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[Sandgropers]

Going to teach at a College in Guandong this September ( our first time in China ) and having made enquiries regarding what literature texts we might be required to teach, the following titles were given. 'The History and Anthology of English Literature' (2 books) and 'The History and Anthology of American Literature' ( 2 books). All published by the Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press in Beijing. Having had many years of teaching literature ( too many years if the truth be known!!!) I have never heard of these books. Has anybody had experience with teaching Literature using these texts? We would love to know their contents! It would then guide us as to which of our own teaching resources to take with us to China.
Cheers

[Roger]

Yep, I have taught English Literature in Guangdong eight and a half years ago! Was a traumatising period, but highly interesting and revealing!
The books you mentioned may or may not have been the ones I was supposed to use. There is not much choice anyway. I remember the book had text excerpts from works by John Milton through to Bernard Shaw. It is no mystery why it stopped there - George Orwell or Anthony BUrgess cannot possibly be welcome to the folks domiciled at Zhongnanhai...
I have here in my private collection a thick tome "Selected Readings In English and American Literature", which covers the entire period of English literature from its early beginnings to the twentieth century, and it is somewhat readable. It also has valuable footnote information in English and special notes in CHinese on the different eras and literature.

I think you need not worry so much about whether you can deliver; your main worry is going to be whether your students can cope with the subject. Students are not used to reading between the lines; they will expect you to tell them what to answer in any test or exam. They will memorise "Shakespeare was the greatest British dramatist of the 16th century..." - this, and nothing else will count!

[Minhang Oz]

I've found that whilst many students are interested in Western literature, they can rarely cope with the original English text. It needs to be drastically abridged, Readers' Digest style, or they'll read the translation, of which there's quite a lot, up to and including D.H. Lawrence. No one's even heard of Orwell; no idea why. The texts you mention may be the ones a teacher I was tutoring some years back used, and they contained a number of short, quite well chosen excerpts.

However, as I have to go faculty shopping today, I'll check out the Shanghai Foreign Languages bookstore for you, and get back on that tomorrow.

[arioch36]

The Western concept of teaching literature is not the Chinese concept.

First, let's be honest. I took Shakespeare many times, once i had a great teacher , and learned a lot. And when we studied Shakespeare, we had a page of explainations for every page of Shakespeare. The same holds true for most of these classics, and to expect even a good Chinese student to be able to read these classics is absurd (which I didn't know before i came). Most western students can't read most of the "Penguin Classics" you will find at the Shanghai bookstore. Which is why cliff notes abound.

What you are really being asked to do is teach a history course. On the test they must know when the "Enlightened Period" was. And their main concern is doing well on the test. But you will not be teaching the classics, you will be teaching a history class. Not trying to be cynical, but factual.

This does not mean that you can't give them anything interesting in class. Many will appreciate it. If you want to splurge, bring the cliff notes of some of the anthologies. If you have 30 students, divide them into 6 groups, and have each group give a play. Pick one or two of your favourite works, and during the semester try to realte this to them (but make them do most of the work). But be prepared a little to understand all of that is extra. Unless you are teaching Tsinghua graduate students in literature, you will be really only teaching a review of the history of literature.

Sorry Keep an open mind, and don't let the truth get in the way of your idealism, because idealism is more real then mere truth

[Chairman Roberto]

I'll be taking the big plunge next semester and attempt to teach literature. I'm armed with a thick tome of literature, but I've quickly realized most of this material is way over my student's heads. But so far, these will be my selections for my students to sweat over...(and I'll drop some titles if this proves to be way too much):

Short Stories
"The Monkey's Paw" W.W. Jacobs
"The Killers" Ernest Hemingway
"The Guest" Albert Camus
"The Lottery" Shirley Jackson
Poems
"Stopping at Woods on a Snowy Evening", "The Road Not Taken" Robert Forst
"This is just to say" "The Red Wheelbarrow" William Carlos Williams
"My Papa's Waltz" Theodore Roethke

I'm also mulling over "Paul's Case" Willa Cather, and "Araby" James Joyce, "Shooting an Elephant" George Orwell. (now that shouldn't offend Beijing, right?)

