One of the best and funniest student evaluations I have ever
received read: "if this professor taught a course on Hell and how
to get there I would take it." This generous compliment sounded
like a good course idea, and a year or so later, Dr. Caroline Perkins
and I successfully proposed an honors seminar called "Heaven, Hell,
and Purgatory in Literature and Culture." Like other programs
described in previous issues of Honors in Practice, the Marshall
University Honors Program is built on team-taught interdisciplinary
seminars--in this case Classics and English--and emphasizes student
leadership and collaborative learning.
Presumably "what happens to us after we die" is one of
humanity's oldest questions. Nonetheless, we wondered about the
type of student a class about life after death might attract in the
millennial age. While text-oriented Baby Boomers and Generation X
professors are likely to seek stories of the afterlife in classical
epics and scripture, our tech-savvy Generation Y students, fans of
Twilight and players of MMORPGs, may well have other ideas not only
about where to find stories about the afterlife but about the definition
of the term. Also, while the topic sounds interesting enough, the course
implicitly promises to waver between eternal bliss and perpetual
damnation, to acquaint students with angels as well as devils, and at
some point to evoke terror; after all, we are talking about dying. Most
of all, we recognized that, like other college experiences, the course
might question cherished beliefs, overtly or subtly, depending not so
much on our presentation of the material as on the individual
student's reaction to it. Fortunately my teaching partner
skillfully wrapped up our first day's discussion with a simple
summary, which turned out to be a fitting description of our semester:
"we bring the literature, you bring the culture." We have
taught "Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory in Literature and Culture"
twice now, meeting once a week for two and a half hours and maintaining
the momentum of the seminar during the week with postings on our web
discussion board.
SETTING UP THE SEMESTER
Our first two seminar meetings were devoted to setting up the
semester by broadly surveying works that address the afterlife,
articulating our own cultural understanding(s) of the afterlife, and
reading two stories that displace common modern western concepts of the
afterlife. As a way to introduce ourselves and the students to one
another, we asked each seminar participant to name a work that offers a
glimpse of the next world. We recorded each answer on the board in a
grid that reflected both genre (literature, visual arts, performing
arts) and place (heaven, hell, purgatory). It became immediately clear
that not everything fit neatly into a category, an important first
principle for the semester. We also gave students time to free-write on
their understanding of the general concepts of heaven, hell, and
purgatory, and then we formally introduced the course with a PowerPoint
presentation that anticipated some of their responses.
Our PowerPoint presentation began with Fra Angelico's Christ
in Limbo (c. 1440-1445) and an Eastern Orthodox icon Christ Enthroned in
Heaven (c. 1700). We followed these calm traditional images with the
works of well-known artists: Hieronymus Bosch's creepy gothic
triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights (c. 1504), which depicts a
surreal paradise and a sickening hell; Jan Brueghel the Younger's
Paradise (c. 1620), the epitome of lush edenic greenery and animal life
in peaceful coexistence; and an engraved illustration of a spiraling
heaven from Dante's Divine Comedy by Gustave Dore (1832-1883). We
rounded out our collection of the visual arts with two images our
students would not have anticipated, a painting of Reincarnation in the
Hindu tradition and Dante Gabriel Rossetti's The Blessed Damozel
(1871-79), in which a woman looks longingly down from heaven at her
still-living love interest. our first slide on the performing arts--a
still shot of heaven from the film What Dreams May Come (1998)--picked
up on this idea of someone in heaven pining for someone elsewhere. To
bring in popular culture in its most familiar forms, we included a clip
from the Fox cartoon The Simpsons (Season 5, Episode 1F04), now the
longest running comedy in television history; an opening scene from the
irreverent Comedy Central animated series Southpark (Season 10, Episode
11), as Satan plans "the biggest Halloween party ever"; and a
three-minute segment of Will & Grace (NBC, 1998-2006), in which one
of the characters hallucinates that Cher is g(G)od and that heaven is
populated with scantily clad male angels. We also showed some
predictable cartoons and a 2002 car commercial in which those doomed to
hell have to drive minivans rather than the Hyundai Tiburon. We closed
our PowerPoint presentation with Cynthia Rylant's beautifully
illustrated Cat Heaven, a book written for children but equally
appealing to adults, in which cats fly down from trees, sniff catnip in
the air, and curl up in God's bed. This walking tour of high art
mixed with popular culture previewed the movement of our course from
traditional to modern with numerous permutations in between.
While our first seminar meeting was dedicated to voicing common
ideas about the afterlife, our second seminar meeting revisited these
ideas from a purely visual perspective. In a nod to our school's
renewed emphasis on different learning modalities, we asked our students
to construct sets of collages depicting heaven, hell, and purgatory.
