RAYMOND CARVER
(1933-1988)Carver was born in Oregon in 1933. A product of the working class of the interior northwest, Carver's short stories depict characters who have been marginalized by society and more "traditional" works of literature (including blue-collar workers, substance abusers, and the unemployed). Carver's writing style was heavily influenced by the poet Ezra Pound and Ernest Hemingway (Carver is said to have reread In Our Time every year). This photgraph, taken in Carver's home in Syracuse in 1984, shows the writer at work in his study. Judging from the paper in the typewriter, we might assume that Carver was working on a story when this photograph was taken.
Using CommonSpace Question Sets to Discuss Raymond Carver's "Cathedral"
--Raymond Carver's "Cathedral" (handout)
--CommonSpace Question Set, on C-Drive of Computer (constructed by instructor)
A. For today's class, students have been asked to read the short story "Cathedral." Instead of discussing the story orally in class, I have constructed a Question Set using CommonSpace. In other words, I have taken the three questions I would have asked aloud in class and typed them into a computer file. But this Question Set is more than a fancy looking handout. One of the main features of CommonSpace is that it allows teachers to create a series of questions which students are asked to consider sequentially.
Directions to Students--Opening Screen Shot for CommonSpace Question Set
CommonSpace therefore allows for a step-by-step process of thinking and writing guided by the instructor's questions but focused on the student's responses. The questions should be structured in such a way that students take a cognitive journey through the text and their own thought processes. Here are the three questions in the order that they appear in my Question Set:
**One of Raymond Carver's biggest influences was the poet Ezra Pound. In 1913, Pound established three essential principles for writing poetry:
1. Direct treatment of the "thing" whether subjective or objective.
2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation.
3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase, not in the sequence of a metronome.
Think about Carver's writing style for a moment. Do you see any of Pound's "poetic principles" at work in "Cathedral"? Use evidence from the story to support your claim.
**Return to the story and select a particularly important passage of two or three paragraphs, something that you might want to write about in a paper (you may use any portion of the story EXCEPT the last two pages). Once you have selected a passage, simply type it in below. Do not alter or respond to the text.
**The term "epiphany," coined by James Joyce, has been used frequently in 20th century fiction to describe moments of "revelation" in a story where "everything becomes clear" to a character. The critic Malcolm Cowley defines epiphany as "that sudden reaching out of two characters through walls of inarticulateness and misunderstanding." To what extent does "Cathedral" end in an epiphany? How do you know?
B. Once students have been given enough time to respond to the questions, all members of the class should switch computers. Students will now be asked to respond to their partner's answers by creating a column directly next to the preexisting text. This column should be named after the new user and be linked to the first student's own comments (typically entitled "Content"). Once the 2nd column has been created, students should react, in writing, to the comments/asnwers provided by their partner, preferably by creating links to specific phrases and sentences. Of course, this process will have to be illustrated carefully by the instructor. (Because my second question asks students to simply copy over a passage from the story, their partners will be responsible for explicating portions of the passage and explaining why it is significant to the story as a whole.) Five minutes should be allowed for technological instruction and fifteen minutes for student responses.
Sample Student Responses in a Side-By-Side Column Activity
C. Students will now be asked to print their responses and return to their original computers. The remainder of the class will be devoted a large group discussion, focusing on both the experience of working in CommonSpace and the ideas students generated about the story. In other words, the Question Set will now serve as a springboard for an open-ended discussion about the story and how it felt to respond to the story in a technological medium. Students should be asked to hand-in their printed response sheets at the end of class. Teachers might choose to use these responses in another lesson or write comments back to students.
The course I will be teaching this summer is entitled "Literature and Composition: 20th Century Voices." Although the course isn't necessarily thematic, I hope to focus on this notion of "voice" and how we construct who and what we are through writing. In the classroom, it is always a challenge to hear the voices of all our students, either literally or metaphorically. Discussions are often dominated by a few speakers, and written responses typically take the form of "what the teacher wants to hear." The CommonSpace Question Set is an attempt to search for authentic student voices. If each student is working at his/her own computer, this activity begins with active engagement from every member of the class.
During the last twenty years much has been made of "writing as a process," and teachers have worked hard to engage students in prewriting and revision activities. We have continually struggled to help students realize their writing voices independent of the ideas and interpretations passed on by teachers and critics. It has been difficult, however, to find activities or mediums in which to engage students in the writing process. In Hypertext: The Convergence of Contemporary Critical Theory and Technology, George Landow postulates that electronic computing and hypertext may actually be a fulfillment of many principles of contemporary literary theory. I think the same might be said for electronic computing and writing. A program like CommonSpace provides students with an opportunity to begin writing (to prewrite, if you will) without every speaking a word out loud in class. Furthermore, the Question Set asks students to move from question to question in a predetermined sequence, to undergo a specific cognitive process. And the process does not end there: students are also asked to respond to one another's work in writing. Here students have the opportunity to read, reflect on, and respond to another writer while simultaneously reconsidering (or reaffirming) their own thoughts and writings. This notion of peer response will figure heavily in our next lesson using CommonSpace.
Finally, CommonSpace allows for a decentered primary text. Here our attention is shifted from Carver's story to students' reactions to the text and, later, to students' reactions to one another's responses. I think this is best illustrated by question #2, in which the first student selects a passage from the story (note: a student-selected passage, not one chosen by the teacher) and his/her partner is asked to react to that piece of text. To use Landow's term, this is a "dispersal" of the text. One of the effects of this "dispersal" is that students feel more comfortable in reacting to works of literature, precisely because some of the text's "uniqueness" or authority has been taken away. In other words, I believe a decentering or dispersal of text helps students discover their own creative and critical voices and come to understand, implicitly, what Trent Batson means when he says that electronic spaces can help make the "Bakhtinian vision" (the multivocal, intertexual vision) a reality.