Concetta Bommarito
Dr Lisa Logan
Studies in Literary, Cultural, and Textual Theory
28 November 2011
Surprising Narratives, Stable Boundaries: The Panther Narrative and US Adversarial Self-Identity
From the British to Indians, Russians and now terrorists, American identity has been continually tied to adversity to outside threats. Framing US identity in terms of its enemies is often linked back to the Revolutionary War; often captivity narratives depicted Indians as dark demonic other, reinforcing the binary divide between ‘savage’ and civilized, captive and captor (Colley 205, Burnham 2). This divide, Gary L. Ebersole argues, was used to form a sense of self for the new republic, creating a ‘false consciousness’ that trapped redeemed captives ‘within the discursive boundaries’ of the Puritan clergy, among others, creating propaganda that promoted this adversarial divide between red and white (61-2).
In these early narratives, Indians became the monstrous fantastic lurking just outside the borders of civilization and women the workhorse upon whose backs the nation could conquer and assimilate both natives and their lands. Native and women’s bodies became encoded in propaganda for the new republic, the real pain and hardship of the American frontier and Indian wars made spectacle and repurposed for the new nation’s identity (Ebersole 145-6). In the hegemonic view of Indian-white relations that was created, women were often the vulnerable point at which the Indian could attack not just the country itself but the United States’ core identity; that women could cross cultural boundaries and interact freely with both whites and natives was a sign that national markers of identity – “languages, rituals, and institutions” – were discursive in nature and not tied to biology or white superiority (Castiglia 7), a fact that American settlers had to either answer to or suppress in order to establish an identity separate from Britain and native civilizations. Abraham Panther’s tale of not just a woman but a ‘lady’ being able to outsmart, conquer and cultivate the untamed frontier plays into this need to create a myth of savagery conquered by white civilization.
Unfortunately, scholars still insist on reframing captivity narratives such as the Panther Narrative in analysis comfortable to Western tropes rather than accurate to the narrative’s cultural/historical context. Richard Slotkin links the giant that the unnamed lady slays to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight without any evidence that the unknown author would be familiar with Arthurian legends and only a vague connection to the Green Knight and the giant as ‘vegetation god”, an assertion that Kathryn Zabelle Derounian-Stodola echoes[1] in Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives (257, 84). While Benjamin Franklin may have been one of the first to recognize Indian-white relations as a “contest of civilizations” (Heard 9), the mythos of Indian as savage in need of conquest and subjugation influenced and continues to inform North American Indian-white politics, often resulting in legislation that further subjugates native populations under Western-centric laws such as the patriarchal inheritance laws found in the Canadian Indian Act (Simpson 252). This xenophobia-driven rhetoric has also influenced foreign relations as the myth of the cowboy slaying Indians has been the mold from which we have sculpted our views on westward expansion, slavery, World War II and even the war on terror.
It is imperative then that captivity narratives not only be looked at for their content but their function in building and continuing to maintain America’s adversarial self-identity as we continue our relations not only with other countries but with the subjugated land and people in our own borders. In this presentation, I will use the “Panther Captivity” to illustrate narrative tropes found in Revolution-Era captivity narratives that helped to foster the fledgling nation’s sense of self as civilization fighting against first the tyranny of an irrational Britain and then an uncivilized frontier all in the name of American (often Christian) ideology.
With immigrants coming in by the “thousands between 1763 and 1775” mounting pressures to expand caused white settlers to become increasingly violent toward native populations and governments increasingly turned a blind eye to open hostilities against Indians (Sosin 20, 83-7). Indians as well as immigrants and slaves were repeatedly cast as savages in popular narratives justifying their poor living conditions and abuses in white society (20 – 21). A popular collection of such stories was titled Outrages Committed by the Indians in Their Wars with the White People, as if all aggressions were ‘theirs’ to commit and not the mutual acts of both parties. The narratives in this collection often depicted a female captive waiting for white men to save her, both physically and spiritually, from her native captors, a narrative used to “shape and maintain” negative attitudes towards Indians in the turbulent era prior to and during the Revolution (Toulouse 73).
