In their recent study for the English Subject Centre, Living Writers in the Curriculum, Vicki Bertram and Andrew Maunder draw attention to the increasing popularity of modules on contemporary writers in English degree courses and the ways in which such modules can allow students to find their own critical voices, question issues of value and canon formation, and consider the importance of marketing and publicity in the promotion of new works. (1) In this paper, I want to explore these ideas in relation to the design and implementation of a level-three module on the contemporary bestseller at the University of Hertfordshire, entitled Writing Now: Identity Politics in the Contemporary Novel. This module, which ran for the first time in 2005-6, was to create a range of pedagogical opportunities and challenges and raised a number of important questions concerning learning and teaching practices: How might we teach contemporary bestsellers effectively? Which texts are suitable for study? How can we deal with the relative scarcity of secondary sources? And how can we use a module on bestsellers to encourage the enhancement of transferable skills?
Background and overview
The initial idea for Writing Now emerged both from a growing interest on my part in the phenomenon of the bestseller and from a sense that the Literature provision at Hertfordshire might benefit from a module dealing specifically with twenty-first century literature. Such a module would allow students to explore some of the recent trends in the publishing industry, to question the concept and nature of the bestseller, and to interrogate the variety of narrative strategies employed by such novels. Of course, the range of possible texts for such a module is vast and after much trawling through the bestseller sections of Waterstones and Borders, I decide on the following selection, listed in order of study, for a thirteen-week programme:
Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code (2003)
Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2000)
Ian McEwan, Atonement (2002)
Monica Ali, Brick Lane (2003)
Alan Hollinghurst, The Line of Beauty (2004)
DBC Pierre, Vernon God Little (2003)
Yann Martel, Life of Pi (2002)
Alice Sebold, The Lovely Bones (2002)
Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler’s Wife (2005)
The structure of the module sought to divide this material into three key sections. The first section would introduce students to the idea of the ‘popular’ bestseller through The Da Vinci Code and Bridget Jones. The second would move to consideration of more ‘literary’ bestsellers and prize-winners with Atonement, Brick Lane, The Line of Beauty and Vernon God Little. And the third would ask students to consider what I termed (perhaps problematically) more innovative narratives with Life of Pi, The Lovely Bones and The Time Traveler’s Wife, works which play with voice, perspective and chronology in intriguing ways. Throughout students would also be asked to examine the ways in which the chosen texts represent and interrogate various aspects of identity politics – concerning gender, sexuality, class, race, nationality – and how these reflect a range of key issues, concerns and anxieties of the twenty-first century.
Pedagogical approaches
As a new level-three optional module, Writing Now was extremely popular in its first year of running, with seventy students enrolling on it. Many of these were single honours students, although the module also attracted combined honours students and part-time students. The cohort was therefore extremely diverse and meant that we were unable to assume a common body of prior knowledge, experience or reading, something we had to keep in mind during the design stage. In the standard way, we had been allocated a one-hour lecture slot, which all the students would attend, and three seminar groups to be taught by myself and Tim Stafford, a visiting lecturer who has considerable experience of teaching literature in the School of
Education and who was to be invaluable in helping shape the module and its pedagogical approaches. What I was particularly keen to do with the module was to break with more traditional ways of lecturing and develop students’ competencies as independent learners in explicit ways. We therefore decided that in most weeks we would abandon the traditional lecture/seminar format which is the fundamental structure of most modules across the Literature curriculum and replace it with practical workshop sessions where students work in small groups on a variety of tasks and exercises designed to encourage autonomy and active learning. Week by week, therefore, students were asked to work on a range of activities which included the following:
• producing group responses to set questions on a specific text
• writing questions for other groups to tackle
• analysing specific passages as a basis for a presentation
• setting up debates
• rewriting specific scenes through processes of textual intervention
• sourcing information on authors and assessing its relevance
• sourcing and analysing theoretical writings
• comparing the styles of different texts
• comparing passages from the module texts on a specific issue with passages from more ‘classic’ literature (for example, Austen and Dickens)
• analysing and writing reviews
• analysing and critiquing internet resources
• analysing the possibility of film adaptation
• undertaking editing and marketing projects as if they were working in the publishing industry.