This hands-on exercise, low-stakes and ungraded, had the added benefit
of ice-breaking among the students, who were now assigned into groups
for the first unit. We supplied each group with a packet of current
popular magazines, scissors, glue sticks, and paper. Some groups
coordinated their efforts and prepared a trio of collages on a common
theme while others constructed three independent collages. We asked
students not to label their work and to avoid the words
"heaven," "hell," and "purgatory." Groups
had fifty minutes to complete their work, after which they taped the
finished collages individually on the blackboard. Once our impromptu
"gallery" was complete, the students walked around the room to
see if they could determine which aspect of the afterlife was
illustrated in each collage. We then reassembled the collages into trios
to look for themes. Predictably, all groups chose red or black as the
background for their hell and lighter colors for heaven (powder blue)
and purgatory (yellow). All of the collages depicting hell vaunted
grotesque or frightening images; in some cases, students reassembled
ordinary photographs into disturbing compositions. Identifying the
heaven collages was also fairly easy, but the images here varied widely
in theme and composition. Purgatory, on the other hand, was surprisingly
consistent: most groups built their collages out of pictures of watches,
clocks, and calendars (images of time) or ladders and escalators (images
of ascent).
Armed with the earlier discussion and our collage gallery, we
completed our introduction to the seminar by reading two brief texts:
Plato's "The Myth of Er" (The Republic 10.614-10.621, c.
380 BC) and Robert Olen Butler's short story "Jealous Husband
Returns in Form of Parrot" (1995/1996), the title of which
summarizes the plot. Separated by more than two millennia, both works
leave modern readers unsatisfied: they elude the now familiar Abrahamic
beliefs but propose similarly certain models of the afterlife; they
advance the concept of reincarnation but withhold the promise of any
final reward; and they ascribe consequences for one's earthly
actions but do so with an unnerving sense of scale. Within this context,
we set out to explore the afterlife as it appears in literature and
culture.
We were in good company, of course. Odysseus, Aeneas, Innana, and
Orpheus served as our first guides, followed by figures from the Bible,
Dante (himself escorted by Virgil), Milton, and C. S. Lewis. As these
names indicate, our core readings made giant leaps in chronology and
were confined to the cultures of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, Ancient
Sumeria, Medieval Italy, and Medieval and Modern England. Our major
assignment was designed to balance out the course's largely
Eurocentric nature. Early in the semester we invited students to
research the afterlife beliefs of a culture not represented on our
reading list and to present a summary of their findings to the class.
Popular choices among our students included Japanese Shinto, Ancient
Egyptian, Native North American, Native South American, Ancient Irish,
Nordic, and Caribbean. While in both semesters our students chose
geo-historical cultures, we would have been equally interested to see
what they would do with culture in a more nuanced definition (gay
culture, biker culture, blind culture, etc).
Once they reported their findings, students met in small groups
based on overlapping, related, or geographically-proximate cultures, and
identified common beliefs as well as beliefs particular to each culture.
Students continued to study their selected cultures throughout the
semester, with their work culminating in a final project: an anthology
of ten items that best reflect that culture's afterlife beliefs
selected from paintings, sculptures, architectural drawings, music,
literature, prayers or rituals, photographs, ceremonial dress, and
popular articles. Students introduced their collections with polished
prefaces that expanded on their earlier reports to the class and
described the contents of their anthologies, identifying each item and
explaining its significance. We encouraged our students to think of this
project as setting up a museum display introducing the general public to
concepts of the afterlife central to the culture under exploration. on
the last day of the semester, students put their anthologies "on
exhibit" for the class and answered questions about their
collections. This semester-long project built on the skills practiced in
the other three formal assignments, which students completed in groups.
CRITICALLY THINKING OUR WAY INTO HELL ...
our three group assignments asked students to explore how a
well-selected cultural artifact--a medieval play, a work of art, a
modern film--reflects ideas about the afterlife. These efforts provided
an ideal occasion to focus overtly on critical thinking. Like many other
higher-education institutions, Marshall university is revising its
general curriculum to emphasize critical thinking. At Marshall, this
revision includes putting into place a new first-year seminar and
formally designating specific lower level courses as "CT"
(critical thinking). In this context, we attempted to incorporate new
challenges in critical thinking by moving away from formal papers and
inviting students to process the course materials in less academically
traditional ways. In addition to requiring critical thinking, this
approach drew on the related concept of multiple literacies, encouraging
students to extend their talents beyond strictly writing and speaking.
We introduced each unit with a hands-on, in-class group activity that
anticipated the analytical skills and learning modalities to be engaged
in that unit: students plotted a route through our city to stage a
series of short plays as we began the medieval unit, illustrated a canto
of Dante's Inferno with modeling clay, and sketched a storyboard
for the opening minute of a film version of Milton's Paradise Lost.
In each case, my teaching partner and I were more interested in our
students' creative and cooperative processes during these in-class
activities than in the resulting products.