My criteria is to give my students some fairly typical selections American middle and high school students encounter in a literature course, as well as introduce them to bona fide classics.

This is my intention: I feel if the students want to stuff their heads with vocab and grammar, they might as well read some lit in the bargain. They already spend hours and hours memorizing words and grammar structures, so actually reading the vocab and grammar IN CONTEXT is...oh wait, I keep forgetting to supress my common sense. It's like a bad rash. My apologies.

I would LOVE any suggestions in this endeavor. Have you found any works to be particulary effective in an literature course? I don't want to be overly ambitious, and I have alot of freedom and can go any pace. I'm open to simplifing the text. Alot of my students are hungry for English reading outside of textbooks...I get students begging for my copies of the bland and badly written "English Digest", "English Salon" , and "China Today."

thanx,
Roberto

[Minhang Oz]

I had a look through the English lit. shelves in the Shanghai bookshop but couldn't find those titles. There were several similar though; History of Eng Lit, 4 parts, part 1 Anglo saxon to Reformation and so on. Most texts had annotations in two languages, the anthologies were exerpts followed by questions.

[Roger]

Roberto,
yes, remain open-minded! I feel too that exposure to the written language would help get them the feel for English and offer them a lot more practice than silly oral parroting after their Chinese teacher! And, I agree in part with Chris - interpretation of our classics is way too alien to Chinese. Reminds me of Tswana kids I met in Botswana that had to come to terms with names like Prince Metternich and Napoleon. I do not mean to say this approach is entirely wrong. I think the CHinese approach is not useful though.

Yes, they will need an intro to American history of the time in which the novel is set. But history turns them off too! I tried to parallel events in Britain with events in China - Charles Dickens in the Qing Dynasty. To my surprise, most if not all students had no inkling that the Qing Dynasty spanned the 19th century! Opium War between Britain and China - they failed to correlate these periods!
In my experience, only normal school students attend English Literature classes. It is amazing how many of them are unmotivated. The majority will not want to become English teachers!

One restriction has to be taken into account: Your students will already have been brainwashed into accepting only what the Party wants them to believe! Thus, the selection of acceptable writers is severely restricted! Charles Dickens is welcome for obvious reasons. He was a "realist", depicting the "true and horrible reality of England's exploited blue-collar masses..."
I do not know how you would deal with rhetorical figures of speech, the intrinsicacies of poems, styles.
Here is another book from my shelf, never used it, but it may give you some ideas of what English/American Literature in China is all about:

TEST PAPER 10:
I. Choose the Corr4ect ANswer From Each of the Following (15%)
1. Which of the following is not true?
A. Slavery was mainly in the SOuth.
B. Racial discrimination existed throughout the USA in
American history.
C. Racial segregation after the Civil War existed only in the South.
D. Racial segregation existed throughout the USA.

2. In the case of Brown versus Board of Education, the Supreme Court
ruled that---------------------
A. separate educational facilities had been illegal.
B. educational facilities had been separate but equal.
C. educational facilities had been equal.
D. separate educational facilities were inherently unequal.

And so on, and so on! I gathered this from a textbook A HANDBOOK TO ESSENTIALS OF BRITISH AND AMERICAN CULTURES, from the Beijing Foreign Languages Studies.

These are the kinds of tests your students are used to - mutliple-choice papers that elicit replies based on memorisation. I also have a tattered and oldish HISTORY AND ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN LITERATURE Volume I, more illustrative with excerpts from novels and a body of notes, but in my opinion way too fuzzy for Chinese learners who always want "facts" and "data".

One of the difficulties I faced with my students was their laziness. No more than 10 out of 60 would go to the "trouble" of reading a passage ahead, of being prepared for the lesson the following week! Well, in the West there are many truants too, of course! I just felt so hopeless as the school administration did not offer me any moral support, far from it! In fact, the principal subscribed to Mao "wisdom", lecturing me that "if students don't like the book the teacher has chosen, they should choose what they like".
They never "had time", always were "busy" or "sick", or the text "was too difficult", or they did not know "the meaning" of certain words...

