Often, our love for literature is catalyzed by a journey taken within a classroom. No matter where and how we teach literature, it is always an opportunity for our students to engage with their world in a new way. The Asymptote Educator’s Guide is a resource we’ve developed to facilitate more of these expeditions, bringing important, diverse works from our issues into the classroom by way of a curated and detailed guide for teachers. In the following essay, Barbara Thimm, Assistant Director of Asymptote’s Educational Arm, discusses the immense potentials and applications of the Winter 2020 Educator’s Guide.
Jerome Bruner, the famous cognitive psychologist and one of the most important contributors to the theory of education, likened reading to a journey into new terrains without the help of a map: “As our readers read, as they begin to construct a virtual text of their own, it is as if they are embarking on a journey without maps.“ Yet that emerging virtual text is shaped by our previous reading experiences, “based on older journeys already taken . . .” Eventually, that journey becomes a thing of its own, a generator of new maps and thus an extension of the reader’s world, an addition to her repository of maps.
World literatures are particularly apt in expanding their readers’ collections of maps, that is, to enrich their reading of the world, not only literally in the sense that they raise awareness of writing and thinking in parts of the world more likely to be “known” via externalized news reports, if at all. Through their defined difference, world literatures confront us with names, places, and narrative patterns that are farther removed from the “older journeys already taken,” and thus extend the routes we can travel in the future. It follows that world literature can be made uniquely productive in encouraging our students to expand their horizons by adding to the variety and reach of their reading maps.
Asymptote’s mission, “to unlock the literary treasures of the world,” thus becomes a rich resource for a variety of classrooms in the English language arts, not least because the vast majority of the pieces published here are contemporaneous—that is, they reflect the thinking, storytelling, and creativity of artists writing in our present moment. Often, these texts are not part of a canon, nor can they be found in print outside their countries of origin. What they have in common is that someone who speaks both English and the language of the original artist found them worthy of her or his attention and effort, and brought them forward so that we may connect their ideas, experiences, and visions of the world to ours. Bringing these voices to the attention of our students is an ever more urgent endeavor in a time where nationalist interests and perspectives crowd out more unifying visions.
Asymptote’s Educator’s Guide is an attempt to facilitate access to these voices by offering lesson plans based on pieces in the current issue of Asymptote so that teachers in a variety of instructional contexts are encouraged to use more diverse material in their classrooms. Prior to the publication of each new Asymptote issue, members of the educational team—a group of passionate teachers—choose pieces that speak to them and discuss didactic strategies, leading to the collection of lesson plans in the Educator’s Guide. One focus of these lesson plans is to encourage students to engage in deep thinking and writing, another is to push them to connect their reading with their own experience.
The 2020 winter of Asymptote is particularly rich in material that lends itself to such thinking and connecting. The first lesson plan is based on an excerpt from “Uok Phlau,” a story by the Brazilian writer-scientist Olavo Amaral, translated by Isobel Foxford. “Uok Phlau” portrays a fictional endangered language and people, and explores the idea that language expresses and limits one’s perspective on the world. The story features two texts: one an anthropological report on a fictional extinct people, the other a first-hand account of a (fictional) nineteenth-century explorer and his attempts to change that people’s language to reflect his understanding of the world. The corresponding two-part lesson plan contains a guided reading of the story, information on endangered and extinct languages, and a TED Talk by cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky on how language shapes the way we think. Students are provided with outlines of both of the story and the TED Talk to aid their note-taking practice. Some instructors may want to extend the lesson plan to include a discussion of linguistic anthropology or a reading of Richard Nordquist’s article on “The meaning of Linguistic Imperialism and How It Can Affect Society.”
A second lesson plan in the Educator’s Guide is based on “Unbelievable Stories,” a poem by Dmitri Alexandrovich Prigov, translated from Russian by Simon Schuchat. Referencing sensationalist stories about miracle rescues, escapes, and unlikely recoveries from a fatal disease, the poem turns this narrative format on its head by listing accidents such as a child falling from the fourteenth floor of a building and dying, all the while insisting that this is an unlikely outcome, an “unbelievable story.” The poem’s comic effect results from a twofold use of irony in the poem; the lesson plan provides definitions and examples for three types of irony, offering a lens for students to read the text with an understanding of how this literary device is employed. Students also reflect on the appeal such sensationalist miracle stories have for their audience. In a more advanced classroom, these reflections could well be expanded to a wider discussion on how the belief in miracles functions in a societal context, where it originates and what needs it expresses. Yujin Nagasawa’s article, “Why do so many people believe in miracles?”, could be a companion piece for such a discussion, though different approaches to the topic may be more culturally appropriate in some contexts.
