This lesson was designed for an AP Lit class, though I think there would be room for it in an honors class also. I'll walk you through the process to recreate what I did and if you are short on time, I'll give you a link to where I put my final lesson on TPT.
One of the things I wanted to do while teaching AP Lit was to teach different literary lenses (or literary criticisms as they called it when I was in college). I thought how hard could this be?
Turns out, not as easy as I wanted it to be. Well, it's not that the information wasn't out there - it was. It just wasn't already set up in the way I wanted it to be. What I wanted was to have my students read "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" and then use the different criticisms to break it apart. I vaguely remember a lesson like that in college - it was my first exposure to the different criticisms. Unfortunately, I did not see anything like that.
So I set out on my own to research the various criticisms (It has been decades since I was in college and I typically taught lower level students, so had no need to explain Post Modernism). I had hung on to that college textbook for decades, but had thrown it out in the past couple of years (of course). I began researching, hoping that I could find references to my poem of choice, but found only a little directly related to "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening".
So I finally figured I would just do what I would have done in any of those college lit courses thirty years ago and do my own interpretation of the poem using each lens.
I write this poem on the white board with wet erase markers and annotate in class with dry erase so that I can wipe the annotations off while leaving the poem (that blows their minds). It was also a major factor in me deciding to try this all in two days, rather than potentially spacing it out once a week until done. I like the two days crash course, but I see value in the once a week method as well.
I decided to start with Reader Response Theory, which is not that valuable as a lens for an actual FRQ, but essential as a starting point for these students to understand what they bring to a text. Plus I get to draw this amazing picture on my board which makes students wonder why I didn't become an art teacher:
If you are not familiar with the three book theory, in short it goes that Book 1 (or Text 1) is what the author envisioned writing. Due to changing thoughts, edits, etc., what is produced is Book 2, which is often quite different in many ways from what the author had in mind. That is the text we all read, but what is important to Reader Response Theory is that all of use have Book 3 in our heads - how we interpret Book 2 due to past life experiences, memories, connections made to other books, distractions around us while reading, prior knowledge, and a whole host of other factors that make our experience with the text unique to us.
I use this image for all levels of classes - it is great to get them to understand that their experience with the book has merit too. Once we get them all talking about their memories and feelings with this poem, I explain the significance of that third book which will be so important in our discussions, but can only be discussed by them.
At this point I take a break to discuss how all the lenses we are about to learn are specific disciplines, but much like how Ultimate Fighting Championship morphed from specific fighting style vs specific fighting style into Mixed Martial Arts, we too are able to merge them together to get the most out of our analysis.
Now for the meat of the lesson - I researched all of the following criticisms:
- Biographical
- Formalism/The New Criticism (I know that these are two distinct criticisms, but they are similar enough for us to merge for an introductory lesson)
- Myth Criticism (my favorite)
- Marxist Theory
- Existentialism
- Post Modernism / Post Structuralism / Deconstruction (again, three different takes, but as they are often paired with each other by scholars, it makes sense to pair them here)
- Freudianism / Psychoanalytic (two terms for the same lens)
- Feminist Theory
- Queer Theory
- Critical Race Theory
For each one of these I briefly go over what that lens seeks to accomplish and then we break down the poem looking at it through that lens. When we are done we have discovered that this poem either means anywhere from a man riding through the woods at night to a man having an adulterous affair to the problems with a social media culture and many more in between!
I need another picture to break up the text, so here is a page form my notes:
Well, the picture is a block of text, so I don't think it really does what I want it to do. :)
So why teach this?
- It's fun.
- This is a college level course and this is what they teach in college literature courses (well, at least they did in the early '90s when I was there - I assume they still do).
- Once students realize how many different takes there can be in literature, they are less likely to succumb to the imposter syndrome that tells them they don't know enough to put out the "right" answer. There are many right answers! I want to revel in all of them.
If you follow this path, I promise that you will not be disappointed. You probably are closer to your college days than I am and have these readily available in your notes already, but if you do not, I do have it up on TPT should you just want to take my notes and play it out in your class. You can find it here:
I also bundled this with the Archetypes lesson because they pair so well together. I always use them back to back and follow up with
"Hills Like White Elephants". You can get the bundle pack here:
https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/XET-Bundle-Literary-Lenses-Archetypes-14250564