The first of our formal assignments, interpreting a medieval play,
had the greatest potential for disorienting our research-paper-oriented
honors students. We asked our students to process and report their
understanding of the underworld as presented in "The Harrowing of
Hell" (also called "The Deliverance of Souls") by
designing a costume and stage for the play. Their goal was to integrate
the thematic concerns of the text with the practical challenges of
performance. The assignment also served as a good reminder that when it
comes to drama--whether in ancient Greece or on Broadway--the text
provides only part of the story.
"The Harrowing of Hell" appears in all four English
Corpus Christi cycles; the version we used is part of the Wakefield
Cycle. The plays in Wakefield were performed on outdoor platforms from
the end of the fourteenth to the middle of the sixteenth centuries. The
play cycles begin with the fall of Lucifer and end with the Last
Judgment, essentially staging humanity's entire history in the
course of a single day; they were produced by various trade guilds and
performed by the community.
"The Harrowing of Hell" opens as Jesus sends a light into
hell to indicate His imminent arrival. The captives in hell--Adam, Eve,
Isaiah, Simeon, John the Baptist, Moses, and later Daniel and
David--react to this light with great joy, each making personal
connections to it; Moses, for example, refers to Christ's
Transfiguration in Mark 9:2-8; Matthew 17:1-3 and Luke 9:28-36. Ribald
and Beelzebub, devils in hell, react to the sounds of happiness from the
captives and then to the sound of Jesus's voice as He commands the
gates of hell to open. The devils plan to drive Jesus from the gates,
and Satan himself arrives demanding to know the cause of the commotion.
Daniel and David tell the devils that their efforts to stop Jesus are
doomed to failure. At Jesus's commands, the gates of hell crumble,
and the minor devils flee. The dialogue between Jesus and Satan briefly
addresses the nature of this hell, during which it is made clear that
the righteous souls of the Old Testament were not in hell because of
Satan's power but in anticipation of this moment's glory. The
play ends with Satan asking Jesus to take him as well, and, when Jesus
says no, Satan asks that some souls be left behind. The captives proceed
out of hell. Jesus's rescue of souls from the underworld is
mentioned in the Apostles' Creed--"He descended into
hell"--and the story itself is found in the apocryphal Gospel of
Nicodemus. As British literary scholar David Bevington explains,
"The apocryphal account of Christ's deliverance of souls had
become universally accepted in medieval Christianity because it answered
an essential question: what happened to the souls of the righteous
during those years of Old Testament history from Adam's fall to the
advent of Christ?" (594). Bevington describes Christ's defeat
of Satan as "appropriately comic" and Satan's followers
as "ludicrous"; "they raise the alarm in a noisy panic,
shore up useless defenses against Christ's entry, and turn on one
another in an orgy of mutual recriminations" (594).
Bevington clarifies that the play "explicitly differentiates
between hell as a place of eternal torment and limbo as a temporary
residence for the patriarchs" (594); this distinction is the key to
our students' understanding of how to stage this play. The setting
is not a place of fire and brimstone, but rather a place of waiting.
Similarly, in his translated edition of The Wakefield Mystery Plays,
Martial Rose identifies "the acting areas specified in this play
[as] paradise, limbo, and hell" (544). Bevington and Rose recognize
this hell as a place where souls are deprived of the vision of God. The
Catholic Catechism, which explains the theology at work in the Corpus
Christi Cycle, identifies this broad and general hell with the Hebrew
concept of Sheol or the Greek idea of Hades (par. 633).
This idea of a general holding place, a type of limbo, is easily
transportable to other periods and cultures, and we posed this challenge
to our students as they worked in small groups to design a costume and
stage set for a modern production of this play. Groups presented their
ideas in myriad ways, from small-scale sets built in packaging boxes to
detailed layouts sketched out on poster boards. on the day the
assignment was due, students set up their finished projects throughout
the room for general viewing, after which each group had six minutes to
explain its project's design and the rationale behind it. This
activity then led to a discussion of the major staging concerns of the
play, which remain constant between the Middle Ages and the twenty-first
century: At what point does Jesus open the gates of hell? How does He do
it--with force? with only a glance? How do the old Testament figures
approach Jesus when He lets them out of hell?--do they embrace Him? fall
in homage before Him? How does He react? What do the characters do on
stage when they have no lines?
Our students set their plays in modern periods in the U.S.--1960s,
1970s, present day--and various environments--prison, basement,
nightclub, nursing home, big box store. The period settings had
predictable features: the 1960s hell featured an upside-down peace sign
and an overturned VW van surrounded with large flower petals and
withered roses. One 1970s hell featured a gaudy disco ball suspended
over a brightly colored dance floor dotted with sporadic flames and
posters of period films. A second 1970s hell consisted of an
over-accessorized basement bachelor pad decorated with kitschy patterns
and mismatched fabrics. Beyond the period references, each setting
advanced its own metaphor: confinement in a dimly lit jail cell,
inability to advance in life, oblivion on a crowded dance floor, aimless
wandering in endless aisles, lonely monotony in a common room. While all
of the designs were well-executed and had significant merit, two
projects stood out as exceptional.
