While on Practicum, I happened to glance at the list of “Most Challenged / Banned Books” list up on one of the bulletin boards and was surprised to see the one in my hand, The Kite Runner, on the list.  I enjoyed using the book as my silent reading time text so much more knowing that it was probably going to be loaded with controversial subject matter.  What a brilliant way of getting kids to read good literature; put it up on a board as part of a list of books that parents don’t want their kids to read!

More seriously though, I decided to look more into the reasons for the challenge of this particular text.  What I found was that the text had been widely challenged, mainly in the US back in 2008, due to one particular scene where one young boy is raped; not due to the violence in the text, where a man is beat until his aggressor has his eye gouged out by a sling shot, and not due to a vivid and violent stoning scene, but due to the child-on-child rape scene.  The text was “released” as part of the University of Victoria’s Freedom To Read Week, celebrated across Canada, just this past Feb 2010.

The Kite Runner has quickly become one of my favourite books; the writing is vivid, beautiful… the voice is strong… it tackles issues of integrity, honesty, loyalty, understanding, forgiveness and compassion.  I realize that the text has more moments that are moving, thoughtful and difficult than not, that there are challenging moments and that teaching this text invites a tremendous amount of processing and discussion time… but I can’t think of another text I’ve read that tackles all of these literary elements and relevant sociological and political issues so meaningfully.  I think it would be important to balance out the text with additional information to ensure that students don’t walk away from the text assuming any sweeping generalizations about Afghanistan, Afghanis or Muslims in general, but to that end there are several resources online, such as one put out by Amnesty International (http://www.amnestyusa.org/education/pdf/kiterunnerhigh.pdf), which focuses more on the film adaptation of the text, but is complete with lesson plans and a foreword by Khaled Hosseini, and tackles discussion topics around the human rights issues and political situation in Afghanistan during the period the novel (and film) are set in.

This is one of several online resources I found with some additional material that you might find helpful in terms of accessing additional background information and teaching resources/ideas – enjoy.

In rereading the assembled information below I am aware that it is essentially a compilation of ‘background information’ on the novel.  I have purposely left out my analysis and interpretation, for the most part, because my sense of what the duties of the backgrounder entail is to provide information that can then be interpreted by the literature circle as a whole.  I don’t want to start doing the thinking and connecting for my group members.  I want to search out background information that I think will generate discussion, period.  I am aware that this reads like a bad lonely planet entry and I’m not thrilled with that.  I do think that this information will be of value in thinking critically about the novel and that is my only criteria.

Miriam Toews was born in Steinbach Manitoba and spent her youth there.  Her novel A Complicated Kindness is set in a fictional town called East Village. This Russian Mennonite town is generally thought to be a fictionalized version of Steinbach.  This begs the question, what is Steinbach Manitoba like?  We need this information before we can do any kind of meaningful comparison.

Steinbach, Manitoba.

Steinbach is a small city that has a current population of approximately 13,000. If we assume the novel is set in the late 70’s to early eighties (based on the Lou Reed references), then the population of Steinbach at that time would have been much smaller; figures for 1981 list the population at 6,676.

The town traces its origin to the settlement of Mennonite settlers in 1874.  These Mennonites were of two types, Kleine Germeinde, and Bergthal. The main difference between the two groups seems to be the reformist and more pious and discipline oriented nature of the Kleine Germeinde who were reacting to some general backsliding among the Mennonites in general.  In this way Miriam Toews story in A complicated kindness seems to be one that has been going on for a very long time, and similar experiences were likely had by youth in previous generations in Manitoba, and even before in Russia.

Steinbach does not seem to have been as Strictly 100% Mennonite as it appears in the novel.  Census figures seem to indicate in the 70’s there would have been about 80% of the population that were German speaking.  As of 2001 the rate of religious participation among the cities residents stood at over 90%.

(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miriam_Toews and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steinbach,_Manitoba)

For a more definitive answer to the question of how much of Steinbach is in the novel it is always prudent to use the author’s own words (from the Faber reader’s guide to the novel:

In writing A Complicated Kindness Miriam Toews has said that she wanted to ‘show how the fundamentalist interpretation of religion or Christianity was destructive in the Nickel family.’ Given her own back- ground of growing up in the small conservative Mennonite community of Steinbach, Manitoba it was inevitable that she would be asked to what degree her confused yet sharply intelligent narrator’s experience reflected her own. Replying that although the events in East Village were entirely fictitious she has explained ‘I was very conscious of making sure that my character’s relationships with the community were authentic. Mine were something else entirely. Obviously. But the emphasis in the town on punishment and shame, and joylessness, that degree of severity and intolerance – all those aspects I certainly experienced.’

