Hidden Meaning

Yes, I know I'm getting tiring. But I wanted to write down something that I thought of today in class—very much on the "hidden meaning" wavelength.

The other day I watched a movie adaptation of Dorothy Sayers' Nine Tailors. In this drama, Lord Peter Wimsey, an amateur detective, sets out to find some missing jewels. (Warning: plot spoiler ahead) He finally does solve the mystery. To do so he must:

1. Figure out that a gibberish letter is really some form of code.
2. Figure out that the code is really a notation for bell patterns in British change ringing.
3. Figure out which of several possible methods might have been used for the change ringing notation
4. Figure out which bell to follow through the changes.
5. Figure out that the code really is writing out two quotations from the Bible.
6. Find the place in the church where those quotations are inscribed.
7. Learn that the church used to have a balcony.
8. Climb up to the place where the inscription indicated, and finally
9. Figure out what to open up once he got up there.

THAT'S a hidden meaning! To unlock it, one had to be a trained bell-ringer AND have lived in the parish when there was a balcony twenty years previously AND known that the bell to follow was named "Tailor Paul." (Not to mention having a certain familiarity with the Bible.)

Many of my students write as if poems and plays worked much the same way. No—it's not like Indiana Jones or National Treasure. It's more like a letter from your mother, mentioning things that make you both happy. Or maybe like someone visiting a zoo and seeing a lot of animals that remind him of frightening predators, then moving on to wonder whether a good God could create things that eat small animals.

Tyger! Tyger! burning bright
In the forests of the night
What immortal hand or eye
Could form thy fearful symmetry?

Well maybe that's more obscure than "I looked at the tiger and wondered if God could make something that scary." But Blake's poem isn't hidden. Just deep.

Richard Cory

1. Images of Royalty in Cory — not what you might expect in New York


1. Royal words — many words here do double duty, meaning one thing, connoting something completely different; Robinson often works against the common meaning of the word.
1. Gentleman (l. 3)
2. Crown
3. Favored (dual meaning: facial appearance {archaic} and blessed with advantages)
4. Imperially slim (are emperors normally slim?)
5. Arrayed (means decorative clothing, but this is quiet)
6. Richer than a king
7. Grace ("your grace")
8. In fine — another odd word: precision and superiority


2. Royal attributes
1. Quietly arrayed; human (why make a point of saying so?)
2. Flutters pulses (movie star? what is it like to meet royalty—as in Mrs. Dalloway?)
3. Glitters when he walks
4. Richer than a king
5. Schooled in every grace. Who is schooled that way?


3. His name
1. Richard may recall the kings of England
2. Richard Coeur d'Lion — perhaps, but not necessary
3. Not much made of names, but it is one of the simplest in Tilbury Town


2. Oppositions between Cory and population


1. He comes downtown; we're already there
2. We on the pavement; he's presumably not
3. We are still waiting for the light
4. We work; he's just rich
5. We have no meat
6. We wish we were in his place—we do not wish to be him, just to have his position and stuff


3. About his death


1. Irony of setting: calm summer night at home contrasted to violence of his manner of death. No preparation in the poem prior to the last half of the last line.
2. Irony of motivation: all our observations are of externals (clothing, possessions, behavior that he has been schooled in)
3. Why does Robinson work the nobility thing so hard before the death?


1. Death of aristocracy in the new world? Not likely.
2. Like so many others in Tilbury Town, the facade hides a darker story. Eben Flood, the merry drunk hides a lonely, rejected man. John Evereldown goes sneaking through the night woods to women he cannot resist. The tragedy of Miniver Cheevy and George Crabbe lie on the surface for all to see. Richard Cory's was hidden deep—only he knew.

Hidden meaning

This is one of those phrases that makes most literature teachers cringe: the "hidden meaning" of the piece. It's as if we were in an episode of Indiana Jones. The straightforward meaning of the story or poem might be about romantic love, but there's a "hidden meaning" (only available to the high priests who have gone through certain rituals) that has to do with something totally different.

The whole idea makes me a bit ill, but when I think of it, I've got to admit that the "hidden meaning" idea makes a bit of sense.