The most impressive was the nursing home set, which captured the
sense of waiting, a place not necessarily of active pain but of
agonizing passivity (Figure 1). On one side, a staircase leads to a door
labeled Heaven in rainbow letters; a trap door labeled Hell in red
letters is located in the middle of the floor. The set itself is clearly
an in-between area, a common room with tables set up for a perpetual
game of bingo with impressive thoughtful details: bingo cards with no
numbers, a wall clock with no hands, and a repetitive checkerboard
linoleum floor that appears to go on forever. The walls of the room are
decorated with portraits of Bob Barker, host of the Price is Right Game
show (CBS 1972-2009), and the cast of the Golden Girls sitcom (NBC
1985-1992). our students unanimously applauded these details on our
discussion board in the days following the class, and several made
personal connections to the overall concept. one student wrote:
"The one that struck me the most ... was the nursing home exhibit.
This hit home with the experience of having family members in these
facilities, and, along with the discussion, really made me think about
identity and the hours spent in such conditions." Another student
elaborated on the symbolic value of the setting with touching personal
insights: "I thought the idea of a nursing home being hell [as a
waiting place in this play] was very fitting. I have been to at least
six different nursing homes that I can immediately remember. Most
experiences I have had in nursing homes were difficult and painful. Many
people in nursing homes must sell their estate to be able to live there,
and all the possessions they have left at the end of their life is what
can be neatly packed away in a room that they share with someone else.
This fits in perfectly with the idea of disenfranchisement after death.
There is also a valid connection with the waiting/eternity aspect of a
nursing home ... getting placed in a nursing home often leads to a
feeling of loss and disconnection from loved ones--like the denizens of
hell [in this play] probably feel."
[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]
Another group set the "Harrowing of Hell" in a big box
store, playfully placing the various Biblical figures in appropriate
sections: Eve in produce (apple), Noah in pets (ark), Moses in fish (Red
Sea), St. John the Baptist in pool supplies (River Jordan), etc. Other
sections of the store emphasized the heat and fire traditionally
associated with hell, prominently labeled "space heaters,"
"water heaters," "fireplaces," "stoves,"
"grills," and "saunas," as well as fictional
sections devoted entirely to "fire" and "brimstone."
In this group's staging, an overweight Satan wears a manager's
vest and patrols the store in an electric shopping cart. His office is
in the center of the store, a windowless room labeled
"Security." The store's layout shows no bathrooms but
boasts a dental practice and an IRS office across from the check-out
registers. Fittingly, the store's automatic doors are open 24/7.
Students also offered some broader reactions on our discussion
board. Most of them celebrated the creative opportunities inherent in
the assignment: "I was absolutely blown away by the variety of the
project ideas. It was quite amazing that after the reading of one single
play, it could be interpreted in so many ways." Another echoed:
"I really liked the way this project allowed everyone to present
designs and characters in a variety of ways. I was really impressed by
the craftsmanship of the sets focusing on visual experience and the
clever elements of the ones that seemed more conceptual ... I think
it's very cool that everyone was able to take such old, loaded
concepts and translate them into the terms of more recent time periods
while still maintaining the fundamental qualities that make these
concepts what they are." Students also extended their observations
to academic work in general: "Each group led me to view the play in
a different light and reinforced my own belief that history and
literature are about 10% fact and 90% interpretation."
... AND FINDING OUR WAY BACK WITH TRADITIONAL ASSIGNMENTS
Delighted as we were with our students' success in this
nontraditional format, neither of us was comfortable completely
abandoning time-proven classroom practices. Part of each seminar meeting
was dedicated to good old-fashioned textual analysis or cross-textual
comparisons. For example, when we read the underworld journeys of
Odysseus and Aeneas, we asked our students to look at various modern
retellings of these stories and discussed how the later texts transform
the earlier ones. Students responded particularly well to Louse
Gluck's poem "A Myth of Devotion," which revisits the
story of Hades and Persephone. If we teach this seminar again, we will
likely include Rick Riordan's The Lightening Thief, which features
a visit to the ancient Greek underworld. The Lightening Thief is the
first of five novels in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians series,
classified as children's literature but appealing to adult readers
as well.
While our first assignment forewent traditional ways of reporting
analysis, the two that followed--art analysis and film analysis--were
mostly traditional, with critical-thinking activities relegated to
warm-up exercises. As with the collages, these warm-up activities served
as a way to introduce students to one another and to begin building good
working relationships in anticipation of the formal assignment to
follow. These assignments also gave us the opportunity to bring in
skills from different disciplines and borrow basic materials from
colleagues in other departments.