[Sandgropers]

Sincere apologies to Roger, Minhang Oz, arioch36 and Roberto Azula for not acknowledging your replies to my posting earlier. The day after we posted our query our computer crashed! Only today did we succeed in replacing the hard-drive and modem so we are back in business!!
Each of you deserve a special thanks as your ideas/suggestions/experience/ thoughts were much appreciated. We'll just have to see how it pans out in our new positions in September. We thought as we would be in a Teachers Training College that the syllabus would be more 'literary' content rather than 'historic'............we'll find out once we are there.
PS if we knew how to apply the 'emoticons' we would show our embarassment at the delay in saying 'thanks' to you all.
Cheers

[Roger]

No need to apologise! Glad our answers gave you some food for thought.
By the way, if you pass through Hong Kong, don't pass up the rare chance of visiting a bookstore there! These days, they are offering huge discounts (at least at this very moment, Swindon in Pacific near the STAR Ferry is!) on most books.
Rumours have it that the bookstores are in a serious crisis. Who knows how many will be around come next year!

[tess]

I know these texts. They contain an intro to and excerpts from:

Beowulf, Chaucer, Ballads, Shakespeare, Bacon, Donne,Milton, Bunyan, Defoe, Swift, Fielding, Goldsmith, Sheridan, Blake, Burns, Worsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, Eliot, Brontes, Tennyson, Browning, Hardy, Wilde, Shae, Lawrence, Woolf, Joyce et al.

Not unusable as texts despite the typos and "special" socio-economic perspective. The challenge is to build interesting lessons around them. You will rely heavily on the internet. Students here do love to simply recite after you and if you can bring some passion to it this can be a good starting point for some deeper appreciation.

[tess]

Shae = Shaw

"Bleep" is Charles Dic*ens !

[arioch36]

Tess, how many of your students could read the text, and how much time did you actually have to discuss it in class. And could your students actually read the original english. I love Captain Courageous, but I have a hard time reading it. My students wouldn't be able to.

[Chairman Roberto]

Roger--

I know this reply is a long-time coming. First off, thank you for your invaluble insights into the possible hurdles I will face. I hear you about homework and the whining. Yep, I'm quite familiar with "Oh, it's too hard!" "I don't understand this!" "There's too many words I don't understand"...from the English teachers!!

I don't care. If Chairman Mao can take a hardline, so can I. In an earlier post in the off-topic board, I gave the idea of "annexing" my classroom in the name of the U.S. government. That is, for the next two hours, my classroom will be the property of the United States. I'll put up a flag of China with an arrow pointing out, the U.S. flag with the arrow pointing in. Therefore, my students will have to abide by U.S. law (conveniently interepreted by me). That means participation and attendence will be 30% of the grade. Sleepers and people doing other homework will be thrown out of class. If you don't care, I don't care. Get out my class and quit wasting my time. Go whine to the Dean if you don't like it (an unlikely event!). Papers will be written, another 30%. Guess that leaves the almighty test at only 40% of the grade, so even if you cheat your way through it, you still fail w/o the participation and compositions. So sorry! (And Mao help you if I catch you cheating).

This "Cultural Revolution" will be made clear on the first day, and contracts of Academic Honesty and Grade Explanation will be signed.

So MAYBE the kids will get a slight taste of a literature class in the West. Hope there isn't too much vinegar! Should the losers go behind my back and pass my class through guanxi (or the simple fact my class is irrelevant to their grades), so what. I didn't come here to change China. But hell if I'm gonna teach Western literature with Chinese Characteristics!

I'm going easy on these "English Majors." I should be making 'em read Moby Dick and the Scarlet Letter! These "English Majors" should be count their blessings.

see you next semester when I crash and burn,
Roberto!

[Anne-Marie Gregory]

good man Roberto, and good luck

[tess]

[quote="arioch36"]Tess, how many of your students could read the text, and how much time did you actually have to discuss it in class. And could your students actually read the original english.

I was ***HIGHLY*** selective, particularly with the earlier writers ! For example, they could manage Shakespeare's sonnets but I went with a film for the drama. I left Chaucer out entirely. I agree, reading un-annotated early texts is too great a challenge for even a native speaker/reader.

Discussion was a problem as there's so much content to cover (expectation of the course) and it was a group of 60. I used small group activities of various kinds such as role-play, sequencing poems cut into strips, creating an alternative eding to a story...