before we look at literature (and the why and how of it)...

"What's with all this mystery and detective stuff?"

This theme/approach is something I've been kicking around for some time, and it is driven by three things:

  1. I've always loved mystery novels and movies; there's the selfish motive.

  2. More and more students find that trying to make sense of rather-puzzl-y readings (poems, plays, stories, novels) really is a mystery.

  3. My daughter earned her BS and MS degrees in Forensic chemistry (in the process she studied many aspects of crime investigation), and since I am the nosey dad, I have followed her "career" with great interest.

Taking up that last item first, I realize, over the past several years, that the way I ask students to decode a subtle reading really is very much the way my daughter approaches evidence used in a crime investigation. It all starts with the same task: find a solution to a problem (whodunit? what tangible evidence is there? how do you draw conclusions when you weren't actually there (this is similar to not actually being in the head of the writer of a subtle, complex poem)?

There is the long process of going over the materials closely, thoroughly, often several times, and applying the same tool in each activity: observation. In Chemical analysis you may be putting ignitable liquid samples under a microscope or in a Gas Chromatography Mass Spectroscopy instrument (see, I have been following her) to determine the chemical structure which may, in turn, help you discover where the liquid came from after matching results against a database. The database itself was compiled only after samples had been separated by distinctive elements many, many times. So, yes, you need to look very closely at literature because it does not tell you whodunit. Instead, it hints at it. It is up to you to analyze the data (the text) and figure out what it suggest/implies.

Nowadays that activity is called critical thinking or analytical thinking; it used to be called (just) thinking or analysis. It is incredibly useful in any field where a solution needs to be found or a system needs to be understood. It's not just an English class thing.

There are many distinctive tools used for both crime detection and literary analysis, and we will look closely at several as we move through the course, but that "way" or method that I ask students to apply to analysis involves only two key tools or observation (which do sometimes overlap):

  1. Look for (and take notes on) any patterns, for repetition, for things that stand out because they appear multiple times (perhaps in different ways).

  2. Look for (and take notes on) any peculiarity, oddity, weird thing that just does not seem to fit (and question why they are there and what they suggest).

These things may be small (a short poem that refers to being "free and easy" five separate times, making that phrase and it's possible implications stand out). It is the distinctive, unusual gum wrapper found at four different crime scenms that ties the cases together. It is an important thing to look at.

These things might just seem random or out of place (a short story that mention a red river when we know perfectly well that river is not at all red; we could even look it up; the fact that it is so clearly wrong either means the author was careless, which is possible, or that the author wants us to think of that river in a different way). This is the fingerprint at the crime scene that does not match anyone who should have had access to the building.

why apply critical thinking to a poem (what's the point)?

I know most of my students are not intending to teach English or become writers, but you never know (I was a physics major through my sophomore year of college). I find teaching a lot of fun, but I do know it's not for everyone, and there are loads of other classes to teach if you do decide on a teaching career. So why do "they" (?) expect us to analyze poems and stories? How is that practical?

The analytical skills are much the same in any field, though, of course, the data you are analyzing is going to be wildly different (a rhyme Vs. blood spatter).

Figuring things like this out (analysis) can be applied to othere things that might seem more practical, like detective work, automotive repair, medical diagnostics. And all of those could have life-or-death implications. Imagine an unusual ker-THUMP, ker-THUMP noise is coming from your car's engine, and you pop open the hood to figure out what is wrong (or you go to a mechanic who has expertise in auto repair). You know what the engine is supposed to sound like, and you know that ker-THUMP is not it. So you poke around to locate the source of the sound, take that part of the car apart to locate the problem, then put the car back together. In other words, you puzzle over something that is unusual, look closely, dismantle, make sense of it, put it back together. That may have saved your family from a horrible accident. A physician does the same thing when trying to locate the source of some irregularity in the body (maybe an elevated white cell count), making a diagnosis (making sense of the problem), and figuring out how to solve it.