We look at Emily Dickinson's poem, "I like to see it lap the miles," and ask, "What is IT?" Students say "racing car" or "river." I point out that racing cars hadn't been invented when Dickinson was alive. I guess that's hidden meaning because I looked up her dates on Wikipedia. I ask whether rivers are "punctual" or "peer in shanties" and the students think I'm making something up.

There is a kind of student paper that says, "What the author was trying to say is ..."

Take it as a fact: most of these authors were actually pretty good at saying stuff. That's how they made it into the textbooks. And the stuff they were saying isn't something that's only for the high priests. It's for everyone. Everyone who will read carefully and look at a dictionary, that is.

Response to Bananas

Response paper, very rough drafty, to Wendy Lee's "Peeling Bananas."

Though Wendy Lee would call herself a Chinese-American and Carolina Miranda perhaps a "Lots of places-American" (RCWW 179) my sympathies lie more with Lee than with Miranda. That's odd, because, so far as I know, my ethnic background spans German, English, Norwegian, American Indian, Spanish, and (probably) Miscellaneous. But the Chinese author is the one who has something to say to me.

Our family never had any hopes of turning out to be nobility. That was dashed when a bit of genealogical research discovered that we never did have an English coat of arms. The Allen family was pretty lucky to have a coat at all. My aunt was truly mortified to discover that my Norwegian side of the family preserved its records from the 1400s, showing that every one of them was an impoverished fisher, and that my grandmother was, by modern standards, an illegal alien. The English side, the one with the fake coat of arms, seems to have been minor shopkeepers and laborers—and their records only consist of cemetery headstones that go back two generations.

Though we sound like the Miranda family, the comment by Lee that the "strictly Caucasian" homes seemed to have "no traces of their heritages at all" (191) caught my attention. That's where I grew up: no trace of our heritage. Yes, my mother has collected antiques for years. The house is filled with old glass and old wrought iron, but none of it relates to us. There's almost nothing that she can point to and say, "My mother used a kettle like that" or "My dad worked with a tool like that." Much of her furniture is fake pioneer, with fake worn places (you have definitely made a mistake, though, if you add to the worn look). I managed to take (with her blessing and relief) several small things that relate me to my father: his fountain pen, his drafting set, and a lamp he made for high school shop class. But there's nothing very Norwegian or old country in the lot. My older daughter felt that sense of rootlessness. She said it was as if our family had simply risen from the sidewalk. That's why she had a tattoo of a Celtic knot on her thigh. She knew it wasn't our heritage, but at least it was some heritage. In a twist of irony, my younger daughter teaches Japanese in the Los Angeles public school system—a white woman teaching the children of immigrants how to speak their parents' language because the best they can do is the Japanese of a very small child. Visit her apartment, and you will see a lot more of Japan than of Norway or England.

I gave my brother a bit of a shock recently when I revealed that we weren't really Norwegian anyhow. We're Lapp. Look it up. We're descended on my grandmother's side from the wandering reindeer herders who live above the Arctic circle in skin tents. Did that change my sense of who I am? Not really. I doubt if I will ever own a "four winds hat"—that Lapp ethnic garment that resembles nothing quite so much as a court jester's garb. Unlike Lee, I'm not longing to return to my homeland, whether it's Lapland, England, Germany, or whatever.

One of my Japanese friends marveled that everyone in the USA is hyphenated: Chinese-American, Polish-American, Mexican-American. Nobody in Japan is hyphenated. They're just Japanese. Maybe that's why I wasn't too shocked to lose Norway and gain Lapland. I've never been hyphenated. But I think my older daughter would appreciate knowing that we came from somewhere.

Carver intro rough

Beginning rough draft of an introduction:

I once asked a choreographer to explain a dance she had just performed. "What? Would you like me to do it again for you?" she asked. Raymond Carver's short stories are a bit like that. They are something close to poetry, and any attempt to analyze, summarize, or dissect seems to somehow fall short of the whole. Bedford refers to Carver's style as "brief and minimalist in style, plot, and setting" (288), so it seems that any trace of non-minimal description that makes its way into a Carver story must be there for a very good reason. That's the point of this little essay, to examine "Popular Mechanics," and pay particular attention to setting details and, most specifically, to light.

