1. QCR520 Approaches
-Prose 2: teaching the novel –
-Apologies – forgot to bring your
assignments. 

2. Activity
• In groups, talk about the novel each of you would
like to teach
– What level do you think the novel is suitable for and why
– What genre is it
– What time period is it set in
– What are some of its themes
– How would you introduce the text to the class

3. Quick History of Prose
• 600 – 1300 AD The Dark Ages: Beowulf (1100 AD)
• 1200 – 1450 AD The Middle Ages: Chaucer
(‘The Canterbury Tales’)
• 1500 – 1620 AD The Renaissance/Elizabethan period:
Cervantes (‘Don Quixote’)

4. The Rise of the Novel
• Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe (1719)/Moll Flanders
(1722)
• 1st
Person, supposedly authentic memoirs, episodic
• Jonathan Swift: Gulliver’s Travels (1726)/A Modest
Proposal (1729)
• Political satire/allegory
• Samuel Richardson: Pamela (1740)
• Epistolary
• Henry Fielding: Joseph Andrews (1742)
• 3rd
Person, Self-reflexive

5. 1750 – 1800 Age of Johnson
• Laurence Sterne:
Tristam Shandy (1759-67)
• Comic metafiction, disordered narrative
• Samuel Johnson:
Rasselas (1759)
• Moral

6. 1790 – 1840 The Romantics
• Austen: S n S (1811) Northanger Abbey (1818)
• Dickens: Oliver Twist(1838)
• Brontes: Wuthering Hts / Jane Eyre (1847)
• Scott: Ivanhoe (1819)
• J F Cooper: Last of Mohicans (1826)
• Poe: “Fall of the House of Usher” (1839)
• Shelley: Frankenstein (1817)
• Chapters in newspaper

7. 1830 – 1900 The Victorian Age
• Hugo: Hunchback (1831)
• Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter (1850)
• Melville: Moby Dick (1851)
• Eliot: Middlemarch (1872)
• Hardy: Tess (1891)

8. 1860 – 1910 Modern Age
• Wilde: Dorian Gray (1891)
• Alcott: Little Women (1868-9)
• Twain: Tom Sawyer (1876)
• James: Turn of the Screw (1898)
• Crane: Red Badge of Courage (1895)
• Carroll : Alice in Wonderland (1865)
• Verne: 20 000 Leagues under the sea (1870)
• Doyle: The Hound of the Baskervilles (1902)
• Stevenson: Treasure Island (1883)
• Stoker: Dracula (1897)
• Wells: War of the Worlds (1898)

9. 1900 – 1915 Edwardian Age
• Conrad: Heart of Darkness (1902)
• Maugham {mawm}: Painted Veil (1925)
• Lawrence: Sons and Lovers (1913)
• London: Call of the Wild (1903)
• Henry: “Gift of the Magi” (1906)
• Wharton: The Age of Innocence (1920)

10. 1916 – 1945 Modernism
• Joyce: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
• Woolf: To the Lighthouse (1927)
• Forster: A Passage to India (1924)
• Huxley: Brave New World (1932)
• Waugh: A Handful of Dust (1934)
• Fitzgerald: The Great Gatsby (1925)
• Faulkner: As I Lay Dying (1930)
• Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises (1926)
• Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
• du Maurier: Rebecca (1938)

11. Post-War till 1960
• Orwell: 1984 (1948)
• Golding: Lord of the Flies (1954)
• Greene: The Third Man (1949)
• Mailer: The Naked and the Dead (1948)
• Tolkien: Lord of the Rings (1955)
• Asimov: “I, Robot” (1950)

12. 1960 to Present
• Spark: Prime of Ms Jean Brodie (1961)
• Lessing: The Golder Notebook (1962)
• Updike: The Witches of Eastwick (1984)
• Bellow: Herzog (1964)
• Rushdie:Midnight’s Children (1981)
• King: It (1986)
• Rice: Interview with the Vampire (1976)

13. Proviso
• The periods of an author's writing are arbitrary.
• This does not account for Post-Colonial (e.g. Naipaul,
Achebe etc), European Literature (e.g. French,
Russian, Australian, South American etc).
Read “Analyzing Fiction” Handout

14. Using Background information in
Literature
• In which time period was the novel written?
• What was the prevailing ideology of the age? What was the spirit of
the age (zeitgist)?
• What was society like during that time?
• What changes were being made socially, scientifically, politically,
economically? How did the sexes treat each other? How was
society structured? What modern inventions were changing the
world?
• At what stage was the development of the novel/literature? What
were the prevailing styles?
• How does the socio-historical background relevant to the novel?
• Why did the novel appear at that time? Was it a result of the world
it originated from? Is it an accurate depiction of its world? Is it
critical of its world?

