The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, th... by Drew Hayes

There are some titles, both medieval and popular, that could have some real classroom use, but aren’t always available in accessible forms, which makes them even more likely to remain obscure. I know this because I asked, and upon further reflection I figured out that the movie might be slightly older than some of the younger students. Even Stoppard’s biggest commercial/popular hit, Shakespeare in Love, isn’t as well known to students in a first year introduction to literature class. Because it isn’t a classroom standard, it’s less likely that students will have studied it previously, and some students might be more interested because this play is something new to them that they haven’t even heard of. I have used Tom Stoppard’s The Real Inspector Hound before as well, and students generally respond well to it, although this is definitely a play where you need to use both the script and a performance.

With some extra annotation and lecture framing, these texts are not too hard for a student to look up either for background or for translations or secondary analysis. I have taught a few things that aren’t staples in surveys of global literature and British literature, but Ovid’s Amores, Boethius‘ Consolation of Philosophy, Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Mankind are all canonical, at least tangentially, in terms of general Western literature.

Recently the idea came to my attention of the question of accessibility of some less than canonical authors and texts that still might be useful in a literature survey. I teach a lot of survey courses, often to non-English majors.

The Utterly Uninteresting and Unadventurous Tales of Fred, th... by Drew Hayes