Abstract

Teaching with great literature gives me the feeling of being anointed yet unworthy; still feel compelled to bring great works into my classroom. Any teacher of freshman composition needs to be grounded, but an adjunct teacher of freshman composition needs to be especially grounded. So, ground myself on the likes of Martin Luther King, Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Einstein, Lao Tzu, Gertrude Stein, Kerouac, Ginsberg, Stafford, Plato, and James Joyce. feel somewhat brazen in doing so, for am not a superpowered specialized scholar, but love these works and believe in their power of conversion. believe they are not meant to be our sacred and closeted gems, but our air and food and water and shelter. It has been my experience that there has been a shift in composition courses, away from reading literature until basic skills have been learned. have found that literature can be used to teach grammar and pass on the goods at the same time. The writers mentioned above are on my guest list, and for the most part am in the business of toying with my guests. Halfway through the semester, hand out a section of Martin Luther King Jr.'s I Have a Dream speech where I've deliberately tampered with grammar, spelling, and punctuation, and expect my students to right my wrongs. count on their ears, which believe more dependable than their ability to memorize a list of ever-changing rules. I've reduced the Tomorrow .. . passage in Macbeth to a discussion of subject and predicate. But it's with my most precious saint of words, Mr. Joyce, that I've truly tested my students. At the end of the semester, my students must add punctuation and in other ways make articulate the last six hundred words of Molly Bloom's poignant rambling soliloquy-the so-called stream of consciousness.' This exercise has on occasion gotten me into the deeper waters of the English Department. At first glance it appears to test the student's ability to tolerate tedium, but when students look at it a second time, they realize that they are being called upon to translate the stuff of dreams into the stuff of tangible communication-which is indeed hard work. When readers take it upon themselves to look at this block of unpunctuated prose, they will see that the option is to either sink or swim. One either remains barred from the private sea of consciousness, and, dumbstruck and resentful,