The daughter of a liberal family, Toews still describes herself as a Mennonite (although she also declares herself an agnostic) and has retained a great affection for the positive aspects of the Mennonite way of life, such as the idea of the extended family, an affection echoed in Nomi’s feelings for East Village. She remembers ‘a very nur- turing, safe environment, everybody knew who I was, who my parents were, who my grandparents were, what part of Russia we were from originally. That was a really comforting feeling. Non-Mennonites, when they see that aspect of it, think it’s a beautiful thing, and it is, but there’s so much going on besides.’ Toews left Steinbach the day after her graduation and says that she could not go back to live there explaining that people who leave ‘have very complicated relationships with the places we grew up. We want to love them, and we do love them, but there’s so much of it that’s so harsh, so unforgiving.’

Source: http://www.faber.co.uk/site-media/reading-guides/complicated-kindness_reading-guide.pdf

Miriam Toews novels often contain absent mothers.  This is the case in both Summer of my Amazing Luck and A Complicated Kindness.  It raises questions for readers of here work about the nature of her relationship with her own mother; Toews addresses these issues in an interview she gave to Herizons magazine:

“The relationship I have with my mother is so strong and loving and fun, that maybe I had to, in order to have a character who was working through something difficult, have her gone – dead, or missing, or whatever, just absent – in order to create that conflict for my character. And, to get all psychoanalytical about it, I’ve been trying to understand my father for a long time now, and I think that in my own life, growing up, etcetera, my mother was sort of this buffer between him and me, in that she kind of protected me from his sadness and tried to make life fun and upbeat all the time. So maybe, in order for my character to understand her father better, and assuming that my characters are in some ways me, that particular buffer has to be removed.” (Source: http://www.randomhouse.ca/author/results.pperl?authorid=55356&view=full_sptlght )

I may be misunderstanding the spirit of the blog posts for our lit circle novels, but I’m using it as a place to document the discussion points I’ll be bringing up for our novel. If (when?) we teach these books down the road, we’ll have a place to refer back to and see what others had to say before we tackle teaching these texts on our own.

I signed up for the roles of discussion director and stylistic foregrounder.

Discussion Director: ask questions about the story to help the group have dynamic discussions.

How do you feel about the role the grandmother played in the story? The grandfather?

Do you feel the mother’s depiction in the novel was realistic? Why or why not?

The book capitalizes on the fact that Oscar’s relationship with his father was so dynamic and multifaceted. How do you feel the book would have changed if it had been his mother that had died instead? Do you think the view we receive of his relationship with his father is accurate?

What could Thomas Senior’s silence be a symptom of? In what ways do we feel that the silence was metaphorical?

What connections did you make with this story on a personal level? Specifically, did the book make you remember any games you created or stories you told yourself as a child? Alternatively, did Oscar’s quest to find the owner of the key make you think of any beliefs or determinations that you held as a child that you’ve since let go of?

Stylistic Foregrounder: locate passages that are stylistically elevated, or complex. In the context of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, I’ve also extended this role to facilitate discussion of some of the formatting choices made in the novel.

Passage titled “Why I’m not where you are 4/12/78”, starting on page 208.
Are there any thematic connections to the passages that have been circled in red pen? Besides the highlighting of errors in the text (who do you think is doing this highlighting?), do we feel that the phrases being drawn out illuminate the writer or the highlighter? Or both?

Passage titled “My feelings” starting on page 224
What effect is caused by the typographical choices made on this page? Does this serve to further or complicate our understanding of the text?

The repeated question: “Do you know what time it is?” in “Why I’m not where you are 5/21/63” starting on page 108
Why do we feel that this question is often offset from other text, isolated in the page, occasionally with at least a page between the question and other text in the narrative? Does this line up with our understanding of Thomas Senior’s silence or complicate it?

The passage from 292 to 302, in which the quest is resolved and Oscar speaks the truth about his father directly.
This passage does not have stylistic or typographical flourishes, which makes it stands out in the end of the book, as the book becomes very typographically diverse as it nears the end. Why do you feel the author made this choice? How does it make the content more or less effective?

