Teaching in Concentric Circles

Without giving too much individual detail, I want to use the students in Desiree’s American/Ethnic Studies class (for which I TA) as a sample group. They are about evenly split between English majors and non-majors, and most are in their later years of college. While there are a few who clearly stand out in terms of grasping a nuanced interpretation of each text, on the whole both sections of the class struggle with moving beyond surface-level observations.

           

Since Desiree’s lectures give them a more comprehensive thematic and contextual understanding of the novels/films, I try in section to teach smaller-scale approaches that could kickstart some paper ideas. Often what this means is that I will choose a couple specific and unusual analyses that are designed to be defamiliarizing and unexpected. My own interests sway these toward structural questions, which I use because many of the students have never been exposed to the possibility of thinking outside and around content.

Though the Spivak is probably not the kind of text that would come up in this undergraduate class, I’d like to use it to demonstrate the type of lesson I’d construct to get the students engaged and thinking about paper topics. Since the entirety of the article is a bit much for this project, I’ll pull out one particular section that connects well to Woman on the Edge of Time.

“A theory of change as the site of the displacement of function between sign-systems […] is a theory of reading in the strongest possible general sense. The site of displacement of the function of signs is the name of reading as active transaction between past and future” (Spivak 4-5).

Since the notion of a “sign-system” isn’t very legible without a lot of background theory, what I’d focus on here is the latter idea: “reading as active transaction between past and future.” Woman is a great place to start with this kind of thought because of its obvious link to temporal displacement, so my goal here would be to show how the more abstract concept of reading can work within the novel in several different ways.

In general, when I structure my lesson plan around something conceptual like this, I start with the textual example that will have the most immediate (and least conceptual) application for the students. In Woman on the Edge of Time, for instance, there is an early scene where Connie interacts with a “screen set into the wall” in the future utopia that she assumes is a television but that turns out to be more like a tailored newsfeed. She turns it on and it responds with information that is unintelligible to Connie.

‘Good light, do you wish visual, communication, or transmission? You have forgotten to press your request button.’ […] She pushed T for transmission, she hoped. The screen began flashing the names of articles or talks, obviously in plant genetics. As the screen flashed the meaningless titles, she read the other buttons. One said PREC, so she tried it. A description like a little book review came on and remained there for two minutes.

           

Attempts to increase nutritional content in winter grain (Triticale siberica) suitable short season northern crops maintaining insect & smut resistance. Promising direction, full breeding info. James Bay Cree, Black Duck Group, 10 PP. 5 DC. 2 PH.

Feeling watched, she shut the set off guiltily and jumped back. (Piercy 64-65)

Here Connie is a very concrete manifestation of the transaction between past and future, and it comes out as a function of her inability to comprehend what she reads. Instead, she feels herself part of some illicit action, as though the difficulty she has (or even the attempt at) reading this future text with her past knowledge is somehow transgressive.

From this point I would move outward in stages--hence the title of this post--to get the students comfortable with the practice of pulling back and expanding their perspectives on the content. I would talk about how Connie’s transitions between past and future and the ability to move between them can be a kind of reading—in the novel they call it “catching,” but it is, in effect, the inhabitants of the future reading Connie’s receptivity, situation, and potential, and using that to introduce her into their environment. This of course cannot happen without some exchange in the other direction, hence the transactional nature. I would then move even further out and talk about how the physical act of us reading Woman on the Edge of Time is by its nature also a transaction with our own past, given when the book was written and its connection to a certain moment in women’s history. I would suggest it can be a kind of reading of our future as well, since many of the technological advances in the book are part of our current existence and many more are potentials on the horizon.

I’ve found this approach interesting as a demonstration of the variety of ways students can analyze a text, though I can’t say whether it has been successful. The idea is that it will help at least a few break away from the all too common plot-retelling that happens in papers. From what I’ve seen, some of that is a consequence of not being able to think of a unique analysis or one that excites the student when writing, so my lessons are an attempt to continuously expand the parameters while also suggesting specific, actionable methods for thinking about a text.