UT Snapshot: Literary Form and Expression

This version of my E343L Literary Modernisms class was an archival class, one day of the M-W week was spent in the HRC/Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center throughout the semester. The students were responsible for weekly archival projects. This opportunity meant that the time that we had available for analyzing and discussing the required literary and cinematic works was a bit more compressed than was typical. This was something that I had some concerns about, as much of the literature is formally thick and complex, ambiguous and unresolved in meaning. I used Canvas to help address the time compression: the “Modules” included more “Study Guides” to direct continued analysis; I used more links to Modernist Resources than I usually do. One of the best and most complex discussions of the semester was the “Discussion Board” on Ryunosuke Akutagawa’s short stories. The rich and in-depth ways in which the students puzzled-out and interpreted those short stories in their written posts has inspired me to use the Discussion Board more frequently than I have in the past. Some truly brilliant posts were submitted by some of the shy and reserved students, for one; it was also very moving to see the level of serious engagement that they created by responding directly to each other’s critical observations and praising each other for shedding a different perspective on their initial readings. When I do use it, I always respond to each “Discussion Board” post; they deserve some brief acknowledgement and appreciation, in my view.

For the Bertolt Brecht page on Mother Courage and Her Children, I wanted the students to get a multi-dimensional sense of the only play that we were reading for the semester, and of a text that was meant to be experienced and viewed. The play uses Brecht’s alienation effects and contains songs. The postings included different stage versions’ performances of the major songs, along with video clips and from images of different productions, so they could see how directors and stage producers’ accentuated their production’s unique socio-historical “take” on Brecht’s play. For example, one production used recognizable military uniforms from different eras (WWII, Viet Nam) and cultures (USSR, North Korea); another used a very steam-punk apocalyptic setting with punk-era clothing. Being able to hear the play’s dialogue and different versions of the play’s songs, along with the various stage designs and casting of the play’s types would, I hoped, enable the students who had never seen a performance of the play to read it a bit more dimensionally, more dialectically.

I typically used weekend time to change the Canvas front page to highlight material that aligned with the syllabus, so when we were in the Surrealist cluster, the page featured Surrealist photography and included links to our assigned Surrealist filmmaker’s works (Maya Deren), and to other Surrealist classics, as well (e.g., Dali and Buñuel’s Un Chien Andalou, along with additional Dadaist and Surrealist films by Marcel Duchamp, Hans Richter, and some contemporary scores of classic silent Modernist experimental films). I am continually amazed by the excellent resources on YouTube and the appearance of things that were not available during the previous semester. Or, maybe that it is just that using Canvas with YouTube has encouraged me to open my eyes and mind more. My happiest find this semester Dub Omen’s 2013 Techno score to Maya Deren’s short post WWII film, Meditation on Violence (1948)—very cool.

Well, I accidentally discovered the starred designations for individual student’s use of the Canvas page, which was pretty fascinating to see. It is now the week of the start of summer session I and I discovered this morning (5/30) that five students from the class were still logging on to the class’s Canvas page as of May 27^th. That excited me more than I should probably admit!

I am something of a Luddite, technologically speaking. I hate when software updates itself and I have to make new adjustments, and I have still learned how to use Canvas without ever attending an instructional workshop—something that I always plan to do, but have not yet done. Sometimes I forget basic things, like transferring materials from one class to another. I’ve learned to use the drop-down menu helpers when this happens and just battle my own “why can’t I remember how to do this?!” frustrations. I generally breathe through any difficulties; I figure it out because I now heavily rely on Canvas as a teaching partner.