The art analysis assignment gave us the opportunity to assess the
familiar saying, "a picture's worth a thousand words." We
introduced the assignment by briefly identifying the elements of art
(line, color, texture, shape, form, space, and value) and the principles
of design (rhythm and movement, balance, proportion, variety and
emphasis, and harmony and unity) and then applying these terms to
illustrations of Dante's Inferno by Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510),
William Blake (1757-1827), Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863), and Gustave
Dore (1832-1883). After this lecture and ensuing discussion, newly
formed student groups were given class time to sculpt a canto of the
Inferno that had not yet been discussed; the class then matched each
sculpture to a section of the text, and the artists elaborated on their
design choices and how those choices conveyed some crucial element of
the poem. For their formal assignment, students were asked to find a
painting or stationary work of art that claims to depict some aspect of
the afterlife or underworld and to present that work to the class later
in the semester. They were to identify the author, place, and time of
composition; provide relevant background information; analyze the
work's characterization of heaven, hell, or purgatory; elaborate on
any implications or statements the artist might be making; and make
connections with the class readings.
To our surprise, all of our students chose works from late medieval
and early renaissance periods and, with one exception, all preferred
working with hell: Christ in Limbo (Duccio di Buoninsegna, c. 1255-c.
1319), Punishment of the Envious in Hell (manuscript illustration, c.
1450-70), Purgatory (Book of Hours, 15th cent.), Hell (Giovanni da
Modena, early 15th cent.), The Last Judgment: the Damned in Hell
(anonymous, c. 1500), Hell (Herri met de Bles, c. 1540), and Charon and
the Damned (Luca Signorelli, 1499-1504). By contrast, when we offered
this seminar in 2003, our students' artworks were selected largely
from the later periods: Haywain Triptych (Hieronymus Bosch, c. 1490-95),
The Burial of Count Orgaz (El Greco, c.1586), Falls of Eternal Despair
(Martin Wells Knapp, 1895), The Emerald Throne Scene in Heaven (Pat
Marvenko Smith, 1982), Vision of Hell (Salvador Dali, 1962), and
selections from Barlowe's Inferno (Wayne Douglas Barlowe, 1998).
Our students successfully incorporated art values in their analyses,
drawing the class's attention to warm colors and telescopic
perspectives in the case of de Bles's Hell and symmetry and angles
in Modena's Hell. Each group also made helpful connections to
common symbolism and to our core texts: for example, the group working
on Signorelli's Charon and the Damned demonstrated how this fresco
in the orvieto Cathedral's San Brizio Chapel is actually an
illustration of Canto 3 of Dante's Inferno.
Analyzing works of art depicting hell and purgatory generated
discussion on the use of images rather than texts to convey an idea. In
contrast to the stationary visual arts, films and television programs
face the additional challenge of sustaining an image for some period of
time and making that image an integral element of the work. For their
third group assignment, our students examined film or television
programs that claim to present some aspect of the afterlife. Their task
was to analyze a film's presentation of heaven, hell, and/or
purgatory, select an appropriate segment of that work to show in class,
demonstrate how the work furthers (or challenges) our understanding of
that particular place in afterlife, and discuss it in the context of our
seminar. As with the art analysis assignment, our first step was to
acquaint our students with cinematography terms and values, and we did
this through a brief PowerPoint presentation and two helpful videos
available on-line. We then revisited our video clips from the first day
of class and asked students to comment on the use of angles, lighting,
and framing. Finally, we directed our students to the Internet Movie
Database (IMDb) to learn more about the films or television programs
they were considering and offered a brief list of titles that looked
appealing but were unlikely to be successful subjects for this
assignment.