A few lectures were included on the module – specifically at the beginning or when introducing theoretical material – but the majority of the work on the primary texts was facilitated through this range of practical activities.
This break with the conventional teacher-led approach – what Graham Gibbs terms ‘closed teaching’ where learning outcomes are all but completely defined by the lecturer (2) – encourages students to work both independently and collaboratively so that there is greater potential for the experience to become one of transformation as the students move from a more ‘surface’ learning approach to a ‘deeper’, more reflective approach. (3) Indeed, as Paul Ramsden argues, ‘[t]he supreme purpose of such small group work is to encourage students to confront different conceptions and to practice making sense for themselves’ (my emphasis). (4) Certainly this more student-centred approach was well-received by the first year’s cohort and also provided them with the opportunity to develop that range of skills – advanced writing skills, presentation skills, research skills, team-working skills – which are central to both Dearing’s concept of lifelong learning and the current employability debates. (5)
Within this more fluid learning space, where we were asking students to engage in working practices with which they might be unfamiliar, it seemed important to establish some form of agreement on responsibilities. To this end, therefore, we drew upon the idea of the ‘learning contract’ as it has been defined by educationalists such as George Boak and J. Clark. As Boak notes, learning contracts function as an agreement between the learner and the tutor/ facilitator on the rules and strategies to be employed in order to facilitate effective learning and teaching. (6) Used widely in a range of academic environments and situations, they are often designed to focus upon what will be learnt, but for this module we employed the contract to help highlight what was expected from each participant (tutor/student). Indeed, as Clark argues, ‘the metaphor of a contract is used to allude to the serious commitment participants will make’ and can often result in greater student motivation and sense of owning the learning experience. (7)
For Writing Now, the learning contract involved the students agreeing to complete the reading of all primary texts; attend at least 75% of the scheduled sessions (a standard attendance requirement for the Humanities programme) although preferably all of them if the workshops were going to be effective; prepare for and contribute to all sessions; and be willing to engage in a range of practical activities designed to promote discussion and deepen understanding. On the other side, the tutors agreed to introduce theoretical frameworks for interpretation of the primary texts; provide a series of structured activities to facilitate learning; offer regular formative feedback; provide extra study material on StudyNet, the University’s intranet managed learning environment; guide students towards successful completion of all assessed work; and to organise regular opportunities for students to feed back on any problems they have with the module (particularly important, it was felt, for a new module). In effect, this ‘contractual’ agreement allowed the students to take control of the learning experience to a greater extent and made transparent the strategies by which successful implantation of the module could be achieved. Certainly it highlighted a collaborative responsibility between tutor and student which is often only implicit and which, in the case of Writing Now, had extremely positive effects as students demonstrated a strong commitment to the module through detailed preparation, effective group work and informed and energetic discussion and debate.
Syllabus design
As Allen H. Miller has detailed in his book-length study, Course Design for University Lecturers (1987), the design of any syllabus or programme of study can be an extremely problematic process and always requires careful consideration and justification. (8) This is particularly so with a module like Writing Now which makes great demands on the students in terms of primary reading (several of the texts, not unusually for bestsellers, are over 500 pages long) and where students need to be successful in their attainment of a range of different learning objectives. As I noted above, the module was designed with a fundamental tripartite structure leading students from consideration of ‘popular’ bestsellers to consideration of more ‘literary’ bestsellers. In the first three weeks, then, we asked the students to begin thinking about the whole nature of a popular bestseller by considering not only the key narrative strategies employed in such works but also issues to do with marketing and publicity. This is particularly important with texts like The Da Vinci Code and Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason which clearly justify their position on a bestsellers course through their massive sales, but about which students might be prone to make easy and dismissive readings and value judgements. The module is not, of course, trying to recuperate either text as a ‘great’ literary work but rather to explore how and why these novels have achieved such popularity.
