Please be courteous with the information and ideas you find here. The ideas are to be shared, but please credit the original author.
Click here for the In the Classroom resources.
We're teaching in unprecedented times. To help our colleagues move their courses online on short notice, Assay has been collecting lesson plans, activities, rubrics, and more to be a resource to the community. We are actively soliciting your expertise, so please check out the resources we've posted and contribute your own. Click here to see what we've collected so far.
Our resources are always free and open access. Beyond the pedagogy we publish in each issue, you and your students might find ou :
|
Truthful Inadequacies:
Teaching the Rhetorical Spark of Bashō’s Travel Sketches
Jens Lloyd
6.2
At key moments in his travel sketches, Matsuo Bashō, the renowned seventeenth-century Japanese poet, acknowledges defeat. For instance, in The Narrow Road to the Deep North, his most famous travel sketch, upon attempting to describe the islands of Matsushima, Bashō writes, “My pen strove in vain to equal this superb creation” (116). These moments, counterintuitively, seem to sustain his efforts to render his travels in haibun, a distinctive blend of prose and haiku. As with so much travel writing, the aim of Bashō’s sketches is less about charting unfamiliar terrain and more about charting a process of self-discovery that spurs something similar in readers. At the same time, as with so much travel writing, the veracity of his sketches has been scrutinized, leading some to argue that the sketches are best understood as “discursive creations rather than simply transcriptions of experience” (Carter 195). Still, while stretching the truth in some areas, Bashō strives to be steadfastly truthful about his inadequacies. When writing in a genre that permits selective departures from the truth, why acknowledge your inadequacies at all? Click here to continue reading.
|
Situating Scenes: Cheryl Strayed’s “The Love of My Life”
George H. Jensen
6.2
Cheryl Strayed published “The Love of My Life” in The Sun in 2002, before she wrote either Torch (2006), a novel, or Wild (2012), a memoir, all on the subject of her mother’s early death. As should become apparent, Strayed is doing more than scenes in this essay. She moves through a number of kinds of narration (scenes, recurrent time, backstories, fast narration, counter-narrative, and meta-narrative) as well a number of kinds of reflection (reflection on scenes, reflection on recurrent time, and reflection on historical/cultural norms). As I map Strayed’s moves within this essay, I will refer to the sections by paragraph numbers, which readers will need to add to the original text if they wish to follow the analysis section by section. Click here to continue reading.
|
Footnotes from the ‘Margins’:
Outcomes-based Literary Nonfiction Pedagogy in Puerto Rico
Gregory Stephens
with Christian Fernández, Andrés Padró, and Gabriela Ruiz
6.2
This essay was co-developed with Latin American graduate students during a Spring 2019 Literary Nonfiction seminar at the University of Puerto Rico-Mayagüez, a Spanish-dominant STEM university in the Eastern Caribbean. A broad question we addressed was: how does the pedagogy of nonfiction operate in international contexts? The narrative response develops from a departmental and institutional context, using a theoretical framework and an assignment provided by the professor, then shifts to close readings elaborated by students. There are two different focal points, one pedagogical (arguing for and demonstrating the use of Learning Outcomes), and one more thematic, about using nonfiction as a means to facilitate cross-cultural or transnational communicative competence. The logic, as students argued, is that nonfiction is particularly well suited to meeting the Outcomes on which we focused. Click here to continue reading.
|