Who Would Win in a Fight Between Frankenstein and Dracula? Students!

Cheesy title aside, I was watching The Monster Squad last night, and as Frankenstein's monster impaled Dracula on a wrought iron fence post, I was reminded how much I enjoyed teaching a 19th century British literature class that culminated in reading The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. In my first literature class--a college, sophomore level Introduction to Popular Culture course that I had themed around "heroes"--I began with Sir Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines. I wasn't sure how well such an old text would go over in a course that included comics, a field trip to a baseball game, and a critical analysis of the film Sucker-Punch. I was surprised that not only did my students enjoy Haggard's "adventure story for boys," but they were eager to form their own opinions on sexism, racism, and even post-colonialism (without, perhaps, realizing that that's what they were discussing). The book went over so well that it lead to me trying the all-Victorian reading list I mentioned earlier.

That too went surprisingly well, but I don't think I realized why until this past week. One assignment of the course required that, in pairs, students lead the discussion of one of the texts at some point in the semester, in which they related the novel to a pop culture artifact and suggest an explanation for the connection. In both classes, I modeled this for them by showing how the 2009 video game Resident Evil 5 not only has virtually the exact same plot as King Solomon's Mines but also experiences similar accusations of racism toward Africans and raises important questions about racism in the media. As the semester wore on, they began reading the texts looking for these connections and not only finding them but enjoying the novels, as well. This enjoyment lead directly to our ability to discuss the texts on deeper levels--such as the aforementioned post-colonialism in Haggard's novel, but also Darwinism in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and social justice in The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Now, if I understand the terminology I've been reading about correctly, this would be classified as student aesthetic reading leading to efferent reading, which is really exciting to me as so much discussion of the two seems to suggest they're must be separate--you can't read for fun and meaning!--when the majority of my students were doing just that. I've also continued reading Gerald Graff's Clueless in Academe, in which he suggests that one of the reasons students don't like to discuss meaning or analyze is because (as they see it) the meaning should be apparent--either it's there or it's not--and is therefor not worth discussing. What's the purpose in continuing to dig? But my students didn't mind when I asked them look for meaning in our texts because they saw it reflected in what they were already familiar with--their favorite TV shows, movies, and music.

Granted, this wasn't the experience of all of my students, and lest I leave you with the impression that they all loved all the books, that wasn't the case--surprisingly, however, they enjoyed Alan Moore's interpretation of Alan Quatermain the least. But with a few exceptions, they all found something to enjoy in at least one of the novels, and regardless, classroom discussions were always lively--my favorite was when discussions of post-colonial themes in King Solomon's Mines lead to a discussion of New Mexican water rights. Thus, the more I read, the more I think I was onto something in these classes, even if it was, at the time, accidental.

Questions? Quibbles? Controversies?