While “Uok Phlau” and “Unbelievable Stories” play with realistic genres found in academic writing and the news media respectively, Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer’s entertaining short story “Memoir of a Turkey,” translated from the Spanish by Kayla Andrews, veers into the fantastical. Bécquer wrote the story in the middle of the nineteenth century, but the absence of antiquated language or detail makes it remarkably readable for a contemporary audience. The appearance of a written manuscript, the titular memoir, inside the cavity of a roast turkey, gives voice to the deceased bird’s life experience. In her translator’s note, Kayla Andrews observes that Bécquer employs the turkey’s refined voice “to exquisite and agonizing effect,” thus making the reader aware of the true magnitude of loss signified by its death. Both the turkey’s voice and effective plotting create an engaging tale that keeps the reader captive despite her or his knowledge of its ending. The reading of the text itself is supported by a graphic organizer that encourages students to record their emotions at turning points in the narrative. Such reading serves two purposes: one is the identification of important events in the story where the relevance of the event is determined by the students’ subjective experience; the other the foregrounding of emotional reactions to the text, an aspect that is often neglected or treated only in passing in academic contexts. The identification of important events and the tracking of their emotional response leads to a discussion of the difference between the chronology of the events in a narrative, the story, and its plotting, the deliberate arrangement of events in a narrative that may not be chronological.
Horoscopes are a common feature in popular magazines and newspapers. “Ephemeris,” a horoscope from the early renaissance, appears in a playful and melodious translation by Gnaomi Siemens that moves the genre into prose poem territory. Students will likely savor lines such as: “you love to let your hair down after a long day, your home a cozy den to cook up some delicious” for the way they stretch language into something strange and oddly contemporary, particularly when they learn that these are translations of texts written in the late fifteenth century. The two-part lesson plan based on “Ephemeris” goes beyond that linguistic delight by suggesting activities that highlight the kinship of horoscopes with almanacs and the manner in which both are expressions of a particular historical and cultural context. Guided in-class discussions make students aware of structural and linguistic similarities between historical and contemporary examples before they get to create their own horoscopes and almanac pages. Excerpts from Linda Rodriguez Robbie’s article on the changing allure of horoscopes in the Smithsonian Magazine could be supplementary reading for this lesson plan in a high school context, while other instructors might be more interested in using the lesson plan’s creative prompts to have students reflect on what is important to them in their own culture.
These lesson plans offer instructional explorations of pieces from the Winter Issue of Asymptote and should be seen as suggestions rather than as prescriptions, and adjusted to the cultural context of the classroom where they are being used. A common feature of these lesson plans is that they ask students to connect what they already know about the world to themes present in the pieces. When reading “Uok Phlau”, they are asked to reflect on what the implications of a language becoming endangered are, and students are likely to reference what they know about endangered species. They could be thinking about encounters with indigenous peoples and the early explorers, or the instructor could introduce students to the field of linguistic anthropology. Similarly, students will likely engage with faits divers and horoscopes in a different way once they have worked with “Ephemeris” and Dmitri Prigov’s poem, not least because they have broadened and refined their view of these popular genres. This potential difference in future reading is possible because students have added to their repository of maps so that a horoscope is not only a slightly ridiculous attempt to cope with an uncertain future; rather, it can also be a playful exploration of the here and now or a reflection of the culture it emanates from. In this sense, reading across geography and history is an urgent task for our time, a necessity Judith Butler expresses in her 2013 honorary doctorate address at McGill University: “The humanities give us a chance to read across languages and cultural differences in order to understand the vast range of perspectives in and on this world,” continuing to ask, “How else can we imagine living together without this ability to see beyond where we are, to find ourselves linked with others we have never directly known, and to understand that, in some abiding and urgent sense, we share a world?”
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