Hi everyone, I’m new here at Dawning of a Brighter Day. My name is Shelah Miner, and if my name sounds familiar, it’s likely because my Mormon Lit students’ book reviews have been featured on the blog quite frequently over the last year.
It’s my role as a Mormon Lit teacher that brings me to writing for the blog. I’ve now taught the English 268 course at BYU-Salt Lake for two years, and this year I’m already signed up to teach it for the next two semesters. I’ve taught English at the college level for most of the last fifteen years, and this is by far the most fun class I’ve ever taught.
Since it’s my first day here, I thought I’d talk a little bit about the first day of class. At BYU, “Literature of the LDS” is an elective course, and the vast majority of the students in my classes are not English majors. My course meets once a week for two and a half hours on Thursday afternoons. At the Salt Lake Center, the class caps in the low twenties. I had 19 students in my class the first time I taught it, and 13 last semester. I think the class is similarly-sized on the main campus at BYU, where two sections are on the fall 2016 schedule, a day class taught by Kylie Turley (which has 55 on the waiting list!) and a night class taught by Cheri Earl.
The first thing I do when we start class is ask each student what their favorite work of Mormon literature is. When I started teaching the course, I didn’t really think that people would be picking books like The Giant Joshua or Dorian. But I was surprised that for every person who was brave enough to profess their love for Anita Stansfield or Brandon Sanderson, there were three who said their favorite work of Mormon Lit was Believing Christ or Jesus the Christ, and another who said they hadn’t read any Mormon Literature. The first time, I had to fight the urge to stare back at them all blankly, put on a snooty accent, and tell them all that the books they were naming “weren’t literature.” These days, I talk about the value of the doctrinal books, but try to make it clear that this isn’t a religion class, but that we’ll be exploring Mormon culture through novels, short stories, plays, film, poetry, essays and memoir.
I’m a little conflicted about my approach to the rest of the first day of class, and this is where I’d love to get some feedback. First off, we talk about Orson F. Whitney, who both defined the concept of “Home Literature” (which basically boils down to fubu- for us, by us) and who set the bar high for all Mormon authors when he said “we will yet have Miltons and Shakespeares of our own.” Once we’ve established the concept of “home literature,” we talk about the differences between literary and genre fiction (which is usually a new concept to almost everyone in the class). I’m torn here, because I know this is a bit of a false dichotomy, and because setting things up this way on the first day really seems to perpetuate the dichotomy, but it’s an easy way to structure the class and some the assignments that will follow. I’ve set up my reading list (see below) to include both popular and literary fiction, because, let’s face it, the popular fiction is where Mormon authors have really excelled. And genre fiction is super fun to read.
Then we delve into Mark Oppenheimer’s (in)famous piece in the NYT, “Mormons Offer Cautionary Lesson on Sunny Outlook v. Literary Greatness” as well as about half a dozen responses from Mormon authors and bloggers ranging from George Handley to Larry Correia. My goal for this first day is to establish two of the central tensions I see in Mormon literature– the intended audience and the approach (popular or literary). Oppenheimer’s article also inevitably leads to a discussion of how clean or dark books by Mormon authors “should” be (especially after the group who reads the Correia response reports), and since this is a concern for some students for the entire semester (more on that another month), I like to lay it out on the table right from the beginning.
I appreciate being able to use this forum to get some feedback from others who have taught Mormon literature and from those who know a lot more about the subject than I do (does reading a lot of books qualify someone to teach Mormon lit? I’m not sure, but I’m really happy that somehow I tricked them into giving me this job).
So here’s my reading list. I borrowed Margaret Young’s syllabus when I was asked to teach the class, and she put a lot more thought into the structure of her course than I did. My structure is pretty basic (a week of old stuff, a week of poetry, a week of essays, several weeks of novels). I like to mix it up a little bit each year, so I’d love some feedback on what to swap in and out.
Week 2: (the old stuff) Added Upon by Nephi Anderson, King Follett Sermon, Journals of Jane Manning James and Eliza Lyman. We also watch a lot of Saturday’s Warrior this week.
Week 3: Charly (Deseret Book’s first fictional smash- a romance) by Jack Weyland
Week 4: Poetry from Fire in the Pasture
Week 5: Global Mom (memoir) by Melissa Dalton-Bradford
Week 6: Selected Essays. This year we read “Easter Weekend” by Eugene England; “Barcelona, Venezuela: 1998” by Brittney Carman; “Take, Eat” by Tessa Santiago; “Smoke and Mirrors” by Stephen Carter; “Of the Drowned” by Jaren Watson; “Working at Wendy’s” by Joey Franklin; “On Laughter” by Patrick Madden
Week 7: The Chosen One (YA novel about fundamentalist Mormon polygamy) by Carol Lynch Williams
Week 8: Stories from Dispensation: “Calling and Election” by Jack Harrell; “Wolves” by Doug Thayer; “Buckeye the Elder” by Brady Udall; “Clothing Esther” by Lisa Torcasso Downing, “Obbligato” by Lisa Madsen Rubilar
Week 9: Stories from Monsters and Mormons: “The Mountain of the Lord,” by Dan Wells; “Allow Me to Introduce Myself,” by Moriah Jovan; “Charity Never Faileth,” by Jaleta Clegg; “The Living Wife,” by Emily Milner, “That Leviathan, Whom Thou Hast Made” by Eric James Stone
Week 10: Plays. We typically read two. This year we read Little Happy Secrets by Melissa Leilani Larson and Gadianton by Eric Samuelsen. We have also read I Am Jane by Margaret Blair Young.
Week 11: The Scholar of Moab by Steven L. Peck
The other three weeks of the semester are taken up with projects. The students read a work of literary fiction and a work of genre fiction on their own and present them to the class at midterm (genre fiction) and at the end of the semester (literary fiction).