Poetic line endings

When we read poetry, we're tempted to come to a sudden, complete stop at the end of every line. Sometimes that really destroys the meaning of the thing, though. Consider this traditional hymn:

Take my life, and let it be
Consecrated, Lord, to Thee.

If you sing or recite it with a total stop at the end of the first line, you get "Take me life and then leave me alone" (which is pretty far from the teaching of most churches). Then the second line is simply gibberish. If you simply consider it as a sentence, it's far different, and much better:

Take my life, and let it be consecrated, Lord, to Thee.

Apply the principle to all poetry. Yes, there's bound to be a slight pause at the end of a poetic line (especially if there's a rhyme), but the thing is bound to make more sense if you read the punctuation, not the line endings. Here's how Shelly's "Ozymandias" reads if we print it like prose:

I met a traveller from an antique land, who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone stand in the desert. Near them on the sand, half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that its sculptor well those passions read which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed."

Makes much more sense, doesn't it?

Thesis in Literature Papers

Several kinds of papers are really tempting in a literature course, but you should avoid all of them:

• "I didn't really understand this piece." You're actually telling us that you haven't done your homework and that you were too proud to make an appointment to see the teacher. That's not much of a paper.
• "I didn't like this piece at all. It was dumb." To put this as gently as possible, nobody cares whether you liked it or not. Generations of scholars, critics, and teachers have loved the works of Shakespeare and Frost. Why is it interesting or important for you to write that your level of taste or understanding isn't quite mature enough to appreciate such things? (The reverse of this is also true: it's not scholarship to write about how much you loved a poem.)
  
• "I had to look up a lot of words in the dictionary, and here they are." Sometimes, an intense study of a word and its use in the poem or story is very fruitful, but don't spend the entire paper telling us how limited your vocabulary is. It's not really scholarship to announce that "luve" is the Scottish dialect spelling of "love" in "A Red, Red Rose," or that "melodie" is the 1799 spelling of "melody."
• "Here's a line-by-line translation of the work." Dictionary work and paraphrase are sometimes useful prewriting strategies, but, again, they aren't scholarship. One of my students analyzed these lines from Poe's "The Raven" "Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door; / Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking / Fancy unto fancy," and announced triumphantly that the writer had sat down on a couch and began thinking. Well yes, but that's not really worth saying, is it?
• "Here's a very raw set of observations." If you read "When I consider how my light is spent," and announce that it's fourteen lines (which means it's a sonnet), iambic pentameter, and a rhyme scheme of ABBA ABBA CDE CDE, you haven't really done anything yet.

Thesis basics

The thesis in a literary paper is pretty much the same sort of thing as a thesis in a scientific or historical paper.

• A statement, not a question
• Goes in only one direction
• Makes a statement that you'll have to prove
• Ideally, has enough of an edge that a few readers will say "Really? I never though of that!"

Here are some thesis examples culled from my files of various student and on-line papers:

• Flannery O'Connor loves to pick unlikely, ordinary people and show how, by the sudden and unexpected operation of God's grace, they are transformed into saints.
• By paying close attention to the various fields in the mother’s monologue in "Girl," we discover that, instead of developing a plot, her dictums develop an ideology that prescribes and originates from labor (laundry, cooking, sewing, light farming, etc.).
• Four thematic devices which unify [William Cullen Bryant's poem "Inscription for the Entrance to a Wood"] come together in lines five through seven: the spatial organization of the poet’s vision, light and shade, personification of the forces of Nature, and the breeze.
  

Fiction paper prewrite

You rarely get to look over the shoulder of a writer during the writing process, so I'm going to talk my way through the writing of this paper.

I'm working on Raymond Carver's "Popular Mechanics." I began with the whole minimalist idea, and took some notes (mainly from my memory, because I've read the story several times, and I assume that things I remember well will be important in some way).