You could ab-so-lute-ly apply analytical critical thinking skills to a crime scene, a sketchy car, or a patient in a hospital, and those skills actually pay a lot more than analyzing short stories and poems. Those might feel "useful" and the Shakespeare analysis trivial. However, can you imagine every student being assigned an old beater to work on or a ward of terminally-ill patients to diagnose? Now that is really not very practical.

Fiction is inexpensive, portable, widely available, self-contained, and harmless (you are not likely to accidentally destroy a play or kill a novel, and a desparately-cornered poem is not going to put you six feet under because you are getting too close to solving a case). Much has been written about fiction, so you can do the research, and the range of "things" to discover is humongous. You do not need a lot of expensive tools or a lot of space. Your mishandling of a story is not going to put a life at risk.

And with luck, you may even enjoy it (a side benefit), though there are no guarantees, and even learn something about human nature while you are at it.

so will we just be reading mystery stories, and are those really literature?

What is literature?

Likely, somewhere, at some time, you had an English teacher who tried to distinguish between great literature and popular pot-boilers. In some cases, it's relatively easy to plunk some fiction into the trash category. Formula fiction, for example romance novels, and pulp westerns. and pop adventure stories, offer very little beyond a fun ride, and that's not a bad thing. I read a lot of "junk" fiction (especially mysteries).

But even there the distinction is not easy. Why, for example, is a Louis L'amour western considered just formula writing and Charles Portis's True Grit considered more literary? what is the difference?

And to make the question really, really hard: some works that were considered just pop fictino when they were written (the pulp sci-fi novels of P.K. Dick, for instance) are later looked at as works of genius (sort of like the paintings of Vincent Van Gogh).

You may already suspect that I am not going to resolve this question in this little sidebar, but consider this: English teachers are serve up the idea that "Literature has stood the test of time." That has two glaring problems: 1) it means nothing new can be literature, and 2) it assumes that what survives aeons is necessarily the best. What's left, in terms of the written word, is, more logically, what was most pop(ular), not most literary. If 1,000 copies of an intellectual work exist and 10,000,000 copies of a Dan Brown novel exist, then chances are what will survive for the next 1,000 years is the Dan Brown novel. It kind of makes me wonder if those works from antiquity, such as Antigone, by Sophocles, were the most literate works of 5th C BCE Athens or just the most pop.

Oh, there are distinctions, and we will look at some of them, but you should have just a bit of douubt about that English teacher :)

NO and MAYBE.

Keeping true to the theme here, we will look at a couple of more-conventional popular mystery/detective stories, but most of the course will be what is often included in literature anthologies. However, a couple of those do have mysteries within them. In fact, the two reading for this week's class discussion invite you to decide, "Who Killed Whom?"

That literature thing, though, now that is trickier to answer. I will take a stab at it in the sidebar (the pinkish box to the right), but I'm not sure if my answer will satisfy anyone. Maybe this will help:

"There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands' necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge."

That is the opening a paragraph from Raymond Chandler's (long) short story called "Red Wind." It is an L.A. hardboiled detective piece first published in Dime Detective magazine. I would have no problem laying that passage alongside just about any so-called literary work as an example of terrific writing.

At the very least, you will apply literary tools to all of the things you read. I hope you find the assigned readings pleasurable, but this is not just a reading for pleasure course. It is a what-does-that-suggest-and-why course? It will require you to look at several works that are not just simple surface stories and figure out what they mean as well as what they don't mean.

For the most part, the vocabulary in the readings will not send you running to a dictionary, but you will probably get to the end of a story or poem and wonder, "Well, what does that mean?" Parts may be unclear and require some re-reading, you will probably have to look at the works in fresh ways, and there should be plenty of note-taking and puzzling along the way.

and it can be tricky; let me walk you through an example

This little poem by Sylvia Plath is called "Metaphors":

I'm a riddle in nine syllables,
An elephant, a ponderous house,
A melon strolling on two tendrils.
O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
This loaf's big with its yeasty rising.
Money's new-minted in this fat purse.
I'm a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
I've eaten a bag of green apples,
Boarded the train there's no getting off.