15. Teaching the Novel
• Most important decision?
– Which novel do I do.
– Teacher’s preference vs Students’ Interest
– Anglo- vs Local : Availability of Material e.g. Resources,
Past Exam Questions
– Classic or Modern
– Perception of Students’ Ability
– Proportion to rest of curriculum / approach
– Length of text vs time available

16. Disclaimer
• Every novel demands a novel approach!

17. Preparing to teach the Novel
• Read the text AND annotate
• Notes: NUS, past notes, colleagues
• Starting points: Cliff notes
• Internet web-sites
• NUS library

18. Challenges in teaching the novel
• Organising your content
• Bulk of interpretation
• Building on schema and Making it relevant
• First four weeks – what do I do while they are reading
•  give them early start while you are teaching something
else
• Can’t talk about the novel as a whole until they have read
• Students who do not read
•  choose shorter novels  assign certain no of pgs by given
date  mid-term check with questions abt the text
• Students who read but like never read
• Spoilers and revealing the ending

19. The First Four Weeks
• Background Knowledge (Biographical, Generic,
Historical, Topical, Contextual)
• Title, Cover, Blurb, Predictions, Internal Structure of
the book, overview, chapter
• Approaches to studying the novel: Teach them to
‘read’
• Paying special attention to Chap One – how it
foreshadows what is to come, getting used to
author’ style

20. Close Reading
• Teaching from the Microcosm
• “In every great novel, there is a passage that when deeply
understood, reveals how the author develops character,
establishes tension, creates dramatic movement. With that
understanding, the student can read the rest of the novel
more insightfully.”

21. General Rule
• You cannot cover everything.
Equip your students with skills.
• "a sense of the whole that provides the student with
some control over a major work of art, and a sense
that there are still further dimensions to investigate"
•

22. Activity
• From your book, pick a paragraph that narrates a
significant event or exemplifies the author’s style
best. Decide the start and end point. Phrase a
question for analysis.
– Pass your passage and question to your partner. Have your
partner do a practical criticism on it.

23. Titles on the current O Level Syllabus
• Chinua Achebe: Things Fall Apart
• Merle Hodge: Crick Crack, Monkey
• John Wyndham: The Chrysalids
• Gwee, Li Sui (ed.): Telltale: 11 Stories
• Pearl S. Buck: The Good Earth
• Anita Desai: Fasting, Feasting
• Mildred D. Taylor: Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry
• Prescribed texts for 2012 & 2013

24. For tomorrow:
• Fiction 55
– Eg
• Tommy and Frank sat quietly at the bar nursing their beers. Neither said
anything – it wasn’t their way – but they were worried about Mark. It
wasn’t like him to not show up… not even for something as trivial as
happy hour.
Suddenly the door burst open. “Drinks are on me, fellas! I’m having a
boy!”
• My only true masterpiece. Fifty-five careful, eloquent words. Laying the
page on the table, I waited for his praise.
“Fifty-six.”
“…What?”
“You’ve made a mistake. That word’s hyphenated.” A smile. “Better luck
next time.”
The crimson droplets look misplaced, scattered on my manuscript. But at
least nobody will ever again threaten its perfection.

25. Your task
• "You’ve lost weight, Mom."
"Got to watch my figure for Dad."
"You’re 82, Mom. Dad’s dead. You need to eat!"
"Don’t harp at me, sonny Jim. Your Mom knows best."
A month later, Jim asks: "What’d she die of?"
"Malnutrition," the doctor replies, "weren’t you looking after
her?"
"Did the best I could," Jim shrugs.
• Write your version of Fiction 55