That said, however, we were keen that students would approach their work on The Da Vinci Code and Bridget Jones in an academically sound and theoretically informed manner, consistent with their work on the other module texts. (This was particularly important given that a number of students would choose to work – often very successfully – on one or both of these texts for their first piece of summative assessment.) To this end, therefore, we introduced each novel through a strong theoretical framework. With The Da Vinci Code, we examined the problematic nature of history and historiography, emphasising how history as narrative questions the notion of any one objective ‘truth’ and serves specific social, political and ideological ends. (In his rewriting of religious history in order to resituate Mary Magdalene at the centre of the transmission of Christian beliefs, Brown opposes established patriarchal religion and exposes the supposed suppression of the ‘sacred feminine’.) Although Brown’s use of history is in many ways ‘cheerful[ly] sloppy’ (9), the text nevertheless works well in getting students to think about the slippery relations between fiction, ‘reality’ and history (this is the first of several historical texts on the module). Students were next asked to consider the reasons why this text might be popular at this particular historical moment, using part of a December 2004 New Statesman review which linked the novel to post-9/11 fears of conspiracy theories, secret societies and fundamentalism. Moreover, despite – or maybe because of – its clunky plot, clichés and reliance on coincidences, The Da Vinci Code serves as a good medium through which to interrogate the key narrative strategies of a bestseller, including patterning, pace, the creation and manipulation of suspense, use of dialogue, setting and generic tensions.
Bridget Jones, on the other hand, was introduced through frameworks derived from cultural studies and third-wave feminism, again in order to demonstrate how a seemingly lightweight text can be read analytically and theoretically. Bridget Jones has, of course, spawned a wide-ranging ‘chicklit’ genre in both fiction and television (Fielding’s work is often compared with Ally McBeal, for instance), and we began by considering the feminist backlash against the Bridget Jones phenomenon. (10) However, students were then encouraged to debate this viewpoint and explore the text in relation to the politics of the body, theories of performativity, the role of the alternative/urban family, and the potential reconfiguring of marriage. Further, in terms of style, we explored Bridget Jones in relation to the bildungsroman, intertextual relations with Austen’s work (Fielding specifically highlighted the first Bridget text as a reworking of Pride and Prejudice and the second as a reworking of Persuasion), and the politics of the diary format as it has been theorised by critics such as Laura Marcus and Julia Swindells. (11) Through such approaches, therefore, we were able to help students see how the ‘popular’ bestseller can be theorised in many of the same ways and often as rigorously as more ‘literary’ works.
As we moved to the second part of the module, then, students were already used to reading bestsellers both in terms of narrative strategies and theory. With Atonement, Brick Lane, The Line of Beauty and Vernon God Little, we shifted to more acclaimed prize-winners/nominees and sought to build upon the previous weeks by emphasising the detailed examination of aspects of identity politics and the idea of rewriting the classic which runs through all four texts. It was also at this point that we reinforced the strategies for encouraging independent learning by turning increasingly to workshop sessions and greatly reducing the time spent in the traditional lecture format. In a two-hour workshop on Atonement, for example, we divided the cohort into six groups, two of which worked on a number of questions on issues in the text, two of which analysed part of an essay on the novel, and two of which responded to ideas raised in a review of McEwan’s work generally. Students responded positively to the introduction of the workshop style here and the subsequent feedback plenary was extremely dynamic and insightful.
In subsequent weeks, students returned to tackling the texts through explicit theoretical frameworks. In the session on Brick Lane, students explored elements of postcolonial criticism (adaptation of form, voice, nation, cultural conflict, diversity and the ‘Other’) in a debate stimulated by close analysis of specific passages, whilst in the session on The Line of Beauty, we spent an hour discussing models of masculinity through historical and contemporary visual images (drawn from paintings, adverts and film) before interrogating the various constructions of masculinity in Hollinghurst’s novel. The following week on Vernon God Little subsequently offered an opportunity to consolidate the theoretical ideas employed so far through reconsideration of some of the key concepts of postmodernism – the breakdown of grand narratives, the questioning of value systems, the decentred self and depthlessness, the fluidity of history, and ideas of metafi ction. Using these concepts and David Lodge’s ‘five techniques typical of postmodernist fiction’ (contraction, permutation, discontinuity, randomness, excess)(12), the students then designed their own questions on the text for each other to respond to. The questions – which covered, for example, the ways in which the novel satirises religion, the media and consumer society; the constructions and representation of masculinity and sexuality; and the relationship to the bildungsroman and coming-of-age novel – clearly showed the students to be considering both the text’s issues and narrative strategies in ways which locked into the aims and the learning outcomes of the module overall.