It can be tricky, and, in fact, this may be one thing (there could be more than one) that separates so-called literature from simple pop fiction--it can be tricky; it can require some effort to figure out (like playing Clue); it can have ambiguity. If it did not have ambiguity, what would be the point. "Aha! This story is about someone who foils a plot to take over the world, and the good guys win. The End." That may be entertaining, but it is not stretching our thinking, giving us a deeper understanding of life, the universe, and everything.

First, literary analysis, like forensic science, has all of these terms used to describe "things"--UGH! What, for example, are "Metaphors" (which, yes, is a literary term), and how does this relate to Plath's poem (in essence, was there some reason she chose that title)?

Fortunately, the internet is filled with information, this from Dictionary.com: "metaphor: a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable," and/or "a thing regarded as representative or symbolic of something else, especially something abstract." Oh, and it is often used in poetry.

So is the poem describing things that are LIKE other things rather than literally those things? The first line hints that the poem is a sort of riddle (look it up) "in nine syllables"; it's not lost on us that the poem has nine lines (not literally syllables), and we are trying to figure the poem out (like solving a riddle), so that seems to work as a metaphor.

There are lots of references to huge things: "An elephant" and "a ponderous house" and a "big" loaf of bread and a "fat purse." Some lines are just bizarre: "A melon strolling on two tendrils," for example. Melons don't stroll, and two little tendrils (you may need to look that up) would never support a walking watermelon or even a canteloupe. Literary analysis, like working a crime scene, often involves looking for patterns or things that are out of the ordinary, and we seem to have both.

There are a couple of other patterns you may have noticed: a lot of the lines refer to things inside other things, such as money inside a purse and a calf inside a cow and having "Boarded this train" which the narrator seems to be stuck on. There is also the reference to the eaten "bag of green apples." Hmmm... How might you feel if you'd eaten a bag of green apples? Sick!

So the narrator (not Plath, the person IN the poem speaking and referring to herself (why not himself?) as "I") refers to being huge and getting bigger, feeling ponderous, with something inside, likely with nausea, on a journey of some sort that relates to the number nine.

The solution to the riddle: she is pregnant. The poem is a series of comparisons that give the reader a sense of what the narrator feels like being pregnant.

What's the point? Why make the reader go through all that work to solve a puzzle? Because the metaphors show, via comparison, what it might be like to be pregnant. So what? Well, as I type this, I am a sixty-seven-year-old man. I have never been, nor am I likely to ever become, pregnant. It is an experience that a huge (yes, that is a pun) segmant of humans (and other animals) have experienced throughout history, but I never will, at least not directly. Plath is giving me something to compare the experience to. The things she is cmoparing it to might be funny or exaggerated or suggeestive, but there is a good chance that even I, an older male, will have come across yeasty bread or a watermelon or eaten food that has made me ill. And so she communicates somethign I will never experience with me. Communication is sharing experiences with others, and the others can either nod and identify ("Yup, been there!") because they have had similar experiences (this just reinforces it and lets them know they are not alone), or others for whom this is new can learn what life is like for another human in a differnt time and a different place.

now you get to give it a try

This week's discussion starts with you introducing yourself to the class briefly, but the larger part has you trying to solve a couple of murders (or perhaps suicides?).

Read through Luisa Valenzuela's very short "All About Suicide" (you may want to read it a few times and take notes) and then Akutagawa's "In a Grove." You are going to use evidence from the stories to try to determine, well, you'll read about it in this week's discussion, here: Discussion 1. You are only responsible for posting about one story, but you will likely reply to other students' discussions on both stories, so do read both. I think you will find both quite interesting. Be sure you have looked at the class Discussion information page so that you know how to earn maximum points, and HAVE FUN.

"The Game is Afoot!" (Sherlock Holmes).

NOTE: normally you will get to the weekly Discussions from the Class Schedule page. Did you remember to bookmark that page?