In an account published in the collection, Colonel James Smith describes his Indian captors as “slovenly people” who “seldom wash their shirts”, who are “very much addicted to drinking”, and whose religions are “vague, whimsical, romantic, and many of them scarce worth relating” (233, 235). John M’Cullough corroborates these observations in his captivity narrative in the same collection, describing the deity Mah-tan’-tooh as ‘the Devil’ (274, 287). M’Cullough also links his belief in the inferiority of Indians to their treatment of their female captives. He details what he calls “Indian file” where captives would be made to run after a leading warrior. The warrior would be holding a pole with scalps affixed to it, scalps taken from the prisoners’ conquered brethren. Though the captives would be of both sexes, M’Cullough highlights that women in particular would be forced to run in these processions before being sold and would be beaten if they could not keep up (290-1).
In using women as tools for narrative and cultural myth-making, actual women captives were silenced in favor of their more dramatic narrative incarnations. Mercy Short of the Cotton Mather possession narrative A Brand Pluck’d out of the Burning, for example, comes off as not only possessed by the narrative’s Indian ‘devil’ but as possessed by white and Indian men, never quite having control over her own self but formed through her role in the story and its underlying propaganda (Castiglia 41-3). Mather was actively using the trope of women possessed, and using Short in particular, to reframe cultural and physical warfare as spiritual warfare, repainting the cultural blending that naturally happens with neighboring civilizations as a spiritual possession and enforcing a religious imperative to segregate the two cultures (Toulouse 95-99). This tied women’s vulnerability to the savagery of the mythic and hegemonic savage Indian myth; when the savages would eventually attack white civilization, it would be though brute force or spiritual warfare; it was the white woman who would be the first to be attacked and conquered.
As women’s bodies became tied to land, culture, and the vulnerability of the colonies to invasions, men’s duty became tied to the preservation of the land and by association women’s honor; by the Antebellum Era, “manliness” in the United States was connected to “protection and honor”, linking masculinity to violence and expansionism. This link manifests itself in differing ways depending on region and time, but throughout American history, “masculinity” meant domination.
As western expansion shifted from necessity to ‘destiny’, Indian became tied to the land they lived on as both nature and natives were conquered (Slotkin 52-5). Even the name “Indian” was a label given by Europeans – not derived from Indian language – linking the natives with Western (mis)perceptions of the land rather than the actual facts of the environment. Phobias about the natural environment and its inhabitants began to shift in the post-war era when segregation and (re)enforced belief of superiority would often break down as white settlers interacted more and more with their Indian neighbors. As is evident in Rowland captivity narrative, women often interacted with their Indian neighbors to the point where both were well versed in each other’s languages. By 1782, J. Hector St. John De Crevecoeur marveled at how those taken young by Indians would not want to return to their biological parents, praising the social bonds among tribesmen that simply could not be broken by weaker white bonds in his Letters from an American Farmer (Ebersole 190-2).
Moments of honest examination of native/white relations like Crevecoeur’s were met with a backlash against inter-race relations even in the span of one author’s writing. When whites began adopting native habits, Crevecoeur himself created characters in his fiction warning of the dangers of living close to the forest and that doing so would incite wild behavior in whites. This backlash extended to non-fiction accounts as well; Anglican minister Charles Woodmason called the settlers of Flat Creek "rude in their Manners as the Common Savages, and hardly a degree removed from them." (Kolodny 336-7). In this context it is no ‘surprise’ that in Panther’s “A Surprising Narrative”, the group of Indians that the unnamed lady of the narrative first escapes from do not notice her escape as the dance around her husband who was being burned alive:
They barbarously murdered my lover, cutting and mangling him in the most inhuman manner after tying him to a stake they kindled a fire round him, and while he burnt they run round singing and dancing, rejoicing in their brutal cruelty. (88)
This scene is a summary of the rhetoric surrounding the racist views of native savagery; the ritualistic dancing is reminiscent of demons roasting impure souls in hell, the emphasis on the savagery of the act meant more to define the natives than to define their actions. Despite her close proximity to these savage natives and being surrounded by untamed nature, she maintains her white civility, remains relatively calm and escapes becoming possessed by her captors as they “danced… in their brutal cruelty”. It is important to note that she does not do so by her own cunning, but because of an error on the part of her captors; the Indian appointed to guard her could not help but get up and join the others in dance. It is the savagery of the Indians then, not the ability of the unnamed lady that allows for her to escape. She outsmarts them by getting away, but only because their savagery blinded them to her escape.