After watching Ken Robinson speak on creativity, and reaching the unexpected ending of Life of Pi, I couldn’t help but draw a parallel between the arguments both of these very different pieces were making. I believe that both, rather explicitly, make an argument for the importance of creativity in our society. Ken Robinson discusses the ways in which creativity can benefit our children, and in the long run, society at large. The creative process is an essential part of children discovering who they are as people, as they grow and become the members of society they are destined to be. How can we expect students to fully live this discovery process if we cut it short, most clearly by devaluing creative activities, such as dance, art and drama? Robinson argues that we are on a path to self-destruction if we do not revolutionize the educational system and drastically reevaluate our priorities. To him, it is nothing less than a matter or survival.

In Pi, Martel makes an argument for creativity as a survival strategy as well, as an escape from a harsh reality. He points out that it makes no difference to Mr. Okamoto which of the versions of reality he accepts. It does not matter to him whether Pi lives in his created world or the terrifying reality, but to Pi it may mean the difference between life and death. The same could be said for the children we encounter in schools; in the long run it makes no difference in our lives as educators what path our students chose to follow, but for them it is of the utmost importance. For many children, creative outlets such as art, writing, and drama allow them an escape from their everyday lives, if escape is what they need. Having a creative outlet is arguably one of the best coping strategies a child in a stressful situation can employ. As educators, we have a responsibility to support our students in their creativity as much as we can. It doesn’t matter if what students create approximates reality; the process of creating, of using ones talents and imagination, is extremely valuable, or as Robinson argues, essential to survival.

I hope everyone’s practicum is going well! I don’t know whether anyone is checking the blog during practicum, but I thought I would add a bit to my previous post based on an experience I had recently. One of my sponsor teachers took me to the book room today and, lo and behold, Life of Pi was there. I explained to him that we had covered Pi in this class and he was more than willing to share some of his experiences teaching the novel.

He said that his main way of tackling the text was characterization. He had his students do a character sketch for each of the animals on the boat with Pi before they had reached the last part of the book. The students were divided into groups and each group was given either the zebra, Orange Juice, the hyena, and Richard Parker. They had to identify the attitudes and emotions that the animals displayed (fear, dominance, hunger, etc), a physical description of the animals, and describe in depth the area of the life boat that each animal occupied. The students completed the book after this activity and he said that the students were blown away by the end of the book. After they had reached the conclusion, he had them repeat the characterization activity for the cook, the sailor, and Pi’s mother. They were astounded how well the attributes of the animals predicted/coincided with the attributes of the people. As an assessment for this part of the unit, he had the students write an essay on the absence of the tiger as a person on the boat in the “real” story. He said that most of the students thought that Richard Parker was a part of Pi, so he felt that this activity was very successful.

To follow up the characterization activity (especially the part where the students described each animals territory on the boat), each student individually created a travel brochure for an outsider to get to know their way around the life boat. The students had to draw their conceptions of the boat and each animals area. He showed me some of the brochures that he kept and they were amazing.

Just thought I would post this while the conversation was still fresh in my mind. I hope everyone is having a great practicum!

I really enjoyed Elyse’s presentation on “Something Rotten.” I think she brought up some good points on how difficult it can be to teach Shakespeare to high school students. “Something Rotten” is definately something that they would enjoy and be able to interpret Shakespeare at so many levels. I was thinking another way to perhaps make the teaching of Shakespeare a little more appealing to high school students and give them a different perspective culturally, would be to show them Bollywood adaptations of Shakespeare’s works. I think showing students different interpretations of Shakespeare will only spark their interest in his works because it’d give them an opportunity to some how relate to the work through aspects of pop-culture. Some great Bollywood adaptations that I recommend for everyone to check out would be: Macbeth’-inspired ‘Maqbool’, Othello inspired ‘Omkara’ and Romeo and Juliet inspired ‘Qayamat Se Qayamat Tak.’

I’ve had to mull over Pi for quite a while as I’ve found myself going back and forth between whether I would teach the book, or wouldn’t teach the book. I think it’s a great novel to recommend if a student asks for an idea, but teaching it to a whole class? I’ve had quite the internal debate about it.

My hesitation stems from the amount of religious content. It’s well written and informative content, but it brings up so many issues that I’m not sure I would be able to answer in class. Specifically, I have a fear of being asked why Martel chose these particular religions. I don’t feel that I know enough about any of the religions to appropriately answer that question.

