A detour into doggerel

I've always wanted an excuse to make students read James Whitcomb Riley's execrable poem "The Happy Little Cripple," and I finally found it. This semester I'm teaching an upper-level literature class called Representative American Writers focusing on the works of Stephen Crane and Kate Chopin, and I want my students to get a taste of American literary culture of the late 19th and early 20th century.

So I assembled a list of works representing a wide variety of genres and styles: Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick, a few Whitman war poems, "To Build a Fire" by Jack London, A Country Doctor by Sara Orne Jewett, Old Creole Days by George Washington Cable, a few of Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus tales, Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders, and, of course, some James Whitcomb Riley poems. I included some familiar authors' less familiar works (Pauline's Passion and Punishment by Louisa May Alcott) as well as works that were influential at the time but have since fallen out of favor (Jacob Riis, How the Other Half Lives). All the texts are readily available online (many at Project Gutenberg).

On the first day of class (Monday), each student selected one work from the list; by Thursday evening, each student had to write a brief summary of the work and draw conclusions about what it suggests about literary tastes of the time. Students reading long works are expected to read a few chapters--enough to get a sense of the whole without slogging through, for instance, 300 pages of Dreiser's deathless prose.

By this morning, four students had already posted their summaries online and were responding to each others' posts. I expect to see the rest by the end of the day, and tomorrow in class we'll discuss what we've learned and draw some larger conclusions about the era.

I hope someone will volunteer to do a dramatic reading of "The Happy Little Cripple." We may be devoting our semester to studying Serious Literature, but that doesn't mean we can't enjoy the occasional detour into doggerel.