that happen between literary genres and even helped me to understand the forces that play into the changing of the genres.