I just got done teaching a section of my English 204 class. On the schedule for the day: Emily Dickinson. Emily Dickinson days always make me happy--even when after only ten minutes or so it is pretty clear that most of the class didn't read closely enough, if at all. Anyway, one of the poems we discussed was this perfect and witty four-liner:
"Faith" in a fine invention
When Gentlemen can see--
But Microscopes are prudent
In an Emergency
It's a fantastic poem about how we feel just fine about our faith until a moment of crisis, when believing without seeing isn't very easy. So here I am trying to explain this to my class. With Dickinson (especially for beginners) a line by line reading tends to work best. And this kind of close attention can be very rewarding with a poet like Dickinson, who does so many interesting things with punctuation, capitalization, italics, and yes, even quotation marks.
Anyway, here I am, starting at the beginning, and asking students what we should think about Dickinson putting quotation marks around "Faith" in that first line. I met with that familiar wall of silence. So I tried another strategy, asking them what it means when we put "air quotes" around something we are saying. And Lord help me, all I could think of were dirty examples: "He and I were 'studying' all night long," "I'm really good at 'anatomy.'" [This supports Vogel's theory that I am the dirtiest teacher she knows. I don't think this is true, by the way.] The students, of course, got a big kick out of that. Beyond the laughs, though, they started to see the point--the quotation marks actually often indicate that we should take the word to mean something very different than what it would mean without them. They began to see the subversive value of those quotation marks. So what Dickinson is calling "Faith" isn't really faith at all. Once we got this down, they were able to grasp the rest of the poem much more easily.
This whole story (perhaps only interesting to nerds like myself) illustrates so well why Dickinson is an invaluable resource for teaching English. She makes us realize the differences that dashes, italics, and exclamation points make. And she does it in ways that students understand. Consider the closing lines of "After great pain, a formal feeling comes--":
As freezing persons, recollect the Snow--
First--Chill--then Stupor--then the letting go--
In this poem (one of my favorites), Dickinson is writing about a pain (the death of a loved one, a great loss) so severe that it threatens to destroy the sufferer. She creates that powerful and haunting image of freezing to death in these last lines--of the eventual slipping away into unconsciousness and death. The dash therefore, is such a perfect way to end the poem. I asked my students, "Why a dash? Why not a period?" And they got it: it implies that drifting off, that lack of a clean, neat, and definite ending. They understood why. This can even open doors to discussions of editing and editions, always a contentious topic in Dickinson studies. And all of this is possible at an undergraduate, non-major level. Awesome.
All of this also reminded me of a kind of silly blog I recently discovered: The "blog" of "unnecessary" quotation marks. It's really quite funny and worth visiting.
1 comment:
English people are a bunch of horndogs! Remember that "a writers reader" crappy thing we had to read as freshman! the only thing I remember from it was the late night orgy reference!!
Hmmm... maybe I picked the wrong major.
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