2008 Entries and Abstracts
Marc Bizer
French and Italian
Reading Between the Lines/Lyre entre les lignes
The ability to perform literary analysis, to carefully interpret a text with the goal of showing how it works to convey a message to the reader, is one of the fundamental skills that students learn in the College of Liberal Arts, indeed in the university as a whole. The task becomes more meaningful, yet more challenging, when students must analyze short, dense literary texts, such as imaginative poetry, written in a foreign language. Helping students practice this technique on their own is a task which I have been devoted to for almost ten years. Based on feedback given to a previous LAITS project, “The Renaissance Muse: an on-hands approach to interpreting Renaissance verse” (http://www.laits.utexas.edu/bizer), "Reading Between the Lines" was designed with the following goals in mind: 1) increase students’ concentration, comprehension, and retention by integrating explanatory and illustrative elements with the textual presentation itself, so that the student’s gaze never leaves the literary work, 2) ensure that students can work non-linearly, focusing on whichever part they choose, 3) give students the material that they need for practicing poetic explication at home and in class, and (last but not least) 4) demonstrate how relevant these texts are for understanding France today by integrating wherever possible modern recorded versions of the poems.
The site is designed to be used as an interactive accompaniment to our in-class work in "Introduction to French Literature I" (FR326K), where it is used to help students prepare for one of the course's major writing assignments: the "explication de texte" (line-by-line close interpretation of a single poem). It offers a low-stakes, entertaining way to practice the explication before the formal assignment. It is integrated into syllabus as follows: over 1.5 weeks, I assign one or two poems from the site per class (depending on the particular poem), which students prepare at home with the help of the site. Then they work on the explication in class, first in small groups, then as a class (each group usually presents a stanza). Finally, they complete on their own the written explication of a poem (chosen from a collection not appearing on the web site) for the following class. Thus students initially use the site to work independently, at their own pace, and then in the community of their peers, with instructor oversight and feedback, before confronting the final exercise with experience and greater confidence.
French 326K is a very intensive course, covering 6 centuries of literature in 14 weeks, and "Reading Between the Lines" is designed to make it possible for students to achieve a much higher level of proficiency in understanding "old" poetry and practicing the art of the explication de texte given tight course constraints. Thanks to the site, students read more poetry in greater depth in the same amount of time. In a sense, it provides each student with his or her own poetic tutor, thus extending the guidance and influence I can bring to the course.