According to the pile of student papers on my desk, everything is a story. Poems, plays, short fiction, novels--stories all, except that one student refers to a novel as a poem while another thinks an anthology of poems is a novel.
I'm trying to decide whether to despond over the fact that this class made it through an entire semester of literary analysis without ever figuring out the difference between a poem and a story or a play and a novel. If poems can tell stories, what distinguishes a poem from a story? Form, of course--but that's the very element of literature these students are least willing to examine. To judge from this stack of papers, the only thing that matters is the plot, and once the plot has been summarized, what more can be said?
It's a plot, I tell you--a nefarious plot to drain the last dregs of sanity from my exhausted mind until I'm wandering naked around a blasted moor, drooling and babbling about genre conventions. Feel free to join me!
3 comments:
I know the feeling. Genre (well, a particular genre, and several of its subgenres) is one of my specialties, but trying to explain to students why the whole idea of genre is important is, well, difficult at best.
I don't know about your students, but all we learned about in high school English was plot and Symbolism (capital S there intentional). And everything symbolized either sex or death.
That's one reason I went into social science!
Yes, Symbolism with a capital S turns up all over beginning students' papers, usually in vague statements like "This story uses a lot of Symbolism." Try pushing a student to actually identify a symbol within the passage and what do you get? A blank look.
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