Let me say right away that this post will focus on an exercise I’ve used in my literature classes. I think (and hope) the idea could be useful to folks in other disciplines as well.
If you’ve spent much time on the internet (and if you’re here at ProfHacker, I’m guessing you have), then you’re likely familiar with the mashup. A mashup usually refers to a creative work that blends two distinct works into one composition. One of the most famous mashups is Danger Mouse’s The Grey Album, which blends rapper Jay-Z’s The Black Album with The Beatles’ The White Album. The mashup isn’t only a musical genre, however. Internet culture thrives on mashups of all kinds: music, images, videos, and texts. Folks on twitter suggested some more examples from around the web (and beyond), including KanyeNewYorkerTweets, which blends New Yorker cartoons and tweets from Kayne West; Avada Kedavra, which blends Harry Potter villains and the music of Disney’s The Lion King; Buffy vs. Edward, which pits the teen vampire hunter against the teen vampire heartthrob; and the rash of recent classic-lit/horror blends such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, or Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (the last not strictly classic lit, I know, but it follows the trend).
The best mashups juxtapose materials deliberately; they make the implicit explicit. They expose or highlight underlying features of the source materials—formal, thematic, or stylistic—that casual listeners, viewers, or readers might miss.
In my classes, I’ve experimented with mashups in order to help students think about literary style. I started doing this when I noticed that my students often sensed stylistic differences between writers, but had difficulty articulating those differences. So, I opened a class on Virginia Woolf by asking students to rewrite a few paragraphs from To the Lighthouse in the style of Ernest Hemingway, who we’d read the week before. My students jumped into the project with vigor—they had fun breaking Woolf’s fluid, poetic prose into terse, Hemingwayan staccato. The version of “Hemingway” they produced was no doubt exaggerated, but that became part of our classroom discussion that day—the realities of authorial style versus the sterotypical versions of that style that filter into popular consciousness.
Since then, I’ve used versions of this exercise several times, each time to good effect. Most recently, I asked students in my US Literature to 1865 class to rewrite the introduction to Rebecca Harding Davis’ gritty, realist short story “Life in the Iron Mills”—in which Harding Davis describes a smoky “town of iron-works” in antebellum western Virginia—in the exuberant free verse of Walt Whitman. The results were wonderful: some groups kept many of Harding Davis’ words, but worked to blend her grim fatalism into a Whitmanian celebration of American industry. Others translated the introduction more fully into Whitmanian verse—with long, careening lines; lists; and chanted, repeating words; but carried into that verse Harding Davis’ somber tone. Other groups found a point of intersection in both authors’ reformist ideologies, and developed their poems from there. After the groups read their mashups, we discussed what choices each group had made and why. This discussion led to insights about both Harding Davis and Whitman, which we used as launching points for the day’s broader discussion of Leaves of Grass.
So far I’ve only played with mashups in class—as short exercises to introduce the topic of a particular day’s discussion—but they’ve been so successful that I’m pondering a more formal mashup assignment in my literature classes. These assignments are also decidedly low tech. While I suspect that my students’ familiarity with mashup culture helps them engage with these assignments, I’ve not yet asked them to employ audio, video, or the like to complete them—that’s another refinement I’m considering. If you’ve used mashups in your classes (especially in disciplines outside of English), let us hear about the assignment and its results in the comments. If you’ve used tech in your mashup assignments, let us hear about that, too.
For those who are curious, here’s one of my students’ Harding Davis/Whitman blends. Thanks to Megan Duff and her group, who generously agreed to share with the world:
“Life in the Iron Mills”
By: Walt Whitman (aka US Lit 1 students)Life in the iron mills
I see yet another cloudy day
The air stifles me, thick, clammy, foul
All is smoke! I see it roll
Smoke on the wharves, smoke on the dingy boats,
Smoke on the yellow river
Smoke everywhere!—smoke clinging
Coating, greasy on the house frontI see the dull face of the passerby
Oh these men! With drunken faces,
Full of unawakened power
Asking nothing of this world
Yet their lives ask it, their deaths ask it
Long have I hoped! Long have I desired! that others
Will see this perfume tinted dawn
So fair with promise, Hope to come
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14 Responses to Mashups in the Literature Classroom
frostdavis17 - December 9, 2010 at 3:49 pm
I used to use a similar exercise in a writing class to help my students understand that style was a choice. I had them read a translation of Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen, which, even in translation is full of rhetorical devices, and then produce their own encomium of a controversial figure. The really obvious style of Gorgias made it an easy style to replicate. Plus the opportunity to combine that style with a figure from pop culture (like Barney) really engaged the students.