As a new teacher, I’m also hesitant to teach what could be viewed as a controversial text due to its religious content. At this point in my fledgling career, I would not want to jeopardize a chance at continued employment by teaching a text that could get a parent up in arms. Call it residual fear from childhood, but angering parents isn’t on my to-do list as a new teacher. That being said, my opinion changed the more that I thought about it. Would I teach this book while on a short term contract, trying to network and impress my way into a continuing contract? No, I wouldn’t. However, I think I would teach it as an established teacher.

I came to this decision while pondering the purpose of religion in the text and how it would have changed the novel had it not been included. Before concentrating my thought on it, the religious content seemed superfluous. I wondered if Martel could have chosen only one religion for Pi, thereby making the pious sections more concentrated and less weighty.

What changed my mind was the equal consideration that Pi gives to atheism. Martel did not dwell on this belief system as much as he did the others, but it is made clear that the only belief system that Pi does not believe in is that of the agnostics, since they have no belief at all. The conversation regarding passports to Heaven that Pi has with his mother speaks to this. Pi’s concern is knowing where he’s going – not the path he takes to get there. All the religions he practices offer a ticket to heaven, so why must he choose one if they all lead to the same place? In the same way, Pi believes that atheists will find a similar peace at death, due to their beliefs that they know what happens after death; believing in nothing is still believing in something.

Pi’s distaste for agnosticism is that it’s a belief in not having a belief, and it’s this notion that I believe makes the excessive pages on religion more palatable and meaningful as a teachable text. To me, the underlying theme of Pi is the importance of believing in something – whatever it may be. Pi doesn’t choose just one religion when he’s told that he must. Instead, he questions the necessity and reasoning behind the idea, forming his own beliefs as a result. With a group of teenagers who are being bombarded with conflicting messages from home, school, and the media, I think that development of this theme would be in line with the critical thinking learning objective required by the IRP.

The contemporary theorist Akira Mizuna Lippitt gave another theory on the relation of man and beast, a theory more informed by the techno-culture of contemporary society. In his book “The Electric Animal: Toward a Rhetoric of Wildlife,” Lippitt presents an extraordinary idea: animals do not have a language, so they cannot die. Since the animal is unable to understand language, then the animal cannot conceptualize its own death. Lippitt applies this idea to our world, in considering the increased disappearance of the wild animal as a result of human activity; the fleeting animal figure has been transferred to the film image that informs our experience of the wild beast. According to Lippitt, the film image produces an uncanny reproduction of the living in its animation. Lippitt also explains that the image always retains a material connection to the actual creature that was once alive. He goes on to talk about the anxiety felt by a person watching the animal image on-screen and feeling the presence of the moving creature in its filmic form. Arguably then, the wild animal and the technologically enhanced modern civilized human being are still bound together in a digital coexistence. There is an incredibly profound understanding to the significance of the film medium, the representation of the animal figure, our language and what cannot be put into words when we watch an animal image onscreen. Lippitt provides an enlightening scrutiny on the interworking of these ideas. Lippitt’s closely examines the eye of the camera gazing into the eye of the predator and renders the psychological experience of the film viewer in that moment, who senses the impulsive-deathly gaze of the wild animal staring back.  This same experience gets reported on by Pi, in his encounter with wild animals on the boat and the exchange of instinctual gazes.  A cross comparison between the human interpretation of wild life in film and Pi’s own study of the animal’s in their predator-prey interaction, can be performed in a class lesson.

So this brings me to “Life of Pi” in the classroom. The religious pondering in this novel and the close examination of animal-human relations that are creatively combined in this fiction novel touches on the theories of Lippitt.  In a class of adolescents, who have been immersed in a techno-culture world since they can remember, many students will have an experience of wilderness via the electronic image. Therefore they are conditioned to understand the concept of the wild animal in the context of the technology age. I propose that Lippit’s theories get applied to the analysis of Life of Pi during classroom lessons in high schools. Since the high school students have grown-up in a more technologically informed world, they will be able to interpret the complex theories of film theorists such as Lippitt and be able to expand on these concepts, because of their already advanced understanding of the media world. This will give a new potential to the interpretation of Life of Pi through the application of Lippitt’s theories and other film/media theorist by high school students.    