In the final three taught weeks of the module we sought to build on the students’ developing understanding of narrative innovations in contemporary bestsellers through consideration of three works which play with structure, voice and perspective in complex and challenging ways: Yann Martel’s Man Booker Prize-winning allegorical narrative, Life of Pi, Alice Sebold’s horrifying yet beautiful novel, The Lovely Bones, and Audrey Niffenegger’s chronologically- complex fantasy, The Time Traveler’s Wife. These texts sit well together in their use of metafictional techniques and students responded enthusiastically to the analysis of unreliable narrators, allegory, multiple endings, variable perspective, generic indeterminacy and intertextuality. Certainly these three novels worked effectively to bring together the interests and concerns of the module overall.
Resource issues
As Michael Parker has argued in his discussion of resource issues for teaching contemporary poetry:
[t]he sparseness of critical material on much contemporary writing changes the ‘politics’ of teaching and learning, as lecturer and student ‘discover’ or, as post-structuralists would have it, ‘write’ the work together. (13)
Indeed, many of the primary texts on Writing Now are too recent to have been the focus of critical studies – particularly given the length of time that it usually takes journal articles or books to be published. So how can we help students bridge the resources gap effectively?
Obviously we need to start by encouraging them to think widely in terms of secondary material. In addition to theoretical work and more wide-ranging critical texts such as Clive Bloom’s Cult Fiction (1996), Steven Connor’s Postmodernist Culture (1997) and Zachary Leader’s On Modern British Fiction (2002), the internet is a crucial resource here. In order to get students to be more discerning in the material they draw from the net, we set them the task of sourcing a website on one of the texts we were studying and then to analyse its strengths, limitations and academic worth and post this on the module intranet site so that it was available for the whole cohort. This material was then supplemented by other useful net resources such as the BBC ‘Interviews with authors’ site and a chicklit author discussion site. (14)
Arguably most important for the material we were studying, however, are reviews and therefore we spent considerable time with the students exploring the potential of using reviews as a springboard for their own analyses of the texts. Halfway through the module, for example, we allocated a week to discussion of reviews both as a means of commenting upon and judging novels and as text types in their own right. To this end, students were given a review of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time taken from the Guardian, a review of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake from The Christian Science Monitor, a review of Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days from Time Out, and a review of an anthology of short stories entitled Ladies’ Night from Heat magazine. The range of sources worked well in allowing students to consider the relations between audience and issues of structure, style, register, judgements made, and the proportion of narrative to exposition. As an extension exercise, they then worked in groups to construct a review of one of the module texts in the style of the reviews we had studied in class. Although the task produced some very humorous results (particularly those reviews composed in the house style of Heat magazine), this was a useful week’s work for raising awareness, on a very practical level, of the ways in which reviews function. Certainly, the students were then more confident and competent when engaging with more lengthy reviews of the module texts for their assessed work.
Assessment
There were two pieces of summative assessment on this module: a more traditional essay which asked for analysis of some aspect of identity politics in two of the first six texts studied; and a one-hour in-class test which asked students to respond to a given passage from a review on one of the last three texts (Life of Pi, The Lovely Bones, The Time Traveler’s Wife). The test paper offered a choice of two reviews on each text and students had to engage with the points and judgements made in them by drawing upon their knowledge and understanding of the novels. This was a different assessment type from that normally undertaken but the majority of students responded well to it as a task which emerged out of some of the key concerns of the module overall.