Rebecca Davis
National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education
ryanshoover - December 9, 2010 at 3:50 pm
I did a mashup this semester in an entry-level rhetorical theories course. For the final project students had to create a unique rhetorical message that had its origins in a class discussion. I opened the door for them technologically so that they could use whatever media format they chose. Most did videos posted to YouTube. Many did PowerPoint image collages. Two did written works (an apologetic speech and a letter to Obama).
Once the students actually figured out what I was talking about, they really ran with the assignment. Several said to me that it was the most fun assignment they’d had all semester and was a good break from written essays (they’re English Writing & Rhetoric majors). And they put in far more effort than they would have in a traditional 10 page double spaced Times New Roman-type essay.
mark_sample - December 9, 2010 at 5:23 pm
These are great ideas, Ryan. I’ve done similar assignments in my literature classes. I’ve found the farther apart the source texts are from each other, the more effective the mashups are in making questions about form and genre approachable to students. One thing I wanted to add is that readers interested in literary mashups should also check out Jason’s classic post on ProfHacker about Ivanhoe, a literary game that students can play.
rwpickard - December 9, 2010 at 5:24 pm
I usually just think of this as a translation exercise — it works well, but I’ll see about calling it a mashup, and maybe offering more options.
In my first-year comp classes, I get students to rewrite their readings in the style of other readings occasionally. Early in the term, I assign curmudgeonly readings that complain about “kids these days” and provoke them. I acknowledge the provocation, and in the end they tend to say the article wasn’t wrong, just incendiary, so then they have to translate parts of it so that it could be addressed to them without hitting the argh button.
They’re good at it, and they’re always interested to notice that they really do understand intuitively something about register and diction and discourse communities!
jfishergwu - December 10, 2010 at 12:58 pm
I did this mashup-ie exercise in a recent contemporary American lit survey. I was taching Pynchon, whose style is really tough going at first blush. Therefore, to give my students both a point of reference and a sense of how far Pynchon’s reach can be, I showed a ten-minute segment from The Simpsons Movie, and I had them transcribe it word for word. Transcriptions ran thusly: “Bart and Homer nail roofing shingles. Homer hits himself in the eye with hammer. Bart skateboards naked. Bart gets chained to a lamppost. Homer rescues Spider Pig.” And the like (their’s were much better than mine).
In any case, what we saw, once the action was transcribed into language, was the really non-linear, herky-jerky style of The Simposns (and, by extension, Family Guy, etc.). My students then started talking about how the narrative gaps, for some reason, don’t seem quite so large when viewed, as opposed to when read. The nature of humor also came up: The Simpsons seemed less funny on paper than it did on the screen.
After all that, we read Pynchon. At the end of the class, many of my students found our days on him to be the best ones in the course. One of them even took up reading V. on her own over the summer.
mliber - December 11, 2010 at 4:59 pm
When teaching paraphrasing to first-year students, I sometimes ask them to paraphrase in a different voice or style (let’s say a politician, an actor, or singer or a valley girl). One student improvised a hip-hop paraphrase of an excerpt from the Gettysburg Address. Students have fun with it!
lucytartan - December 12, 2010 at 9:50 pm
For the last couple of years I’ve offered students in my upper level course on 20th/21st century women’s writing the chance to write papers with techniques like this – though I’ve never thought of calling the assignments ‘mashups’, which is odd, since my husband was at one time a fairly well known mashup artist (some of his work is here.
One topic that has produced some exquisite work is the invitation for students to make a piece that is basically the Barthesian ’tissue of quotations drawn from the innumerable centres of culture’ – the piece must address one of the course themes, eg testimony, modesty, illness. There is a recent Harper’s piece by Jonathan Lethem, on ‘originality’, which pastiches various quotations. Showing students this helps a lot in guiding them to think about what could be done with this form.
mrsj02 - December 13, 2010 at 2:05 pm
In the spirit of the season: these musical mashups have been around for several years: http://music.aol.com/album/what-if-mozart-wrote-have-yourself-a/7251
profhanley - December 15, 2010 at 7:00 pm
I’ve been experimenting with student-produced YouTube mashups for several semesters now. Some examples and commentary here: http://www.babylonisburning.net/?p=134
shakenandstirred - July 21, 2011 at 8:55 am
Signed a contract for a tenure-track position in April. Was in frequent contact with the dept chair and the dean in advance of my cross-country move and arrival three months later, to no avail; when I showed up, it was as if no one who could get anything done had been told that I was coming.
What they could have done to make me feel better about my transition: made sure that I had an office, furniture, a computer, and a bookstore account to order textbooks for my classes – *before* classes started five weeks later. I spent those five weeks trying to get these very basic things done, and was stymied at every turn. By the time school started I was exhausted and frustrated, and seriously questioning my decision to take the position.