Non-minimalist things

The story is so minimal (and Bedford's editor uses the "minimalist" label) that non minimal things might be pretty important, so I listed them:

• Cars "slushing" by
• All the description of the first few lines, with the dirty water, etc.
• The fascination with light: getting dark on the inside, turning off the light in the bedroom, the kitchen nearly dark
• Flowerpot crashing to the floor

Minimalist things

It's sort of an "argument from absence," but the whole story is very flat, lacking in even ordinary conversation conventions:

• No dialog blurbs
• Not even quotation marks
• No emotion words during the early part of the argument
• Lots more indications of "minimalist" writing

Little stuff with deep indications

• "getting dark on the inside too"
• "it" (this baby) not "he" or "George"
• grabbed an arm (how many does a baby have? doesn't even matter if it's left or right)
• the darkest time physically is the darkest time emotionally
  

Research Paper Topics

For most students, the most difficult part of a research paper is simply finding the topic. In a fit of panic, almost everyone falls into one of the common mistakes.

• To explore strange new worlds. Certainly, it's interesting to read about topics that are new to you, but if you go too far from your field of expertise, you won't even know what questions to ask. You'll write a breathless paper that explores very ordinary basic definitions.


• To seek out new life and new civilizations. A research paper must be grounded. If you get into speculation ("Do space aliens exist? Did they leave crystal skulls to teach us technology and art?"), you aren't writing academic research. Leave that sort of thing for the supermarket tabloid papers.


• To boldly go where no man has gone before. If there's nothing written about your topic, no primary research, you'll have to fly to the Amazon yourself to come up with a decent paper. Maybe it's really intriguing to ask the enormous questions, but save that for your doctoral dissertation. Right now, you've got really limited time and no foundation grant.

Three more paradoxes

• Big topics make small papers. Students often figure that the more generalized and enormous topic will make a long paper more easily, but it's the tightly focused topics that suggest a LOT of further research. Consider which would make a longer paper (because it suggests more fertile research questions). "High gasoline prices" or "Effect of high gasoline prices on family-owned businesses in two ocean resorts: Ocean City, Maryland, compared with Rehoboth Beach, Delaware."


• Easy topics make difficult papers. (Difficult to find enough material, that is.) Students often go for no-brainers like "how to change a tire" or "reasons to quit smoking." The problem is that a three-page pamphlet has thoroughly covered the topic, so there's nothing to do except summarize it and get frustrated. There's nothing to prove, nothing to discuss.


• If you know it in your heart, you will have trouble proving it. When you approach a "research" project to teach the rest of us that you were right in the first place, you'll only look at sources that support your point of view. That's why nobody is in love with faith-based papers (except the writer and those who already agree). That's also why topics such as creationism, acupuncture, and macrobiotic diets usually don't fly in the academic world. You have to already believe the main point to accept the basic premise of the paper. There's no possibility for the "research" to change the writer's opinion, even the smallest amount.

It's All About the Grades

Well the grades have been posted for about a week, and (as you might guess) protests are rolling in. It seems worse this year, somehow. Here's a guide to my reactions to grade protests:

I might react favorably:

• Well, I've been a good student and shown up for all the classes. How close is my "A minus" to a full "A"?
• Did you receive this paper that I e-mailed you?
• Why does your gradebook show a different grade from what you wrote on my paper?

I'm less likely:

• Your records are wrong: I really did attend class all those times.
• I'm going to send my mother to talk to your boss.*
• I know I didn't show up much or turn in all my papers. Is there ANYTHING I can do to raise my poor grade?
• Even though I didn't attend class and just sort of guessed when I wrote that last assignment, I think it was pretty good and deserved a better grade.

Face it. Some students suffer from a form of burnout about three-quarters of the way through a term. They stop attending and their papers become shorter and shorter and show less and less real thinking. This is the point where the real students are separated from those who simply take up space: the real students carry through to the end.

*You should know that sending your mother to plead for a grade rarely works, and (assuming you are over 18 years old) it's not even really legal for a teacher to reveal your grade to your parents without a signed release.

Between Terms Advice

Because I write this blog mainly for my students, I feel like I can give you some teacher's advice. Here are three things that would have revolutionized the lives of many of my students (about a third of them).

Show Up! The previous blog entry said something about attendance. I'll say it again. Unless you're in college as a sort of expenses-paid vacation, you need to pass courses and learn information. You can't do that if you're not in class. My students with poor attendance records are always surprised when they turn in papers that I don't approve of. They thought they had guessed right on the assignment! Why not actually show up and make sure? The student with tapering attendance is always fascinating. Pretty good at the start, then less and less. What? Did you learn it all in the first month? Did you discover alcohol? Or are you just so arrogant that you figure nobody can teach you anything?

