Teaching Novel

[mohammadali]

hello friends, I wonder how teaching novel, because at university we have 4 units of novel. i want to know what is the best way to teach novel at university?

[Gladys]

Might I suggest you first teach How to Understand Text:


1.___Use a Literal Reading Method that involves replacing words in a sentence with explanatory elaborations that mean exactly the same thing: an expanded paraphrase that contains all literal evidence bearing on the meaning of the sentence.


a.___In forming these elaborations, you must include all relevant evidence from the previous five sentences and the next.

b.___Establish whose points of view are being expressed and why. Be aware of what it is to be human and how each character is affected by the sentence – deliberately look through their eyes.

c.___Systematically grasp the grammar and punctuation of the sentence.

d.___Read every word, but don't be too hasty to lock in its meaning. The simplest words often have the widest range of meanings.

e.___In decoding the sentence, only keep track of literal explanations that are more than 80% probable. If any highly probable explanation is false, it will soon be proven so.


2.___This expanded paraphrase is likely to illuminate the proper meaning. But there may also be important figurative allusions.


a.___Figurative meanings once conceived - usually in a flash of inspiration - are likely to be either all-compelling or quite false.

b.___Such figurative overtones exist outside of the passage itself. For instance, there may be allusions to earlier (or later) in the book, to other literature, or to general knowledge about the nature of people.

c.___Make note of any clause which surprises or confuses, however mildly, and summarise these for deep consideration later on. A correct interpretation of the entire text will reconcile all these clauses.

d.___During deep consideration, focus on understanding the relationship of the text to the real world. Concurrently considering how the text relates to you - your preconceptions, ideas, hunches and instincts, your friends and acquaintances - is not only grossly inefficient but taints finer insights.

e.___A quality text is a jigsaw puzzle: all the pieces must fit exactly to make the big picture complete. Look at and study the puzzle as a whole.

f.___Ultimately the reader interprets text like a fine pianist Beethoven. All academic pursuits use insightful models of the real world, produced by genius. The reader should use each epiphanic model, as he elucidates its meaning, to shed light on that real world.

[Mutatis-Mutandis]

OP, are you teaching the novel to an English class?

In any case, if you want your students to blow their brains' out, go with the above guide.

[mohammadali]

actually i am not a teacher. i am a student. Because our instructor has gone some where else for PhD so the university has a teacher who don`t know how to teach. Also she is just wasting our time, so i myself want to work as a teacher and student and i want to be my own teacher, also may be one day later in long future i might become a teacher at university, so I want to know about the methods of teaching novel at university. the best way that you can teach novel to literature students.

[OrphanPip]

Well there's no single way to teach novels. I guess some general approaches could be broken down depending on how a course is structured:

1. A course structured around a single novelist, like Charles Dickens and Henry James.
2. A course structured around a historical or artistic movement, like 18th century novels or the Gothic novel.
3. A course structured around theme, novels about poverty or race.

Then from those broad categories you might approach individual texts in a number of ways. Contextually, by focusing on the historical and philosophical contexts. Biographically, based on the life and ideas of the author. Theoretically, reading texts through Marxists or feminists critical lenses. Comparatively, looking at how texts relate to each other and how they differ.

The goals of the course and the texts in question will affect which methods of reading are most effective, and of course there's no perfect way to read a text.

[jayat]

there could be another possibility, apart from all that very instructive messages by Gladys or OrphanPip, which I find very pedagogical indeed, a very good path to reach your goal. In addition, I will bring up the idea of teaching novel fousing on the main prose narrative genre.

1-The differences between narrative and prose and bettween lyrical and poems. To frame your subject. then, you can explain that novel is written in prose, not in lines and telling facts, narrating. so it is a genre, a literarian container of narrative prose. That could be a way.

2-The kind of narrators we can find: the one who tells the history from inside the main story, like another character or like the principal, told in first person, one intradiegetic narrator; the extradiegetic one, the narator who is not part of the story but tells about it, looking from upside, like god, every detail and characters' action, told in third person, etc.

3-What did novels like "Madame Bovary" by G. Flauvert mean? So you could say it meant a change because we leave talking about great subjects, great wars and incredible stories about knights and events like the mddle-ages literature and come to talk about a very little piece of news that happened in France in the ninteenth century. A woman married a doctor who is a fake (take care of the words you use in class, now I'm talking in 'petit committé') and she died down-and-out leaving a little girl to the orphanage.
3.1. The symbology of every object. Books, earrings, clothes she wear, colours,
3.2. The subjects: Mr. Bovary is a 'good for nothing' man, a doctor who can't work as a doctor (find why, from the very first chapter, and you will discover a good irony almost at the end); the adulterous affairs of Emma (Mrs.) Bovary, the main character, whose lives beyond her means in order to escape the banalities and emptiness of provincial life.
3.3. Telling the cultural movement: realism. So great, detailed, step to the ground descriptions (which pleased Flauvert) like Dostoievsky did in Russia, that was the tendency almost in old Europe. Furthermore, the world is not magical and fair like it was described by the authors (the nobility) of past centuries but agressive and as really acrid as a sacking. Don't get trap in the net which tells you that Flauvert defend the lower classes. Flauvert hated them, couldn't stand its vulgarity and lack of 'class'. Try to use analogies from present day circumstances, etc. to ease the student understanding.

4. Conclude by asking what kind of things that were read could be totally usual nowadays. Remark the fact we don't use coaches but cars, but we live in a democracy and in this period (1856) there was a surge of the middle classes although Flauvert detested ths social class but give to Emma a special beauty.

I expect you don't get asleep with all that 'drag' and be useful as well as the other ones.

[ralfyman]

Try references from the main library, such as the Approaches to Teaching series for particular works published by the MLA.