The image of demonic figures dancing around the fire is not the first time that Indians have been used as tools to reinforce Puritan-based xenophobia. Before the Revolution, Puritan leaders had been combining the history of the Indian Wars with Christian myths of “redemptive blood sacrifice”, equating the ‘sacrifices’ of whites against the natives to the martyrdom of Jesus Christ (Slotkin 62-3). Mather’s later sermons linked attacks by natives to America’s wayward Christian values (Ebersole 62-4) an eerie parallel to modern Christian extremist groups’ view that God let the terrorist attacks of 9/11 happen because America has been lenient towards, as Jerry Falwell put it, “pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People For the American Way -- all of them who have tried to secularize America” (Harris).
Falwell’s bigotry is the end result of the link to violence and cultural/religious identity that began before the Revolution and continued as violence against the natives became linked to masculinity. While violence was linked to masculinity, non-whites and non-Christians were linked to inferiority. This mistrust of their surroundings and neighbors was not isolated to the alien landscape or the natives; Mather regularly preached against other religious sects, Quakers in particular (18-20, 46-7). Transferring racism and the need to dominate from nature to native to religious sects began a pattern of American masculine identity throughout US history being tied to violence and domination. In southern states domination as masculinity is believed to have influenced the post-Revolution “southern honor code” of honor-based duels and helped institutionalize slavery (Greenberg 139, 40-2). This link between masculinity and violence continued to influence white relations with Indians and African populations well over a century later; in 1860, the soldiers that made up the US presence in Latin America could prove their Anglo-Saxton identity, masculine character and honor through violent acts against natives and freed slaves; these acts were sanctioned by the military presence of William Walker under the banner of what he termed the ‘regeneration of … the whole of Central America” (151). In the 1890’s Theodore Roosevelt justified imperialism by comparing Filipinos to the Apaches, and during the Second World War Samuel Eliot Morison justified his use of racial slurs in recruitment posters – one in particular read “Kill Japs, Kill More Japs!” – by stating, “we were fighting no civilized knightly war… we were back to primitive days of fighting Indians on the American frontier” (Slotkin 60-1).
Female representations in captivity narratives typically exemplified some sort of survival or overcoming of their captors, the occasions where captors would join the tribes that captured them being treated as tragedies. It is from this symbolism that female warriors such as Experience Bozarth and Frances Scott became prevalent in fiction (Van Every 65-6, Namias 23, 29-36). These women were symbols of American ideology fighting against invading natives and nature itself in order to carve out a new America from its enemies, often through violence. Again, it is no ‘surprise’ then that the unnamed lady in Panther’s narrative is able to defeat the giant native that traps her in his cave and threatens her virginity. This is more than a threat to her body; in the symbolism of the narrative the native is an embodiment of the perceived savagery of nature threatening the purity of American idealism encoded in women’s bodies. It is important to note that once again it is not the ability of the woman that saves her but the ignorance of the native; the giant is killed in his sleep after poorly restraining the unnamed lady. Of equal importance is the lady’s method of breaking her bonds. She is bound by bark which she proceeds to chew through, literally destroying a natural artifact in the name of self-preservation. In the symbolism of the narrative, she is America ‘herself’ overcoming and conquering ‘her’ inferior would-be conquerors, a rhetoric that eventually leads to Falwell’s rant.
Women became the embodiment of Christian values of the new republic (Slotkin 102-3) and so the woman in the Panther Captivity must win out over her captor. The unnamed lady is not slaying a literal Indian in his cave but a symbol of what the Indian had become through cultural myth-making: a demonic symbol of the land itself who must be conquered through white civilization embodied in the female form. She must defeat him the way American must defeat the British to exist and must defeat the Indians to survive. She chews through her bindings and slays the giant as he sleeps, again besting her enemies not by skill, for that would be a masculine triumph, but through the natives’ own foolishness.
That it is the unnamed ‘lady’ committing the murder and not a male rescuer is indicative more of the increased role and symbolism of the Republican Mother after the Revolution than any internal contradiction or early feminist underpinning. Republican Motherhood became a latent potential feminist tool for manipulating Republican ideals into potential expressions of female virtue and power (Burnham 86-7). Indians in these narratives were depicted as corruptors; the giant native as rapist in The Panther Captivity is not the first Indian as rapist. The trope goes back to pre-Revolutionary anti-British propaganda; Bernard Bailyn described the colonies and the freedom that they represent as a “virgin that everyone seeks to deflower” (Bernham 71) and even now American ideals such as ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom’ are often anthropomorphizes in female form: Lady Liberty, Justice, etc. Panther’s unnamed lady maintains her white civility even under harsh conditions and remains a culturally white woman despite being surrounded by savage natives and cruel nature for nine years (Kolodny 337).
