Introduction to Literature: Personal Accounts (II)

For this installment of my Introduction to Literature Series, I will be featuring Sequoia Stone. She is a second-year M.A. student in SDSU's English and Comparative Literature department, with a specialization in Children's Literature. This is her first semester teaching and her English 220 course is entitled "Reimagining Canon: Literary Confrontations, Adaptations, and Subversions." The following entries are from Sequoia herself!

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I'd had the idea for my syllabus knocking around in my head for a while, ever since I'd read one of my course texts (The Song of Achilles, a queer re-telling of The Illiad) right after reading The Illiad in a course during my senior year of college. While I knew I would have enjoyed The Song of Achilles on its own, reading it on the heel of The Illiad was a deeply illuminating experience. I understood The Illiad better (I read TSOA in six hours the night before my midterm or the course--whoops!), and I was able to approach The Song of Achilles with the tradition and history of The Illiad informing my reading. As I thought about becoming a professor in the far-off future, I thought I'd love the chance to put The Illiad and The Song of Achilles in conversation for my students. When I was presented with the opportunity to teach 220 here at SDSU, I took this initial parting and poured over the books in my library and memories of my undergraduate years in order to create my syllabus based around the idea of reading a "canon" book with a "non-canon" one. Some of these pairings were direct adaptations, while others were simply two texts that echoed similar themes and ideas.

1. What Children's and young adult books or texts were included in the reading list for your course? How were these texts received by the students?

I have eight course texts, four canon and four non-canon. All of my non-canon books are young adult novels: Madeline Miller's The Song of Achilles, Libba Bray's Beauty Queens, Paolo Bacigalupi's Ship Breaker, and Scott Westerfeld's Uglies. I have gotten mostly a positive response to these books, and they are often just as intellectually challenging to my students as the more dense canon texts. Something I would hear often is that reading the YA companion book made things we discussed in the canon text more accessible, as students were able to use more "relatable" texts as a way to retroactively understand things that might have been more austere in older novels.

2. What other texts lended themselves to discuss childhood and adolescence in nuanced ways that were either unexpected or surprising? 

Something that was surprising and delightful to me in my course was how concerned my students were with the interiority or backstory of a character. When reading Lord of the Flies, a student proposed that maybe Jack was so violence because he had a childhood, or was abused. Similarly, in Great Expectations in my class wondered if the villainous figure of Mrs. Joe was more so a product of her upbringing than anything else. While I like to steer these observations back into textual analysis, I enjoyed seeing my students approach these characters as so three-dimensional that they asked themselves, why are they the way they are? It seems that the importance of childhood, the impact of how one is raised, was at the forefront of my student's minds even when we were reading texts not specifically aimed at children or young adults.

3. How does your class's theme carry over to the matters of childhood and adolescence?

Something my class has emphasized throughout our semester has been the importance of familial bonds, and how the family unit impacts the way one grows. Many of our main characters have had abusive parents or families that encourage negativity, and a lot of our discussion has been based around following these characters as they navigate the repercussions of abuse, of cruelty, or of neglect. We have also talked a lot about found families, the family one creates that provides support or love, and how this constructed family illustrates the importance of things like kindness, generosity, and loyalty. As we've moved through our texts, we've also looked at the various ways in which society pressures children and young adults to conform. Whether this manifests as discouraging queerness, encouraging apathy, or dictating beauty standards, my class has talked extensively about the different ways the characters in our novels face crushing dominant ideologies, as well the ways in which it is possible to resist them.

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Thank you so much to Sequoia Stone for the robust commentary and amazing engagement with themes of childhood and adolescence!

-A. Elliott