Is there a place for doctrinal books in Mormon literature courses? How would you recommend integrating them into a syllabus? What would you recommend? We do read the King Follett Sermon, mostly because pioneer-era Mormons weren’t writing lots of short stories, and because I like to talk about the way continuing revelation breathes a lot of life into our doctrines and our culture. I have considered including The Five Books of Jesus, since one student last semester read it for her literary fiction project and said it was “the only uplifting thing” we read all semester.
My other consideration this semester is swapping in a short sci-fi/fantasy novel. I’m also toying with the idea of throwing the whole syllabus out and doing a deep dive into polygamy literature, which would be enormously fun for me, but which might give the students something they really weren’t bargaining for if they thought they would be reading books like The Infinite Atonement all semester. What do you think of that idea?
Thanks for sharing your experiences! Here are some idea, not based on any kind of experience teaching Mormon lit, but simply connections that I think students might find interesting.
Other possibilities for drama: Huebener, Fire in the Bones, or (my personal pick) Reunion, all by Tom Rogers. (His plays are all available on a website that can be linked from the Maxwell Institute.) Fire in the Bones deals with the Mountain Meadows Massacre; Huebener deals with the real-life story of an LDS youth in Nazi Germany who was executed for his actions against the regime. Huebener also was controversial in itself in its day, as an immensely popular “phenomenon” at BYU that was nonetheless requested not to be produced again for a number of years, for reasons that have never been entirely clarified. (There is an essay about Tom’s experiences related to this in the recent collection of his essays that I edited.) Either of these could be good lenses for talking about some of the balance issues you’re addressing. The last piece is a take on a Mormon family split by its different approaches to the faith, but very family-centered. All worth taking a look at if you’re interested,
If you’re going to have people read “That Leviathan,” you might want to consider pairing it with “Avec, Who Is Distributed” by Steve Peck. (I talk more about the relationship between these two in my essay on “Parsing the ‘Mormon’ in Mormon Literature,” over at A Motley Vision.) I also think you might want to take a look at the first two of Scott Card’s Alvin Maker books: the first for what it does with the story of Joseph Smith, and the second for what it does with some specific scenes from the Book of Mormon. Both of these, in my opinion, raise questions about what value there is — or isn’t — in repurposing stories that are meaningful for Mormons in different form that might be meaningful for non-Mormons, and possibly meaningful in new ways for Mormons. Card’s Folk of the Fringe stories also involve many of the same possibilities, in yet another alternative Mormon setting. (Of these stories, “America” offers a deeply disturbing alternative interpretation of Book of Mormon prophecies, while “West” is actually a Mormon conversion story that Card managed to make work as a mainstream sf novella.)
It’s possible that something like Dave Farland’s In the Company of Angels might help build a bridge to the concept of Mormon literature for people who find other stories more alienating, while still allowing a chance to talk about issues like depicting the humanity and human error of Church leaders.
Focusing an entire course on polygamy literature would be fascinating, but I suspect would end badly. There are many Mormons who are deeply uncomfortable with this part of our history — to the extent that I suspect they simply could not tolerate an entire semester about it, and might well raise complaints about the course itself. Considering how few chances there are out there to introduce people to Mormon lit, I’d rather see them get exposed to a wide range with a chance to discover something that might connect for them, rather than run the risk of putting them off the entire field.
Which leads me to my final point. I agree that categories are necessary, no matter how problematic they may be. I wonder, though, how it would be if you treated literary fiction not as a contrast to genre literature, but rather as another genre in its own right? Also: do you provide students with lists of recommended literary and genre fiction titles for them to select from?
On the issue of “literary” vs. “popular” fiction, I recommend for your own reading C . S. Lewis’s _An Experiment in Criticism_.
.
I think for an entry-level / nonmajors course, it’s best to do an overview. When BYU recognizes its destined role in leading the MoLit way, a polygamy-lit course will become an obvious 200-level or 300-level course. For now, I think covering a lot of ground increases the likelihood that your students will have a good experience, which I think is vital.
As for doctrinal works, I think you’re right to leave them out, but if it were me—and that’s really what students were expecting—I might experiment with a class on the sermon, starting with King Follett and ending with Jeff Holland, with some highlights inbetween.
The Five Books of Jesus is amazing, but I’m not fond of the idea of leaving it out there on its own. It definitely seems a bit one-of-these-things-is-not-like-the-other.
That said, another upper-level MoLit course ought to explore representations of divinity. I would definitely sign up for that class.
I can’t wait to keep reading your posts, Shelah.
You’ve probably seen them before, but here’s some writeups on my attempts to teach Mormon literature: http://www.motleyvision.org/tag/berkeley-institute/
.
Something I meant to add: I too have noticed that big ideas broached at the beginning of any literature course form the structure on which students will hang all other ideas, especially if they’re largely nonmajors who aren’t already broadly educated in lit.
I really, really like Lost Boys, by Orson Scott Card. It’s more horror than fantasy. It has a very accessible portrayal of a Mormon family, one that completely resonated with me when I read it for the first time. It’s one I would consider assigning but I don’t know if it falls in the category of short sci fi/ fantasy. I’m looking forward to reading your posts too!
Oooh. Second the above.
I’m so pleased you find stories from Monsters & Mormons worth tackling.
—
“does reading a lot of books qualify someone to teach Mormon lit? ”
I don’t see why it wouldn’t.
—
One observation: while Charly is a classic, and I see why it’s important from a history of Mormon lit and culture and publishing standpoint, it might be nice to switch that out sometimes with a newer Mormon romance novel. I’m not entirely sure which one. But I wonder if students would have more to talk about if they had a newer romance novel to respond to.