Our first group of students did the unexpected by choosing
Satan's Waitin' (Looney Toons, 1954), a cartoon shown in
theaters before the feature film; in this short, Sylvester the cat meets
his end while chasing Tweety Bird but has to wait in hell's foyer
while his remaining eight lives run out. Presided over by a muscular
bulldog, this hell is uniquely suited for Sylvester; our students
quickly made the connection with Homer Simpson's ironic and
person-specific punishment in his hell, citing the scene in which he is
forced to eat donuts excessively. One group worked on the hell portions
of What Dreams May Come (1998), analyzing hell as vacillating between
the massive and general and the intimate and personal; another group
worked on the heaven portion, skillfully applying cinematographic values
to the film's brilliant palette of saturated colors. We also had a
glimpse of a serene heaven in the 1967 version of Bedazzled in which
heaven appears as a blooming botanical garden with a large, glass-domed
conservatory. Another group worked on the film Constantine (2005), based
on a DC comic book Hellblazer, the story of an occult detective who
travels to hell at the request of a colleague; the film reminded our
students of the Odyssey and Aeneid, epics in which a hero receives
instructions to journey into the underworld, in this case a modern,
graphically violent, and grotesque hell. Another group worked on the
complex film The Fountain (2006) which interweaves three stories--one
from the past, one from the present, and one from the future--around a
tree of life and the quest for eternity. The three narratives converge
as an ecospheric spacecraft approaches a golden nebula containing the
Mayan afterworld, Xibalba. Our last group surprised us by choosing a
regional Brazilian film O Auto da Compadecida (2000, A Dog's Wilt),
a low-budget production that one of our students came across while
participating in a cultural exchange. other films that would have worked
well for this assignment include Little Nicky (comedy, 2000) Bill and
Ted's Bogus Journey (comedy, 1991), Defending Your Life
(comedy/drama, 1991), and Purgatory (western, 1999). Films to avoid
based on our previous run of the seminar are Southpark, All Dogs Go to
Heaven, and Dogma.
DISCUSSION AND GROUPWORK
While these four assignments--the anthology and the three group
projects--formed the formal part of our seminar, the remaining two
components of the semester grade were probably more important and
contributed more directly to the success of the course. The first of
these was class participation, which included the hands-on activities
and exercises described above. The second was participation in our
online discussion board, a forum we used to set the stage for our weekly
meetings and to follow up on class activities. To receive credit, each
post was to reflect careful consideration of the text in question,
support broader observations with specific references, and be posted by
the date and time specified. Students were also required to respond to a
set number of their classmates' posts. In this area, students
surpassed our expectations, not only in the length and frequency of
their posts but also in their substance; we expected short-paragraph
answers but found multi-paragraph essays. We were thrilled at the
thoughtfulness behind most posts and the spirited discussion in most
threads; in fact, the responses to already solid and seemingly
self-contained posts often resulted in deeper exploration of the
material. My teaching partner and I were careful to acknowledge each
post in a timely manner but refrained from extensive commenting until
the discussion was well underway.
In every unit, we asked students to react to major assignments and
class activities on the discussion board. Students often assigned
playful titles to these posts ("Me enjoy art?? What?!";
"I'm not going to be able to sleep for a week ..."), took
the opportunity to congratulate their classmates on especially
impressive work, and sought out advice on technical glitches. The
opening lines of posts suggested that we were indeed forming a learning
community; for example, one student began her analysis of the
week's work with "Who knew we could talk about art for 2.5
hours?" These discussion threads not only helped us gauge student
interest on a weekly basis but also provided an occasion to revisit
recurring themes and ideas. For example, one student wrote that the
analysis of de Bles's Hell
Another student echoed:
This comment led to a discussion of the range of the film genres
that portray some aspect of the afterlife, including horror, comedy, and
cartoons. one student pointed out that, no matter what their genre,
"all [the films] had very strong ties back to the previously
mentioned readings, reinforcing the influence of these literatures on
our culture." Students applauded the choices made by their
classmates: "just [by] choosing such different films we further
clarified how open the afterlife is to an individual's own
interpretation. on one hand, you have the lighthearted comedies, while
on the other you have the terrifying Constantine and The Fountain."
Students also mentioned the critical lenses through which they were to
view the paintings and films, citing examples of symmetry, framing,
angles, and lighting, and they embarked on a discussion about mass
media's role in shaping cultural ideas: "Until I saw the
Sylvester cartoon on Monday, I guess I didn't realize or fully
think about how children in society are forming views about the
afterlife so early on in life. It really shows how kids are influenced
at such a young age and form ideas about such meaningful topics not only
by reading, but also film (and cartoons!) as well!" The discussion
list continued to be active well into the next semester.
It is evident by now that much of the work in our seminar was done
in small groups. Generally speaking, students dislike group work, and
gifted, ambitious students dislike it even more. Still, group work is
crucial to an honors program that prioritizes leadership skills and
prepares its students for the challenges that await them as they enter
the workforce or continue their educations. Numerous studies and journal
articles have explored group dynamics in the classroom, and even the
most cursory Internet search yields hundreds of websites and discussion
forums on how to succeed in group projects, some directed at faculty,
most geared toward students. As our students worked with different
partners on each of their three group projects, they practiced important
professional skills: establishing work timelines, negotiating policies,
delegating tasks, identifying individual strengths, and arriving at a
consensus. Group work offers practical benefits for instructors as well,
enabling us to cite specific and concrete examples for questions
commonly asked on reference forms: "ability to work with
others," "ability to work under pressure,"
"demonstrated leadership skills," and the like.
In order to make group work more palatable, we built three
principles into our course design. First, we began each unit with a
low-stakes group activity (collage, sculpture, storyboard) that
anticipated the critical skills necessary for the upcoming assignment.