Nature in Literacy and Cultural Studies: Transatlantic Conversations on Ecocriticism. http://books.google.ca/books?id=Bx6raCjQL88C&pg=PA29&dq=Lippitt+Electric+Animal&hl=en&ei=vK6qTLi2Hom8sQOeqajgAw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CDEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Lippitt%20Electric%20Animal&f=false

http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/L/lippit_electric.html

http://animalvoices.ca/2008/02/12/electric-animal-interview-with-dr-akira-lippit/ (SEE LINK TO LIPPITT INTERVIEW)

In my final year of University, I took an English course on animal signs in literature and media. At the time I thought this was the most bizarre course I had ever come across. I was surprised to find that contemporary literary theory and cinematic theory had for a long time delved into a meticulous philosophical examination of the significance of the animal in human thought. Indeed, the animal has been partly neglected by Western philosophy and religion. Such forms of thought have placed human beings in the centre of existence. Martin Heidegger, an existentialist philosopher throughout the twentieth century, believed that human beings exist in isolation, in a realm of language, separated by an abyss of disconnect from all living things.
Since we access Pi’s experience through language, his experience of the approach of death becomes very different than the animals’ experience of death on the life boat. According to Heidegger, animals cannot die, they can only perish and so we have denied animals the experience of death, not only in Western philosophy and religion, but simply due to the fact that they are unable to conceptualize death from a lack of intellect and higher language capability. It seems fitting that in a novel that addresses religious questions, particularly the Christian religion which denies the animal a significance, Pi’s character then illustrates how the human experience neglects to give the same experience to animals in the moment of death.
Perhaps I am wrong about this though. Could the bizarre circumstances of a young religious boy trapped on a life boat with predatory animals, finally allow for the proper acknowledgement of the animals experience of death, rather than a simple perishing from predation or starvation. Arguably, Orange Juices’s death comes close to the human experience, especially since the monkey resembles the human so closely, as a genetic relative. (Juice’s death gets compared to Jesus’s crucifixion!) The Hyenas last moment before being killed by the Tiger gets captured in Pi’s narrative and Pi describes the look of fear on the face of the Hyena. We of course do not get inside the experience of the Hyena though, because we are outside the animal experience of reality that does not exist in our realm of language. Subsequently, Pi’s fear of death is only ever what concerns the reader. This applies again to what Heidegger believed and that was that humans carry around the burden of an awareness of mortality throughout life and therefore this is a part of the human experience of death, not able to be experienced by animals, since animals cannot contemplate their death. Pi’s own contemplation of death gets experienced by the reader in detail, with his constant description of fear and encroaching danger. Are the other animals actually aware of their immortality in their final moments? Is this conveyed in the narrative? In other words, is there a possible animal experience of a death made accessible, in some way, through Pi’s narrative?

I just wanted to begin by saying that I’ve really enjoyed reading everyone’s responses to and approaches into Life of Pi.

This is my second time reading this particular text and I’m stuck, again, by the same reaction as I was the first time around.  Like all of you my undergrad was in English Lit, and as you all know, there wasn’t a great deal of time for personal reading in the midst of an English Lit degree, but when I did find the time I would myself drawn towards texts that fit into the genre known as “magic realism.”  So I read quite a bit of Tom Robbins where characters such as a tin can and a spoon head off together on an adventure with each other and are completely animate beings.  When I read Life of Pi I am equally struck by the magical realism aspects of the text.

The exercise we did last class, where we drew our visualization of a particular image from the text… I really personally struggled with that because as soon as I find myself drawn into a world where tigers live on boats with boys and trees have fruit with teeth, I suspend all “rational” thought and allow myself to blur the lines between what is possible and what is not.  I don’t know if many of you do the same (suspend analysis or preconceived notions of what is real or possible) or have had a similar experience?

Depending on the level at which I was teaching this text, I think I would like to move in that direction… to discuss magic realism and whether the text could be considered within that genre or framework and also to argue why it is not.  Martel does manage to shake some of the magic realism label during the novel’s conclusion (I won’t give it away for those who haven’t finished the text yet!) so it could be an interesting argument to get the class involved in.  Some techniques might be to split the room in two and have each side argue one or the other point.  This would manage to expose the students to the text, teach them about the genre of magic realism (hopefully spurning them on to pick up more texts like that for their own pleasure reading by simply learning that more like those exist, if they enjoyed it), as well as formulate their understanding of presenting a thesis or argument and being able to support it, or see the flip side and argue for that as well.