Read the Assignment! I mean this in two senses:
1. Read the stuff in the book. I don't know about you, but when I spend $90 for something, I want to get some good out of it. And no, the teachers don't get a cut of the profits. And no, we don't hear whether you did buy the book—so we don't grade on spending. We do grade on whether you absorbed the stuff inside the book. And surprisingly enough (this may be different from high school books) there's actually something inside most college textbooks that's worth reading!
2. Read the directions for the thing you're supposed to be writing. When I ask my students for a research paper that's five to seven pages long, I'm not going to give full credit for two pages of unsupported opinion.

Make a Gradebook! You need to know how many absences you have in a class, particularly if you have trouble showing up. You need to know what your grades are, so you know how much it will hurt you when you don't choose to turn in a major assignment. Many of my disappointed students this semester had no idea they were in trouble, even though they might have missed a quarter of our class meetings and not bothered to turn in a major paper. Here's a little hint: few college instructors will seek you out and try to talk you into doing the work. We feel we have better things to do.

Winding down thoughts

I'm sitting here at University of Akron on the last day of finals week. Department policy requires me to give back the final portfolios in a face-to-face conference this week, so this all feels very final and almost a little sad. I feel like we should do a little ceremony here.

We don't do office conferences that much. For one thing, students are generally terrified of their teachers (I think it's hilarious that anyone would be terrified of me), so it's really rare for anyone to come talk with me unless I've announced to them that I'm failing them for plagiarism. For another thing, someone brought a lawsuit at Akron a while back because classes were canceled for conferences. They claimed that a personal 20-minute meeting taught them less than three hours of group lecture. So we can't cancel classes for conferences. (NCSC is its own world. I can't do conferences there because students assume that anyone who has a one-on-one conversation gets an unfair advantage in the course.)

The result is that the last time I see these people is also the first time I talk with them personally. Odd. And sad, too, because these are some very interesting students, and we get to actually talk about their writing for once. But it's the worst time in the semester to do this, because their minds are on summer, and the next formal writing they will do is in September.

Most of these guys really will do well in their future. I look at the grade book and "B" is the most common grade I give out. About 22% of my students, though, won't be passing. For most of them, the issue is simple dishonesty or simple lack of attendance. It seems like every class I teach has at least two students who have "issues" with attending (often I suspect that the "issues" are related to alcohol). I used to assign a paper on "differences between high school and college." I hoped for people to write about maturity or about the new emphasis on thinking for oneself. Usually, though, they write, "The main difference is that you have to attend classes in high school and you don't have to attend in college." Alas. None of the people I'm failing this semester had a good attendance record. Some missed as many as 20 class sessions.

That's a dreary note to end on. A happier one: Several of my students reported that their thinking changed significantly for the better. They figured out important things about their careers. They learned how to think. They learned how to respect the opinions of others. This is the stuff that's supposed to happen to freshmen, and it did here.

My boyfriend the expert

I'm looking over the current crop of Ashland definitional argument papers, and I'm surprised at how many of them use interviews as research sources. I'm also surprised at the qualifications of some of the people interviewed. Sometimes it really worked. One student, answering the question "Are cheerleaders athletes?" interviewed the faculty member who is in charge of the cheerleading squad. This faculty member happens to be part of the Physical Education Department, and could speak (with some authority) about the number of injuries suffered nationwide by cheerleaders. Another, writing on the question "Are NASCAR drivers athletes?" interviewed her boyfriend. His qualification is that he watches a lot of car races on TV and even attended a couple of races in real life. Yet another, writing on the question "Are band members athletes?" (we seem to be on a roll here) interviewed several band members and learned that they really like being in the band and feel like they have to work hard.

Did these strategies work? Or, more specifically, would anyone call these real research? Or are they just fulfilling the requirement to find outside sources?

Let's review.

• Both the author and the audience must respect the source. The cheerleader source seems to work that way. She's got expertise (and academic qualifications) in the specific field the paper was discussing. Do I respect the boyfriend who put down his beer long enough to say, "Yeah, they look like they're working hard"? Nope. Would I respect the opinion of a Ph.D. in English who watches a lot of NASCAR? No more than I'd respect the opinion of a truck driver or anyone else—the degree only counts in the area it relates to.


