Discovering Symbolic Meaning: Teaching with Willa Cather

Abstract

Generalizations about middle, junior, and senior high school students apply to non-majors college-and sometimes extend to the majors. The majority of my students freshmen and sophomore courses have never read any poetry, independently at least, nor any extended, complex prose narratives. When I ask students what they are reading, they respond that they first see a movie and then, if they like the movie, turn to the novel, often an adaptation of the film. In other ways these students reveal how firmly they think patterns suggested by electronic media. They often compare narrative techniques to camera movements, so omniscient narration seems a wide-angle shot, and they visualize settings and characters as currently popular film versions. Most troubling, they seem to read short, disconnected spurts of attention. Almost all these students have grown up with television; their perceptual patterns have been shaped by electronic media. The effect is far deeper than I am often willing-or perhaps able-to admit. Nathan A. Scott, Jr. Negative Capability discusses this difference between my students' generation and my own. Those of us who spent our early years without television reached toward the roots of our culture by solitarily reading portable books an isolation which in turn bred ... the habit of preoccupation with inwardness, with depth. The art of our students breed quite a different habit, for art no longer fers forms symbolic of human feeling, Susanne Langer's definition of art's natural function. Music, for example, now may simply present sounds, sounds going anywhere or moving through a rhythmically ordered sequence to any sort of climax, . . . not sounds related to one another by any sort of human logic, but simply sounds, the sheer thereness of their acousticality. In architecture there is the skyscraper that is a skeleton of steel and glass; painting there is the canvas that is simply a large white [field] bearing broad strokes of black: sound, glass and steel, primed canvas and black paint-nothing more, only the sheer thereness of the raw materials, their unhumanized facticity.2 I am not here concerned with the merits of one