Teaching Allegory

Teaching Allegory

In my Senior British Literature class we have been looking at P.B.Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound. Going into this mini-unit I was aware that it would be a rough road. I felt that my passion for Prometheus Unbound would carry over to my students. I was wrong -sort of.

As a class we first looked at a brief biography of P.B. Shelley’s life. Then over the course of the next few days we began to read Shelley’s epic. I had the students read ala Reader’s Theatre, where everyone was assigned a part and would pop up out their seat when reading, flailing their arms, screwing around with their voices, etc. This seemed to go ok for the actual epic. We would stop and try to look for clarity using an allegorical model. Students seemed to respond pretty well to all of this-god bless them. They liked the traditional allegory of Prometheus as a revolutionary and Jupiter as a tyrant. This is the one that Mary Shelley alluded to in a note to Shelley’s posthumous published Complete Works.

The reading of the two acts (we didn’t read three or four) went considerably well, especially considering that these are seniors, in their last semester, in their last fifty-minutes of school. Students appreciated the clarification, seemed to like Shelley’s philosophy and enjoyed looking at the epic as an allegorical model, or so I thought.

To cap off our reading of Prometheus Unbound we looked at two critics. One John Rieder who is a difficult and terrible writer. In the article we read he goes over the allegorical importance, characters, etc. We then read an article by Newman who is much easier to read and writes developing a seemingly logical argument that provides plenty of evidence. He’s kind-of like the John Stossell of Shelley critics. Newman writes there is no allegorical model in Prometheus Unbound.

We would read these articles in class. I would do most of the reading aloud. Students who read along were to pick fifteen vocabulary words that they were unfamiliar with and got in the way of their understanding of the article. They were to use five of these vocab words to give a summary of a portion of the article. I felt that this homework assignment would strengthen reading skills for these soon to be college freshmen. It seemed to go over pretty well. Except, I only had about three-quarters of my class interested.

In the end, I gave my students an assessment that they were to argue against Newman’s article and create their own brief article-that was to be published in the New Yorker. The context was that they were professors that had made their career upon their interpretation of Shelley’s poem as an allegorical model. Their task was to argue against Newman using examples from the text, etc. Their tenure relied upon this. I selected two passages from the text for students to choose from. And this is when reality came crashing in.

Three-quarters of my students began to work in class and the other quarter was lost. I tried to prompt them to start making sense of what they felt the passage meant, but as it turned out many of them agreed with the Newman article. They asked if they could just agree with Newman and write a brief couple of paragraphs on why he was right. I said no and tried to continue helping these students.

Any ideas for differentiation with this assessment? I feel that I put a few of my students at a great disadvantage by not allowing more alternatives.