• The source must have something to say. The band people only got to say that they enjoy band and work hard. They didn't get to talk about much of anything else. Nobody among the band interviewees was asked to compare the band experience to (for example) being on a swim team or being a football player.


• You have to ask the right question. The greatest interview source in the world won't help you much if you don't ask the right question and edit the response. The NASCAR boyfriend was allowed to ramble for about half the paper. The band members were asked if they liked being in band. The cheerleading advisor was asked how cheerleaders' injuries and workouts compare with those of other athletes.

What a research paper is about

This is the bottom line: it's about learning something new and reliable, not about simply filling space and accumulating things to put on a "Works Cited" page.

By the way #1: It's all in the question you're trying to answer. If the research paper question was "What do beer-drinking NASCAR fans think about the drivers?" the boyfriend would have been an expert. He just wasn't an expert on what sort of workout and exertion the drivers actually go through.
By the way #2: There's a way to actually cite these interviews. Look it up.

Sample Annotated Bibliography

When I began to work on this assignment, I first thought of doing an easy topic. I read the daily news and saw a lot of material about George Bush leaning on the EPA to weaken ozone standards. That looked promising, but all the sources seemed to rely on the same Associated Press story, and I was faced with either doing a very superficial survey of news articles or doing an incredibly technical thing on ozone (about which I know nothing). I could do the standard student stuff about abortion or alcoholism or gay marriage, but I don't think I could face it—those three topics will probably cover sixty percent of my papers this year, and it's impossible to come up with anything very new.

Then I remembered one of the hottest issues in the teaching of English: Ebonics. It seemed perfect. For one thing, it's not exactly a settled issue. For another, it matters because Black English is the natural language to a significant number of my students. It also matters because I have pretty much stopped reading about this important issue during the last five years, and it's about time to start again.

Defining a few terms:

In the Annotated Bibliography itself, I'm assuming that the reader is aware of some basic definitions, so I have to help you become that reader. Here goes:

• AAE: African American English (sometimes referred to as AAVE—African American Vernacular English). This is the technical name for distinctively nonstandard Black United States English, emphasizing the independence of the latter from standard English.


• Ebonics: A term that comes from combining "ebony" and "phonics." It's a popular word for AAE. (Both of these definitions come from the Wikipedia definition of Ebonics.)


• Language versus Dialect (versus slang or sloppy talking). This is close to the heart of the whole discussion.
  
  
  • If AAE is just carelessness by people who know better, it should be easy to eliminate—it would be like the current habit of forgetting the "not" in the phrase "he could not care less." (Everyone knows that means he does the least possible caring, and the "not" gets dropped by people who aren't thinking about what they are saying or are trying to be cute.)
  
  
  • If AAE is just slang, the speakers are really modifying standard English, and it's still a pretty easy matter to deal with.
  
  
  • If AAE is a dialect of standard English, it's still pretty close, and most of the differences will be in the lexicon (words used and their definitions).
  
  
  • If AAE is a separate language, we can expect different word order, different verb structure, and so forth. The change-over from one language to another isn't easy, and frequently a person who is making the change (from French to English, for example) will take years and years before becoming as fluent as a native speaker.

After all that introduction (which would perhaps appear in a paper introduction, but not in the annotated bibliography), here's the annotated bibliography itself.

Notes:

1. This assignment took me about two hours. I spent some time messing about on the Internet, just long enough to find the Oakland Resolution, then had to leave and do some other work. Then this morning, I returned and did the whole thing in about 90 minutes. Of course, I was working in a field that I know something about. If I had been a total stranger here (a bad idea, by the way, for a research paper), I would have needed more time in general articles to find out just what is going on.


2. When I did this as an MLA bibliography, I lifted all the formatting straight from Son of Citation Machine. It's not that difficult.


3. Converting this to APA was a bit more difficult, so I ended up referring to the latest version of Rules for Writers by Diana Hacker. It's still not too difficult. The APA part took perhaps half an hour.


4. I can't close this without a quick tribute to Akron professor of linguistics Arthur Palacas, who has published several foundational articles on the topic and opened my eyes to it when I was in graduate school.