When placed in its historical context, the most surprising thing about the ‘Surprising Narrative’ is that the woman tells the story in her own voice. The earliest narratives are recorded and told by men; women, even narratives in the first person were told through male authorities. That Abraham Panther is a pseudonym and the lady goes unnamed lends credibility to the idea that the author might have in fact been a woman (Derounian-Stodola 85). If the author were a woman, however, it would only be evidence that women of the period had internalized the rhetoric of the dominant discourse. The men who find her come to her in the cave of her would-be rapist, a space that she has domesticated and lived in for the nine years that she has been missing (89-90). She shows the hunters around her dwelling much in the same way any civilized white woman would be expected to in the late 1700s. It is through her domesticity - not her hunting prowess or physical capability - that she has been able to survive in untamed nature; thus her agency in the narrative is tied to her domesticity, reinforcing her confinement in the rhetoric of the Republican Mother despite the fact that she is childless. This rhetoric of domesticity would later have to be fought and abandoned by early feminists in order to validate women’s place in the workforce outside the home (Ladd-Taylor 104-6).
This paper has been a survey of literature and a recognition of an ongoing pattern of American masculinity as historically tied to the rhetoric of domination and xenophobia. Others such as Susan Faludi have begun to link this pattern to current attitudes and foreign policies, but a more comprehensive tracing of this pattern needs to be done. This pattern should be investigated further since, as I have demonstrated, the pieces change but the pattern still remains. Early American racism and genocide still haunt American politics and a more comprehensive understanding of this framing narrative needs to be explored in order for the United States to hopefully move past the rhetoric of hate, bigotry and violence that has so plagued its self-identity.
[1] Dr Logan, in your notes on my proposal you state in the margins, “I don’t believe Stodola ever makes this claim.” On page 84 of Women’s Indian Captivity Narratives, she states “(The giant) is a mythic figure tied both to Native American lore about the ritual killing of a fertility god and also to the Green Giant in the fourteenth-century classic, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” She does not appear to credit this to anyone, leading me to believe that this is her claim. However, she says that the figure is ‘tied’ to the Arthurian Legend; who is tying the legend to the Panther Captivity is unclear, which is why I used the word ‘echoes’ rather than a more definitive verb like ‘states’ or ‘concurs’.
Annotated Bibliography: Works Left Unused
Goodman, Nan. “’Money Answers All Things’: Rethinking Economic and Cultural Exchange in
the Captivity Narrative of Mary Rowlandson.” American Literary History 22.1 (2009): 1-25.
Was going to be used as a corollary to Pratt, but scrapped because it made the paper lose focus.
Hertzberg, Hazel W. The Search for an American Indian Identity: Modern Pan-Indian
Movements. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1971. Print.
Originally going to be used to show the lingering effects of myth-making around Native Americans have affected current American-Indian relations, but the book focuses more on documenting then-current Indian civil rights movements than on the history of native/colonist relations.
Marienstras, Elise. “Depictions of White Children in Captivity Narratives.” American Studies
International 40.3 (2002): 33-45.
Was going to be used when discussing assimilation narratives and link the fears of children being abducted and ‘tainted’ by natives to Christian demonic possession narratives. Made the paper lose focus.
Panay, Andrew. “From Little Big Man to Little Green Men: the Captivity Scenario in American
Culture.” European Journal of American Culture 23.3 (2004): 201-216.
Was going to show the ongoing influence that captivity narratives have on current American culture (along with more contemporary narratives found in Ebersole). Cut in favor of the propagandas of various US wars and the post 9/11 remarks from Falwell.
Semple, Ellen Churchill. American History and its Geographic Conditions. New York: Russel
and Russel, 1933. Print.
A look at how geography affected certain historic events. Was going to use to show attitudes on environment back when the paper had a more environmental thesis, but was removed when environmentalism was removed from the paper.
Annotated Bibliography: Works Cited
Burnham, Michelle. Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature 1682-
1861. Hanover: UP of New England, 1997. Print.
A look at captivity narratives and culture with a focus on gender politics. Used as an overview of cultural blending in early America.
