Eureka! Summer 2001 Workshop

Literature in a Desacralized Word: Lost Certainties in 20th Century British Literature (Joyce, Yeats, Larkin, Pinter, Beckett)

Leader: Dr. William Hutchings

Date: Monday, July 16, 2001

Presentation Overview
My presentation will focus on pedagogical issues involved in introducing key works of modernist literature in the high school classroom, using authors and works currently included in the textbook used in English literature in area high schools, but focusing on issues of "desacralization" (Mircea Eliade's term for the loss of the "sense of the sacred" in modern life). Although this concept is central to the world-view of writers as diverse as James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, Philip Larkin, Harold Pinter, and Samuel Beckett, it is often unfamiliar and/or disconcerting to students whose enculturation and religious experience is at best inhospitable to that idea. How, then, does one teach works that presume a cultural devaluation of religious experience in the modern world, when one's "audience" in the classroom may well contain a number of students to whom such assumptions seem both alien and alienating? For my presentation, I will use the following works as demonstration texts: All of the above works are included in Elements of Literature: Sixth Course: Literature of Britain, ed. Robert Anderson et al. (New York: Holt Rinehart &Winston, 1989), which is the textbook currently being used by many teachers who will enroll in this course. Each workshop participant will also need to read Mircea Eliade's The Sacred and the Profane, available in paperback. During my presentation, I will also use materials from my personal library, video collection, and files, as well as videotapes that are currently in the collection of UAB's Sterne Library.

Main Points of Presentation
I will begin the workshop with a discussion and definition of Eliade's concept of "desacralization," which will lead naturally into James Joyce's related concept of "devalued modern counterpart" for mythologies, systems of belief, and sets of values that were once believed in but no longer prevail (e.g., chivalry, Greek mythology, etc). Closely reading individual paragraphs of "Araby," we will then examine Joyce's use of "embedded metaphors" and subtle images to embody this theme of devaluation/desacralization in his work. We will develop an heuristic that can be directly translated into the high school classroom as Joyce's works are taught; it will also be applied to excerpts from his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. The goals in this portion of the workshop are twofold: (1) to enable workshop participants to utilize and/or adapt my approach for their own classroom use, and (2) to make this technique conducive to successful literary analysis at both the high school and university level.

The second section of the workshop will shift from prose to poetry, extending the previously introduced concepts to works with "private" and "visionary" mythologies (Yeats's "The Second Coming") and those that deal explicitly with desacralization as a theme (Larkin's "Church-Going"). Both works will be assessed within the context of Matthew Arnold's 1851 poem "Dover Beach," which introduces such themes in a more accessible way. I will encourage participants in the workshop who have taught these works to share their particular experiences and problems with these works, and of course any possible solutions.

The third (final) section of the workshop will deal with particular problems raised in teaching contemporary British drama, focusing particularly on the concept of "the Absurd," as defined in Martin Esslin's seminal study The Theatre of the Absurd. The implications of silence and "meaninglessness" will receive particular attention as we consider the selections from Pinter's and Beckett's works that are provided in their textbook, and the discussion will be supplemented with presentation of a performance videotape of the scene in question from Waiting for Godot.

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