![\"war-of-the-worlds\"](\"http:\/\/macblog.mcmaster.ca\/fryeblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/4\/2009\/10\/war-of-the-worlds3.jpg\")
<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
In a previous post I used Frye\u2019s idea of literary scholarship as proceeding from an \u201cinductive survey\u201d of the subject to argue that, in the field of Victorian studies, we should still be teaching such classics as Vanity Fair<\/em> or Bleak House<\/em>.\u00a0 I was using Frye\u2019s criticism to defend a particular canon of Victorian literature, a goal that might be seen as conservative in nature.\u00a0 Here I want to argue something rather different, and apparently contradictory (in the spirit of the \u201cboth\/and\u201d logic recommended previously on this blog), namely to show how using Frye to think about my Introduction to Literature course encouraged me to incorporate a contemporary popular movie, namely Steven Spielberg\u2019s War of the Worlds<\/em>, an action that superficially might seem to locate me in the cultural studies camp.\u00a0 By writing in some detail about how I teach a specific course, I hope to continue, if obliquely, the theoretical discussion of the last week or two.<\/p>\n On the one hand, just as the literary scholar needs to make an inductive survey, so, in some reduced way, ought the student.\u00a0 On the other hand, if all of literature has certain fundamental structural properties, then in a sense it doesn\u2019t really matter what texts you study, or where you start.\u00a0 And so in a first-year course I don\u2019t really worry about how much we cover. \u00a0I always begin with Oedipus the King<\/em>, for reasons which by now probably have more to do with superstition than anything else \u2013 rather like always wearing the same shirt for a 10K road race.\u00a0 And I do proceed in a largely chronological order.\u00a0 But after that it is a matter of choosing some texts that I hope at least most of the students will be engaged by, and that I can use to illustrate the way that literature can be analyzed in terms of structure and texture, or in Frye\u2019s words, myth and metaphor.<\/p>\n The course outline for my most recent Introduction to Literature course tried to articulate the goals of the course to the students as follows: \u201cWe will study literary works of a variety of different kinds (plays, lyric poems, short stories, a novel, and a film) and from a variety of periods, from ancient Greece to contemporary North America, by artists from Sophocles to Steven Spielberg, from about 429 BCE to 2005.\u00a0 The course is designed to develop the ability to read and think critically, and it will emphasize (i) the structural principles which literary works have in common; (ii) the need for close reading of literary texts in order to identify the distinctive features of any given text.\u201d\u00a0 My \u201ctheoretical approach\u201d adopts Aristotle\u2019s generic categories (as does the Norton Introduction to Literature<\/em>) and draws heavily on Frye along with an eclectic range of other critics and theorists.\u00a0 It didn\u2019t take many years of teaching to discover that Frye was a very reliable guide when trying to work out how to teach the basic principles of literary study.\u00a0 Some of the other theorists I was enamoured of in graduate school were less helpful; I remember a friend who was teaching her first course as a TA in the late 1980s saying to me, \u201cI set out to deconstruct the students\u2019 liberal humanist notions about literature, and then I discovered that they didn\u2019t have any.\u201d<\/p>\n I always like to include one novel in the introductory course, preferably one that is not too long, for the practical reason that Saint Mary\u2019s University has a significant percentage of ESL students, and all students, whatever their degree programme, must take Introduction to Literature.\u00a0 Last time I taught the course, I decided to teach H. G. Wells\u2019s War of the Worlds<\/em>.\u00a0 Most young people are familiar with science fiction, and the \u201calien invasion\u201d is an especially popular topic, so I thought it would be interesting to study the literary work that stands behind so many recent films.\u00a0 I was also influenced by the fact that Steven Spielberg\u2019s film of 2005 adapts the story to contemporary New Jersey, and contains numerous references to the events of September 11, 2001.\u00a0 I thought we would study the film in addition to the book, in order to explore the concept of adaptation.\u00a0 Students are usually astute film critics (in fact, they scored remarkably well on a detail quiz about the film, as compared with the book), and I always hope that discussing which conventions transfer from fiction to film, and in what ways the two genres are different, will bring about a greater awareness of literary conventions.<\/p>\n As Frye notes, science fiction is a form of romance, but H. G. Wells is also a master of what Frye calls \u201clow-mimetic realism,\u201d often with a pronounced comic dimension, as in his novel Kipps<\/em>. While War of the Worlds<\/em> is culturally important for its role in the history of science fiction, it is also a novel about a writer living in the Home Counties, and it is full of vivid period detail.\u00a0 It is an accessible but rich work, and it is a rather frightening story as well.\u00a0 Similarly, Spielberg\u2019s film works on several levels.\u00a0 Among other things, it is about class and family dynamics in the contemporary United States, including a comic dimension based on the class difference between the character played by Tom Cruise and his ex-wife\u2019s new husband.<\/p>\n There is a lot of cultural and intellectual context that is relevant to Wells\u2019s novel, for example, fears of a foreign invasion of England, widely depicted in the popular literature of the time, or the work of Charles Darwin, as championed by Wells\u2019s teacher Thomas Henry Huxley (who became known as \u201cDarwin\u2019s bulldog\u201d).\u00a0 At the same time, as a work of romance it incorporates many of the conventions of that genre, which are even more apparent in the film adaptation, with its scenes of combat and destruction and its images of ascent and descent, death and return from apparent death.\u00a0 Spielberg\u2019s film refers to the fear of terrorism in post-September 11 America, and is full of visual imagery familiar from television coverage of the attack on the World Trade Center: billowing clouds of grey dust, a crashed airplane, home-made posters of missing people.\u00a0 It includes many of Spielberg\u2019s characteristic images and motifs, including familial conflict, vulnerable children, rebirth, and framed point of view (for example, we see part of the alien destruction of Bayonne, NJ indirectly, on the screen of a camcorder that someone has dropped).\u00a0 In one scene, Tom Cruise is pulled inside an alien tripod that has already captured his daughter (memorably played by Dakota Fanning).\u00a0 As he is pulled out by other captives is able to leave inside some grenades that he has picked up earlier, destroying the tripod and allowing the human prisoners to escape.\u00a0 The escape of Odysseus from the Cyclops and the swallowing of Jonah by the great fish are relevant parallels to this scene, and it is an interesting footnote that Wells\u2019s tripods have a possible Homeric source.\u00a0 An Iranian student made the cross-cultural observation, in relation to Wells\u2019s satirical portrayal of the Anglican curate, that the clergy are frequently mocked in the literature of her culture as well.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fryeblog.blog.lib.mcmaster.ca\/wp-includes\/js\/tinymce\/plugins\/wordpress\/img\/trans.gif\"){kind=spacer}
<\/p>\n