I love Macbeth. It's one of Shakespeare's most violent and fast-paced plays. Yet, like many of his tragedies, it concerns royalty. Most literature before realism focused on the upper-classes because writers wanted and liked to get paid. The common themes that the play is associated with (tyranny v. kingship, the perils of ambition) are not directly relevant for middle to high school students, regardless of urban, suburban, or rural. So when I realized that I would be creating a unit based on this play, I was a little concerned about constructing a lens in which students of that age-group would find appealing and authentic.
Fortunately, I've no longer looked at Shakespeare's play as the central component of the lesson but rather as a piece. Actually, it's becoming more of a spring board into a conceptual unit framework that I had not anticipated. Macbeth, with its questions of motive, influence, and repercussions, serves as a particularly useful introductory text for a critical based examination on personal responsibility, the individual, and their environment.
That one small part of the play, where Macbeth hires two people to murder his friend Banquo, resonated with me for a while. The killers feel like they are so poor and inferior that they will do anything in order to regain some sense of power and identity that murder is an easy decision. Bingo! There's something that can resonate with anyone growing up in our society of disparity and inequality. Now although Macbeth is not directly concerned with how our environments shape and influence our identities and actions, it does suggest that the idea that external forces (such as gender roles, spiritual ideologies) can drive someone to act a certain way has been around for a long time.
Now, to incorporate that into a relevant unit, I had to think of the things that cause us to act the way we do: groups we belong to, socio-economics, external expectations of all-sorts. I've begun to look into texts such as The Outsiders, which sharply examines the confluence of group and individual identity formation and how it influences our actions. Also, I'm looking into other resources concerning racial, economic and social differences such as the documentary Crips and Bloods: Made in America, which analyzes the history and origins of two of the most violent gangs in America and what drives its members to, well, become and remain members.
I'm curious if anyone would suggest other texts (be it short stories, poems, etc.) that also concern the external things that motivate us in ways that some may suggest limits our free-will.
Fortunately, I've no longer looked at Shakespeare's play as the central component of the lesson but rather as a piece. Actually, it's becoming more of a spring board into a conceptual unit framework that I had not anticipated. Macbeth, with its questions of motive, influence, and repercussions, serves as a particularly useful introductory text for a critical based examination on personal responsibility, the individual, and their environment.
That one small part of the play, where Macbeth hires two people to murder his friend Banquo, resonated with me for a while. The killers feel like they are so poor and inferior that they will do anything in order to regain some sense of power and identity that murder is an easy decision. Bingo! There's something that can resonate with anyone growing up in our society of disparity and inequality. Now although Macbeth is not directly concerned with how our environments shape and influence our identities and actions, it does suggest that the idea that external forces (such as gender roles, spiritual ideologies) can drive someone to act a certain way has been around for a long time.
Now, to incorporate that into a relevant unit, I had to think of the things that cause us to act the way we do: groups we belong to, socio-economics, external expectations of all-sorts. I've begun to look into texts such as The Outsiders, which sharply examines the confluence of group and individual identity formation and how it influences our actions. Also, I'm looking into other resources concerning racial, economic and social differences such as the documentary Crips and Bloods: Made in America, which analyzes the history and origins of two of the most violent gangs in America and what drives its members to, well, become and remain members.
I'm curious if anyone would suggest other texts (be it short stories, poems, etc.) that also concern the external things that motivate us in ways that some may suggest limits our free-will.
Michael,
ReplyDeleteThe methods text *Critical Encounters in High School English* by D. Appleman has some practical and sage advice about, and makes a great case for, using a kind of approach to teaching literature that emphasizes the ways in which critical theory can shed light on the ways in which social and cultural forces shape the way in which we interact with texts, but also how texts rely on these in order to make sense of the social worlds that are inhabited within them.
I think you have a sound sense of where you are, and where you want to go. I like the texts you've chosen, especially in terms of the conceptual framing you've chosen. Something that immediately came to mind when I read through this was a sort of sub-category that might be an obvious area of exploration would be the ways in which things can or can't be known, especially in terms of belief and faith (and the counterparts of reality and science).
Some poems and short stories that come to immediate mind, ones that are canonical, are:
Poetry: *The Rime of the Ancient Mariner*, "Because I Could Not Stop for Death (712)" by Dickinson, "When I Heard the Learn'd Astronomer" by Whitman, "Persimmons" by Lee, "Immigrants in Our Own Land" by Baca, and "Undertaker" by Smith.
I know you've already chosen your YA novel, but *American Born Chinese* fits in really well (like, really) with what you've outlined here.
I'll think more of other texts, if you like!
sarah