Next, we set our students up for success with mini-lectures specifically
addressing the challenges of each assignment, modeled the level of work
we expected to see through our own collaboration, and gave our students
time in class to set up a timeline for each project. Finally, we turned
over a portion of the grading for each group project to our students.
One of the chief objections to groupwork is the feeling of
powerlessness, of being at the mercy of potentially underprepared,
absent, or otherwise preoccupied classmates. To address this concern, we
invited our students to participate formally in grading their own work
and the work of their group members. The following explanation appeared
at the bottom of each group assignment: "All group-members will
receive the same grades for the first three items on this list
[variations of selecting and organizing the material, analyzing the
work, presenting the project]. With input from the group for each
individual for the Group Evaluation category, it is possible that the
project grade might vary from person to person." The Group
Evaluation category accounted for 20% of the assignment grade; we
determined it by averaging all of the scores submitted for the student
by his/her group members. Our groups consisted of three students; in
classes where groups have five or more members, we would recommend
dropping the lowest submitted score before averaging the Group
Evaluation component of the project grade.
Like most good heroes, we made it back from our forays into the
afterlife relatively unscathed and a little wiser. We had read about the
afterlife from a variety of viewpoints, revisited familiar texts from
new perspectives, and attempted to transcend cultures. Along the way, we
encountered different genres and explored different academic
disciplines. Despite the success of our journey, this seminar generated
an even funnier student evaluation comment: "What, no field
trip?"
APPENDIX
Reading Schedule for Honors 483
Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory in Literature and Culture
WEEK 1
Intro to course
Overview of the afterlife, from classic high culture to modern pop
culture.
* In-class free-write: What are familiar concepts of Heaven, Hell,
and Purgatory? Which of these abstract places holds the greatest
interest for us?
* Powerpoint survey of sample works.
WEEK 2
Plato's "Myth of Er"
Robert Olen Butler's "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of
Parrot"
* Post response on on-line discussion board by class-time: What
does Robert Olen Butler imply about the afterlife in his short story
"Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot?" What does the
afterlife look like in the "Myth of Er?"
* In-class free-write: What questions do you have? What have you
learned?
* In-class activity: collages
The Afterlife in Antiquity
WEEK 3 Classical Views of the Underworld
Homer, Odyssey, book 11
Vergil, Aeneid, book 6 (handouts)
* Post reaction to texts on online discussion board by class-time.
* In-class activity: secondary source/modern retellings exercise.
WEEK 4
Innana's Descent
Ovid's Orpheus (handouts)
DUE TODAY: A 2-3 page summary of the afterlife beliefs of a culture
not represented on our reading list, ancient or modern. Include a
"Works Cited" and document your findings in MLA format.
* Post response on on-line discussion board by class-time: What
happens to identity in Innana's Descent and Ovid's Orpheus,
and how does it compare to the other texts we've read?
* In-class activity: Roundtable Discussion of beliefs across
cultures.
Medieval and Renaissance Views of the Afterlife
WEEK 5
"The Harrowing of Hell" (also called "The
Deliverance of Souls") (handout)
Introduction to the Corpus Christi Cycle Plays
Quick survey of other medieval works with references to the
afterlife
* Post reaction to text on on-line discussion board by class-time.
* In-class activity: Form production companies and begin planning
presentations.
WEEK 6
"Harrowing of Hell" presentations and discussion of the
play
* Post reactions to "The Harrowing of Hell" projects by
the end of this week.
WEEK 7
Dante, The Divine Comedy, Inferno
Introduction to elements of art and principles of design.
* Post response on on-line discussion board by class-time: In
Dante's Inferno, identify the canto that, in your opinion, best
captures Dante's vision of this aspect of the afterlife and explain
the rationale for your choice.
* In-class activity: sculpting cantos from the Inferno.
WEEK 8
Dante, The Divine Comedy, Purgatorio and Paradiso
* Post response on online discussion board by class-time: In
Dante's Purgatorio or Paradiso, identify the canto that, in your
opinion, best captures Dante's vision of this aspect of the
afterlife and explain the rationale for your choice.
The Afterlife in Modern Texts
WEEK 9
Student presentations on the Afterlife in the Visual Arts
* Post reactions to Art Presentations by the end of this week:
identify something you found especially interesting in the presentations
and briefly explain why.
WEEK 10
Milton, Paradise Lost, Books 1, 2 (Hell) & 3 (Heaven, Limbo of
Fools) Introduction to cinematographic techniques.