Turns out that my “welcome wagon” experience was a pretty good indicator of how the place is run more generally.
dbcarr - July 21, 2011 at 11:54 am
My initial days at my first job many years ago were fairly typical, I suspect. I was fortunate enough to have a general orientation courtesy of the institution, and my department chair and individual colleagues took great pains to welcome me. Various experiences turned the warmth of the on-campus interview into a cold, somewhat distant memory. Much of this had to do with the shock of adjusting to a new region and culture, but a few incidents on campus added to my suspicion that I was in fact another worker drone–albeit one with some perquisites and privileges–after all.
For example, although my personnel papers were in order and my office ready to go, but my computer hadn’t arrived. When it did appear, I discovered that I’d foolishly failed to request a printer under the assumption that the department had a common printer or other means for us to publish our work; I also had no computer desk. (My office desk was insufficient to the task.) The department staff found old castoffs for both of these needs, but they were barely functional.
The positive conclusion was that my frequent requests for upgrades to these items helped spur the department to start updating all faculty equipment, as most people had rather decrepit units. The department never failed to keep all faculty computers up to date from that point. When I left that appointment, I made certain at the new job to request every need that hadn’t been provided the first time around.
What would have made the experience better was an introduction to the way things realistically worked at the institution or even, as one colleague put it, “where to find staples and paper clips.” Sometimes these minor details mean a lot to the disoriented new hire.
bioprofe - July 21, 2011 at 7:45 pm
Wow! Do these musings bring back memories! I agreed to the terms proffered by my current institution at the end of May but, as was mentioned by shakenandstirred, nothing was really ready for my arrival by the first week in August. Inasmuch as I am in a developing country but one that is part of the US Compact of Freely Associated States, I couldn’t have imagined that things would be in the state in which I found them-no textbooks for one of the classes I was scheduled to teach; no office (the previous tenant had gone to the States for the summer and had taken the key and the physical plant personnel did not want to break the lock to get me inside); no computer I could take home and work on (An old desktop was resurrected and set up on a table in the shared department copy room after 5 days so that I could finally send e-mail ) until near the end of September; no institution-wide, common grading program in use and although a few instructors used Moodle, no one offered to teach the new hires how to set it up and with three lecture and lab classes to prep for, I did not ask someone to show me…and the list could go on!
Fortunately, my best friend (wife) arrived just in the nick of time to restore some sanity to my life and prevent me from bailing out on my 2 year commitment before it really began! Looking back, at least I was fortunate to get leied, with fresh flowers even, upon my arrival at the airport, something I had not experienced in 38 years! (lol)
dochalladay - July 26, 2011 at 11:19 pm
I’ve just moved to the town where my new academic position will begin in a few weeks. I’ve yet to venture onto campus, but I wanted to share one experience of this relocation that I encourage people to keep in mind when welcoming new faculty/staff/administrators. When I arrived last week, four of my new colleagues (along with two spouses and one adorable child) showed up to help unload the moving truck. Most of these were people I hadn’t spoken to since my interview more than four months ago. As a single person moving to a strange town, I could not have felt more welcomed and supported during such a stressful time of transition. As important as it is to settle into the new workplace environment, remember how difficult the non-workplace transition can be, and do what you can to help.
drdonnaw - August 17, 2011 at 2:03 pm
Catching up on Chronicle articles this week certainly drew me to this recent posting. My “welcoming” saga to my academic academic administrative position occurred several years ago. As an out-of-state finalist, I was invited to the campus interview, but told to make my own travel arrangements (flight, hotel, car rental). I received no communication about who would meet me at the college, no driving directions, travel reimbursement forms/procedures–get the picture? As an experienced professional educator, I should have known better than to have accepted the position, which I did in the interest of a new professional challenge! I also thought that in the interest of collaboration, we all need to help one another and not stand on ceremony to get things done. A challenge it was–no voice mail (go and purchase an answering machine at the office supply store), requesting my assistant be on the lookout for two surplus filing cabinets (you can go out and buy some for yourself), requesting an appropriate desk chair from facilities since the straight-back dining room chair did not fit. In this case, what arrived was a desk chair with broken leg, torn, dirty and non-working height adjustment. Few individuals dropped by to say “hello and welcome”. Those who did make their way to my office were not the Welcome Wagon. Instead, they were the “Personal Agenda Wagon”, requesting favors, reduced workloads, travel money, etc. Like others who have posted to this message blog, I was more than stymied. Unlike others, I should have learned early on with these events, that the workplace environment would not improve–it certainly did not. What should have been my clues to exit, lingered for almost four years–thinking that I could survive by determination and fortitude. I did leave and left academic administration permanently.