Castiglia, Christopher. Bound and Determined: Captivity, Culture-Crossing, and White
Womanhood from Mary Rowlandson to Patty Hearst. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1996. Print.
More focused on how narratives functioned in national and cultural myth making. Used to find other similar captivity narratives.
Colley, Linda. “Perceiving Low Literature: The Captivity Narrative.” Essays in Criticism 53.3
(2003): 199-218. Web. 4 December 2011.
A look at the cultural performance in captivity narratives. Used as a starting point for
Understanding the cultural contexts of captivity narratives.
Derounian-Stodola, Kathryn Zabelle, ed. Women’s Captivity Narratives. New York: Penguin,
1998. Print.
A collection of captivity narratives with a summary of current research on the work. Used as a source for the primary text and as a way to find other captivity narratives.
Ebersole, Gary L. Captured By Texts: Puritan to Postmodern Images of Indian Captivity.
Charlottesville: U. P. of Virginia, 1995. Print.
A look at the sense of self in captivity narratives not only from colonial and early America but all over the world. Used primarily for its look at early American narratives.
Greenberg, Amy S. Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire. Cambridge:
Cambridge U.P., 2005. Print.
A look at the link between American expansionism and views on masculinity. Used to show the results of the gender politics in early American captivity narratives and to find other primary sources.
Harris, John. “God Gave U.S. 'What We Deserve,' Falwell Says.” The Washington Post. 14
September 2001. Web. 4 December 2011. Web. 4 December 2011.
Location: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28620-2001Sep14
A report on a conversation Falwell had with Pat Robertson on an episode of The 700 Club two days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks along with initial reactions from the White House and the People for the American Way. While Falwell’s comments went into the paper, the reactions did not.
Heard, J. Norman. White Into Red: A Study of the Assimilation of White Persons Captured by
Indians. Metuchen: The Scarecrow Press, 1973. Print.
A look at those narratives where whites decided to stay with their native captors and how those decisions were received in white society. Was originally going to have a larger role in the paper but got cut down due to relative importance.
Kolodny, Annette. “Turning the Lens on "The Panther Captivity": A Feminist Exercise in
Practical Criticism.” Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 329-345. Web. 4 December 2011.
One of the few academic looks specifically on the Panther Narrative. Kolodny looks at the views of race blending contemporary to the narrative’s publication.
Ladd-Taylor, Molly. Mother-Work: Women, child Welfare, and the State, 1890-1930. Urbana: U
of Illinois P, 1994. Print.
A look at how views of womanhood and woman’s roles in America are linked to the rhetoric of Republican Motherhood.
Loudon, Archibald. A Selection of the Most Interesting Narratives of Outrages Committed by the
Indians in Their Wars with the White People, Volumes I and II. Reprint. New York: Arno P and The New York Times, 1971. Print.
A reprint of a collection of captivity narratives, originally printed in 1888. This book has commentary from the original editor and several narratives ranging from military to abduction to assimilation.
Namias, June. White Captives: Gender and Ethnicity on the American Frontier. Chapel Hill: U
of North Carolina P, 1993. Print.
A look at early American gender politics. This work covers captivity narratives as well as primary documentation and popular fiction.
Pratt, Amy. “The Pleasure of Being Lost: "The Panther Captivity" and the Metaphysics of
Commerce”. Mosaic 34.1 (2001): 1-18. Web. 4 December 2011.
One of the few academic texts directly analyzing the Panther Narrative. Pratt links the narrative more to commerce than to culture.
Simpson, Audra. “From White into Red: Captivity Narratives as Alchemies of Race and
Citizenship.” American Quarterly 60.2 (2008): 251-257. Web. 4 December 2011.
A shorter work on assimilation narratives and the malleability of race borders.
Slotkin, Richard. The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of
Industrialization 1800-1890. New York: Atheneum, 1985. Print.
An older but nonetheless interesting look at how we came to have our mythology about the frontier. Used for its comparisons to other myths: the Christian imagery in the captivity narratives was used as evidence while the link to the giant in the Panther Narrative and the Green Knight in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight was refuted.
Sosin, Jack M. The Revolutionary Frontier 1763-1783. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
1967. Print.
An overview of politics in the American frontier. Used for its look at the governmental (non)response to increased violence against natives.