* Post response on online discussion board by class-time: In our
readings to date, we have examined the afterlife primarily in terms of
its setting. In his erudite epic Paradise Lost, John Milton populates
Hell and Heaven with otherworldly beings, some of whom the reader
expects to encounter (and has encountered in other texts), and others
who are not well-known or are invented by the author. For your prompt,
prepare a well-supported character sketch of any of the inhabitants of
the afterlife (although technically since no one is dead yet, it's
not exactly an afterlife, but you get the idea). In addition to
describing the figure in detail, comment on your character's
relationship to his/her/its otherworldly surroundings and significance
in these opening books of Paradise Lost.
* In-class activity: drafting storyboards of opening minute of
Paradise Lost.
WEEK 11
Milton, Paradise Lost
In class, we'll discuss the epic's portrayal of Paradise:
books 4, 5 (ll. 1-135, 377-512), 8 (ll. 249-653), 9, 10, & 12 (ll.
466-648).
* Post response on online discussion board by class-time: thoughts
on Paradise as it appears in Milton's Paradise Lost.
WEEK 12
C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce
Descriptions of the afterlife in collected modern texts
* Post response on online discussion board by class-time:
Commentators tell us that one question Lewis considers in this work, and
which was also a concern of Dante, is how or whether a deity that is
essentially good can send humans to hell. Does Lewis answer this
question explicitly or implicitly? Do other authors you have read
address this question? Would it be a concern of Greek and Roman authors?
Why or why not?
WEEK 13
Student Presentations on the Afterlife in Film
* Post reactions to Film Presentations by the end of this week:
identify something you found especially interesting in the presentations
and briefly explain why.
WEEK 14 Last class meeting
Anthologies due
* Roundtable Discussion: What about our view of the afterlife has
changed most dramatically over the centuries? What might account for
these changes?
Course wrap-up
Evaluations
Our semester grade was determined as follows (from the Course
Policy):
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The work of Caroline Perkins, chair of Marshall University's
Department of Classics, with whom I had the privilege of team-teaching
this honors seminar, is central to this article; she is an exceptional
mentor and collaborator, and the ideas in this article are as much hers
as they are mine. Both of us are indebted to colleagues for their help
in various aspects of the seminar: medievalist Gwenyth Hood; costume
designer Joan St. Germain; musician Kay Lawson; and family and consumer
science professor Dr. Glenda Lowry. I am also grateful to our students
for allowing me to quote from their discussion posts: Michael Bledsoe,
Gregory Burner, Michael Elmore, Sammy Hodroge, Rebekah Jamieson, Justin
Kazee, Corey Keeton, Alex King, Kamryn Midkiff, Justin Pannell, Lance
Pennington, Mallory Price, Craig Riccelli, Catharine Staley, and
Shawndra Thompson.
REFERENCES
"A.I.: Artificial Insemination." Will & Grace. 4.25.
KoMut Entertainment. NBC. Originally aired May 16, 2002.
. The
three-minute segment starts at 9:09 and ends at 12:10.
Bevington, David. "The Harrowing of Hell" [Headnote].
Medieval Drama. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975. 594.
Butler, Robert Olen. "Jealous Husband Returns in Form of
Parrot." Birds in the Hand: Fiction and Poetry about Birds. Ed.
Kent Nelson and Dylan Nelson. North Point Press, 2004. 38-44.
Catechism of the Catholic Church. Libreria Editrice Vaticana. 1994.
633.
"The Devil and Homer Simpson." The Simpsons: Treehouse of
Horror IV. 5.1F04. Gracie Films/20th Century Fox Television. originally
aired on 30 Oct. 1993. . Script
available at .
"Hell on Earth 2006." Southpark. 10.11. Comedy Central.
Originally aired on Oct. 25, 2006.
.
"Hyundai Tiburon - Hell." Adland.tv (2002). Commercial
available at .
Rose, Martial. Editor. "The Deliverance of Souls" The
Wakefield Mystery Plays. The Complete Cycle of Thirty-two Plays. New
York: W. W. Norton, 1961. 446-57.
Rylant, Cynthia. Cat Heaven. New York: Scholastic Inc./Blue Sky
Press, 1997.
The author may be contacted at rudnytzk@marshall.edu.
KATERYNA A. R. SCHRAY
MARSHALL UNIVERSITYwas an excellent example of how culture affects the interpretation
of a concept. Hell really is just that--a concept. We have no
physical evidence to draw from, therefore it was interesting to see
the distinct infusion of elements from the painter's culture placed
there. Now that I think about it, it kind of reminds me of the
collages we made early in the semester--all about interpretation!
It amazes me that each time we have a group presentation in this
seminar how different the paintings or films are when compared to
each other!! Who knew we'd have Sylvester and a Brazilian film and
supernatural detective in just two hours!? It amazes me that most
of the individuals who produce these films can use the same
inspiration and come up with such vastly different ideas about the
afterlife.
Discussion Board Posts 20%
Group Projects 45%
Play Design 15%
Art Presentation 15%
Film Presentation 15%
Anthology Project 20%
Class Participation 15%