Teaching Short Fiction: A Fairy Tale Beginning

Abstract Non-majors in the general education curriculum respond well to a course in short fiction when they are introduced to familiar works and then prompted to consider variations on those works that force them to rethink comfortable traditions. My fiction course begins with well-known fairy tales followed by little-known variants, then contemporary rewritings. Engagement in the readings prompts students to sell-examination and exploration of the wider world. ********** "And Cinderella and the Prince lived happily ever after." A paraphrase of that fairy tale ending is one any teacher would like to stamp on the final exam of each student in her class: "May you live happily and well." In my fiction course I have learned how to make fairy tales contribute toward beginning that ending. The final learning objective for students in our freshman literature/composition courses at Spring Hill College is that "students will begin their quest for lifelong learning and inquiry." A corollary objective for our sophomore level literature courses is that students will be influenced to become lifelong readers. Those important goals seem oddly unrealistic for young men and women likely to be more concerned with the latest episode of The Apprentice or who spend much of their spare time playing video games. The rub for those of us who design and teach literature courses is how to get resistant readers to read well and to like reading. The core curriculum requirements at this small Jesuit liberal arts college are heavy in the humanities. The place of a required course in literature can become murky to students weighted with heavy major requirements in a pre-professional field. Often they consider this core requirement simply something to be checked off as early as possible or put off as long as they can. The chore for the teacher is to create a course that entices this resistant reader into both enjoying the literature and finding it beneficial in his or her over-all growth as a human being. For me, a course in short fiction best approaches those two desired outcomes. As Annie Dillard says in Living by Fiction, fiction "is a subtle pedagogy" (155). In one sense it exposes unwitting students to remote or unknown worlds, places of wonder, beauty, or terror, and to situations of strange or quiet newness that can remove them from a reality that may be commonplace. Dillard adds that "a work's greatest value coincides with its greatest appeal; that literature is a joy and not a puzzle, essay, or lecture" (158). If we only launch our students to a lifetime of reading for joy, we will not have failed them. But I am convinced that fiction has a second, and perhaps greater, place in fitting our students for the world that awaits them. It can create opportunities for interpretation that breach one's perception of the self or of the world that has felt snug and tidy. Students find characters that enact the roles they themselves felt they were playing all on their own. The smug, self-satisfied student discovers himself in young Goodman Brown; a young wife finds a soul-mate in Elisa in "The Chrysanthemums"; an adolescent shares Connie's anxieties in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"; an African-American youth knows the pain of the narrator of "Battle Royal." A reader can stumble across his childhood or his adolescent years or even his coming-of-age in a work of fiction and find that he is not out on a limb all alone. At least one other figure has been there. This discovery can bring comfort to the isolate or outsider; it can also deflate the solipsistic ego that believes its experience of life is unique. I propose another powerful means of fiction as a subtle pedagogy; it introduces the means of considering both one's own mental processes and the order of the world as one perceives it. Dillard asserts that "[a]rt remakes the world according to sense" (177). If reason aids the artist in ordering the world, it follows that "art's highest function is to shed light on the mind" (180). …