In addition to these two pieces of formal assessment, however, students were encouraged to write critically throughout the module. One week, for example, was given over to a practical workshop on editing and proofreading. This was placed within the context of the publishing industry but was also geared towards the students’ own essays by asking them to edit and proof two introductions and two conclusions to academic texts and from this, as a cohort, to make a list of elements of good practice for their own writing. Further, at various intervals in the module they were also asked to submit commentaries on the issues raised by the texts, assessments of websites and reviews, and reflections on theory for formative (ungraded) feedback. Whilst this process could, at times, be labour intensive for the teaching staff, it nevertheless provided a forum where students could test ideas and reflect upon their approaches to analysing bestsellers when the normal resource supports were limited.
Evaluation
This was in many ways a fascinating module to set up and run, and questionnaires and discussion groups conducted with the first cohort of students revealed that the module was generally very well received. The students enjoyed the range of primary material, although many commented that the reading load was both heavy and costly (obviously there is no equivalent of the cheap Wordsworth Classics edition for contemporary writing). This will need to be reviewed and amended in the coming academic year.
In terms of pedagogical approach, however, many students were extremely enthusiastic about the move from traditional lecture format to workshop sessions since this allowed them greater opportunity to develop their own ideas and to take responsibility for their learning. Some, of course, still preferred the standard lecture/seminar distinction, but on the whole it was felt that the workshop had much to commend it by encouraging autonomy and creating a place where students could learn through processes of discovery. It was pleasing, then, to hear that many of them felt that the module had both developed their generic/ transferable skills and increased their understanding of some of the key techniques and concerns of contemporary bestsellers. And whilst the module might often have been challenging for the teaching staff on its first run through, it was nevertheless also extremely rewarding as we explored new materials and tried out different learning and teaching techniques. Certainly the thirteen weeks from The Da Vinci Code to The Time Traveler’s Wife served to reaffirm a sense of the diversity, flexibility and inclusiveness of the English studies discipline within which we work.
As someone who is new to teaching contemporary bestsellers, I would be interested in hearing from colleagues on any of the issues raised by this paper and particularly on suggestions for learning and teaching strategies. I can be contacted by email on s.j.avery@herts.ac.uk.
Notes
1. Vicki Bertram and Andrew Maunder, Living Writers in the Curriculum: A Good Practice Guide (English Subject Centre, 2005), pp.3-5.
2. Graham Gibbs, Improving the Quality of Student Learning (Oxford: Oxford Centre for Staff Development, 1992), p.6. See also Bill Cox, Practical Pointers for University Teachers (London: Kogan Page, 1994), pp.61-2.
3. For discussion of ‘surface’ and ‘deep’ learning approaches, see Paul Ramsden, Learning to Teach in Higher Education (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), p.46.
5. See Higher Education in the Learning Society (London, HMSO, 1997); Peter T.Knight and Mantz Yorke, Assessment, Learning and Employability (Maidenhead: Open University Press, 2003).
6. George Boak, A Complete Guide to Learning Contracts (Aldershot: Gower, 1988), p.ix.
8. Allen H. Miller, Course Design for University Lecturers (London: Kogan Page, 1987), p.7.
9. Michael Haag, The Rough Guide to The Da Vinci Code (London: Rough Guides, 2004), p.77. ‘The Da Vinci Code works well in getting students to think about the slippery relations between fi ction, ‘reality’ and history.’
10. See Kelly A. Marsh, ‘Contextualising Bridget Jones’, College Literature 31.1(2004), pp.52-72.
11. Laura Marcus, Auto/biographical Discourses (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994); Julia Swindells, The Uses of Autobiography (London: Taylor and Francis, 1995).
12. Cited in Jeremy Hawthorn, A Glossary of Contemporary Literary Theory (London: Arnold, 2000), p.217. I am grateful to my colleague, Anna Tripp, for bringing this to my attention.
13. Michael Parker, in Bertram and Maunder, p.8.
14. www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/openbook/openbook_interviews_ home.shtml; www.authorsontheweb.com/features/0402-chicklit/ chicklit.asp