_____________________________________________________________________
Teaching "A Very Surprising Narrative"
Handout by Concetta Bommarito
Handout by Concetta Bommarito
Part 1: The Handout
Assignment Overview:
We will be reading Abraham Panther's "A Very Surprising Narrative..." and we will use Panther's account as a starting point to examine the ways in which gender tropes began to develop in the following contexts:
· Historical Context
· Social Context
· Links to Other Works
You will come to class with a short response (300-500 words) containing cited information on the location and validity of Panther's narrative. That response will be the starting point of our in-class discussion.
Details:
You will read Abraham Panther's "A very surprising narrative..." and Annette Kolodny's "Turning the Lens" (pdfs provided) and analyze them for historic and social contexts. Link the Panther Narrative to at least one other reading from the class using Kolodny's methods.
Your analysis can consider the following questions, but is not limited to them:
You will read Abraham Panther's "A very surprising narrative..." and Annette Kolodny's "Turning the Lens" (pdfs provided) and analyze them for historic and social contexts. Link the Panther Narrative to at least one other reading from the class using Kolodny's methods.
Your analysis can consider the following questions, but is not limited to them:
· How trustworthy is the text?
· Why would someone tell this story? Why did it become popular?
· What makes this work "surprising"? Given what we have discussed in class on issues of gender and race, what underlying message(s) or social norms are enforced here? What norms are broken?
· In relation to the other work, how is the Panther Narrative unique? How is it similar? Why do those differences or similarities exist? How do they affect both stories?
Check List:
· Did you give a thorough analysis and not just a summary?
· Did you include at least one other reading from the class?
· Did you discuss the Panther Narrative in its social and historical contexts? Did you model your analysis after Kolodny's methods?
Part 2: In Class Assignment
Assignment Overview:
Students will first break into groups and discuss your responses with each other. Anyone who did not do the homework will be sent home for the day.
We will open the floor to discussion, and each group would show on the board the links that they found to the other readings in the class, making a concept map in markers on the whiteboard demonstrating how the stories are interconnected. Students will mark differences as well as similarities.
Once we have mapped out the reading visually in its context, we will discuss what our findings mean. Students will be encouraged to discuss how gender plays out in the Panther Narrative and why.
Students will first break into groups and discuss your responses with each other. Anyone who did not do the homework will be sent home for the day.
We will open the floor to discussion, and each group would show on the board the links that they found to the other readings in the class, making a concept map in markers on the whiteboard demonstrating how the stories are interconnected. Students will mark differences as well as similarities.
Once we have mapped out the reading visually in its context, we will discuss what our findings mean. Students will be encouraged to discuss how gender plays out in the Panther Narrative and why.
During class, you will take notes on your reader response. These notes can include but are not limited to:
· Links you found interesting
· Readings you had not considered
· Final paper ideas the class activity has got you thinking about.
At the end of class, you will turn in your reader response and notes you took in class.
Part 3: Included Materials
Part 3: Included Materials
Readings:
Derounian-Stodola, Kathryn Zabelle, ed.Women’s Captivity Narratives. New York: Penguin,
Derounian-Stodola, Kathryn Zabelle, ed.Women’s Captivity Narratives. New York: Penguin,
1998.
Kolodny, Annette. “Turning the Lens on "The Panther Captivity": A Feminist Exercise in
Kolodny, Annette. “Turning the Lens on "The Panther Captivity": A Feminist Exercise in
Practical Criticism.” Critical Inquiry 8.2 (1981): 329-345.
Other:
Pen(s) and highlighter to take notes on reader response in class.
Part 4: Pedagogy
I believe more in facilitating student-driven interaction with class materials than giving lectures and quizzes. I try to integrate assignments meant to keep students on task - i.e. reader responses, reading quizzes, etc – with activities that let students use the class materials to start critically analyzing the texts.
This assignment is also designed to get students thinking about their final paper. I assume that they will have to write a final paper with a thesis that analyzes the text. Taking a class period where we discuss the links between the various readings that they can use in their final paper can help them start to see these texts in relation to one another rather than separate entities in separate assignments. The fact that the Panther Captivity is a shorter reading makes it much easier to find links to other works since students can read it quickly and spend more of their study time finding links.
It is also important that this be a social activity; since a class like this will usually have peer review, the academic comradery of the class is important. Getting them critiquing smaller ideas first will hopefully get them used to critiquing each other’s work and help them feel comfortable making larger suggestions on longer work later in the semester.
