G. Robert Carlsen (1917–2003)

Minor collection of short stories and recollections intended for teen readers. There's a simple but effective piece by John D. MacDonald, and a more entertaining reminiscence by John Steinbeck about some of his old cars and the days when people fixed their own cars unlike 1956, when Steinbeck wrote the piece. The last story in the book is a true one of race car driver Jimmy Bryan's preparations in the day leading up to the 1958 Indianapolis 500. At the end of the story, we are told that he won - avoiding a 16 car pile-up that killed one driver. And on that note the book ends - but my own search of the Internet on this driver left me depressed, as I found out he himself died less than two years later at a race on the Langhorne track near Philadelphia. Given the publication date of this book (1966), it seems very strange that this story would have been included, or was it intended to have some special meaning for an audience where many of the readers knew Jimmy Bryan was already dead?

The other stories are pretty minor and not all well-written, but with a cover and a title like this, it was an impossible impulse to resist at $1.50 in the used book store.… (plus d'informations)

Let me say right at the beginning: this will not be an unbiased review. For at the time of the publication of Insights from the Themes and Writers series (McGraw-Hill, 1967), its principal editor, G. Robert Carlsen, was my advisor, mentor, department chair, and colleague. He was also past president of the National Council of Teachers of English and a superb classroom teacher and friend. With my eighth graders, I had used some of the works and units that made their way into this textbook.

Having said that, and realizing that this anthology has long since been out of print and would be somewhat dated for contemporary teenagers, I still maintain that this textbook (and the whole Themes and Writers series) exemplified what a literature curriculum for teenage students should look like.

Why?

(1) It addresses themes and topics that would engage adolescents’ interests. There is a unit on adventure, beginning with the old familiar favorite, “The Most Dangerous Game.” There is a unit on outer space, called “Toward the Stars,” with authors like Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury, but also Ovid’s story of Icarus and Daedalus, Orville Wright’s “How I Learned to Fly,” and the poem, “High Flight.”

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings . . . .

(2) The units would also engage students’ critical thinking, particularly by juxtaposing selections that speak to each other in one way or another. For example, along with Tennyson’s well known “Charge of the Light Brigade,” there is an essay on the actual battle, holding up the lines of the poem for closer examination in light of history. Along with a biographical essay about the explorer of the American wilderness, Francis Parkman, there is an autobiographical essay by Parkman himself about a buffalo hunt, taken from The Oregon Trail.

(3) Obviously, readers of the anthology get experience with a wide variety of literary types and styles. There are old familiar favorites that their parents read before them; such as “Casey at the Bat,” “The Cremation of Sam McGee,” Frank Stockton’s “The Lady, or the Tiger?” Poe’s “Tell-Tale Heart,” James Thurber’s “The Night the Bed Fell,” and the like. Traditional literary classics are represented, like The Odyssey, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped, and T. S. Eliot and Robert Frost. But there are also experimental new forms, such as Kenneth Fearing’s “King Juke” and a poem called “John Doe, Jr.”

Among the Missing . . .
I think he always was—
Only no one thought to mention it before.

He was the boy who didn’t make the team
although, God knows, he tried: his were the fingers
always too eager, that always fumbled the ball.

There are poems and stories, fiction and nonfiction, biography and autobiography, humor and pathos, and one full-length, three-act play.

(4) Strands interweave through the Themes and Writers series. Carlsen believed that in each year of junior and senior high school students should study in depth a literary genre, a literary genius, and certain landmarks of literature. In Insights the genre is the lyric, in a unit called “Ways of a Poet,” which begins with three brief lyrics on the nature of poetry:

What is poetry? Who knows?
Not a rose, but the scent of a rose . . . .
Eleanor Farjeon

The pearl is a disease of the oyster,
A poem is a disease of the spirit . . . .
Christopher Morley, “Bivalve”

If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off,
I know that it is poetry.
Emily Dickinson, from a letter to T. W Higginson

The literary genius in this anthology is Edgar Allan Poe, in a unit called “Once Upon a Midnight.” (This is one of the ones I shared with eighth graders; they ate it up!) The landmarks of literature include, of course, The Odyssey and Kidnapped as well as others.

(5) Units address the needs and concerns of young adolescents. One, for example, “The Inner Circle,” deals with family tensions and surrogate families, forced into close relationships. The longer work is Mari Sandoz’s Winter Thunder about a teacher and her pupils surviving a snowstorm in the Midwest. Another such unit begins with Carl Sandburg’s “Phizzog,” which introduces a theme of particular importance to eighth- and ninth-graders:

This face you got,
This here phizzog you carry around,
You never picked it out for yourself at all, at all — did you?

The unit focuses on young people overcoming obstacles and handicaps and culminates with The Miracle Worker, about the angry, rebellious young blind girl, Helen Keller, and her teacher, Annie Sullivan. It is paired with a selection from Keller’s own Story of My Life. (This is another unit I taught myself, and I can attest to its effectiveness.)

(6) Editorial paraphernalia are kept to a minimum, but there are study questions directing students’ attention to further implications of the works and to literary techniques. The glossary and word studies were prepared by a lexicographer from Webster’s Third International Dictionary, who dealt with the nature of language and ways to improve vocabulary.

(7) But I have retained for last what I consider a unique and important feature of the series. When English as a high-school subject was defined by the Committee of Ten in 1893, it combined literature, rhetoric, and grammar. It separated literature from the other humanities — for example, art and music —, and these never made it into the common curriculum in most USAmerican high schools. Each unit in Insights addresses this oversight by including a wealth of visual art, in various media: painting, sculpture, tapestry, drawings, prints, cartoons; and in various styles: primitive, classical, abstract, impressionistic.

Not only are such works scattered throughout the text to illustrate the selections, but for each unit there is a Gallery. Large, poster-size prints of these works went along with the series for teachers to display in their classrooms. (I still have one of these prints hanging prominently in my study.) For example, in the Inner Circle Gallery, there are works by Pablo Picasso, Winslow Homer, Kathe Kollwitz, Edward Hopper, Thomas Hart Benton, Mary Cassatt, and others. You can just imagine the contrasts they provide and the discussion they might provoke. Call to Adventure juxtaposes Raphael’s St. George and the Dragon with a Russian icon from the fourteenth century; hunting scenes from a stone relief of seventh-century Nineveh and from a primitive American painter of a buffalo hunter, and another of a hunter and his hound from Winslow Homer; and battle scenes from Géricault and Paolo Ucello juxtaposed with the Bayeaux Tapestry from Normandy, France.

Once again literature is one of the arts, and the study of English has been extended to become a study of the humanities. And, by the way, for those traditionalists interested in E. D. Hirsch’s “cultural literacy,” there is an abundance of people, titles, and terms: Aesop and Shakespeare along with Audubon and Renoir; foreshadowing and irony along with high art and romanticism and caricature.

“How many a man / has dated a new era in his life / from the reading of a book,” Thoreau says, in a found poem used as an epigraph for this book. How many a fourteen-year-old must have been touched by the “insights” of this text.

Oh, nowadays, I would supplement the text with CDS of music, from classical to jazz; with topics to be explored in daily newspapers, on cable television, and on the Internet; with lists of books from the library for personal reading and browsing. But Carlsen showed us the way. Would that a program called No Child Left Behind envisioned such a humanistic way of teaching and learning.… (plus d'informations)