Making Connections: Allusion

The subject of reading’s role in college composition has come up in a listserv I subscribe to.  I, like many of my colleagues, use other writers’ essays as models of rhetorical practice, guiding students through examples of how to provide evidence for claims that is more than a recitation of facts.  Brent Staples’s “Just Walk on By” and Jonathan Kozol’s “Human Cost of an Illiterate Society” for anecdote, George Orwell’s “Thoughts on a Common Toad” for description serve as exemplars in early semester assignments centered around those commonplaces.  Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” could serve as a textbook by itself.

In my Comp II classes, where a literature “component” is mandated by the department, I have the pleasure of introducing students to the power of allusion.

One of my personal educational goals, inspired by the American Intellectual History professor David Noble, is to find the connections between things in the world.  Allusion, one of my tools, is a reaching out by one writer to others who came before, through an “evocation in one text of an antecedent literary text (Alter 112).  I refer you to Robert Alter’s wonderful discussion in his The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age for the details of recognition and function of allusion in literature.  However, non-fiction writers use allusion as well, and that provides us with a linchpin to the importance of reading to our students.

Writers as various as Michael Pollan, Ron Chernow, William Least Heat-Moon, and Héctor Tobar commonly allude to the Bible and classical Greek and Roman literature.  Subject matter varies as well, from banking to food, philosophy, history, and journalism.  We find allusion in The Economist and the New York Times.  None of them feature footnotes.  To get more than the main idea, our students have to “get” the connections.  Yet, most students treat allusions as another vocabulary problem and pass them by, leading to a “thinning” of their reading and impoverishing their understanding and enjoyment (Schweizer).

Students’ ignorance of allusion is a direct consequence of our country’s obsession with testing in K-12, but also our profession’s stated disdain for cultural literacy as “elitist” and our fights over the “canon” (Schweizer).

Instead of girding our loins for cultural warfare, we might want to stop for a moment and consider the cost to our students that our combativeness entails.  We do not empower students or increase their agency by protecting them from mental "colonization" by denigrating texts that authors commonly allude to.  Because we already have that knowledge, it is presumptuous of us to deny it to our students for ideological reasons that only serve to disconnect students from the texts we commonly ask them to read.

Perhaps a more functional approach to defining cultural literacy and the canon is to ask what literature working writers, rather than English professors, have conversations with.  Admittedly, this would likely involve a constriction and eliminate a number of our favorite authors and works, be male-focused (if the Iliad and Odyssey can be considered “written” by a male, and there is scholarly weight behind female authorship of the Odyssey), western (if Greek and Hebrew texts can be ripped from their cultural contexts), and white (however that applies to Greek and Semitic peoples).  But the virtue revising these contested ideas lies in focusing our attention as educators on what our students ought to know in order to be better readers—and writers.

In offering a model on how to summarize literary texts as evidence for a claim, I had students read the following excerpt from Peter Rabinowitz’s Before Reading: 

            Eyes are among the more reliable visual guides to character in fiction.  As the narrator of Owen Wister’s Virginian puts it, “Out of the eyes of every stranger looks a friend or an enemy, waiting to be known.” It is no accident that Wells gives the hero of The Time Machine gray eyes, for he wants us to know, from the beginning, that he is keen, intelligent, controlled. 

Imagine how excited students were when they understood exactly what Rabinowitz was referring to.  We had just finished the Odyssey, where Athena is described repeatedly as “the grey-eyed goddess.” Some even cheered!  On the other hand, when providing the same model the previous semester, when we had read Candide, there was no recognition.  In fact, one of my better students felt the connection was something few if any readers would ever make.  I suggested that if Rabinowitz had instead mentioned gold nuggets strewn over the road, or the phrase “best of all possible worlds,” or “Panglossian,” he, not my Odyssey students, would have understood instantly.  He remained skeptical, I think, because my hypothetical was only that.

I require my Comp II students to allude at least twice in their research papers to the literature we read that semester.  There is no reason why we should keep this resource from them.  We want them to deepen their thinking about literature, from Aesop to Harry Potter, making connections between it and their experience and knowledge of the world.  It is an empowering discovery that we owe them.

My next post is an explanation and a worksheet I give my students to practice identifying and applying allusions.  The examples also serve as models for writing them.

Resources

Alter, Robert.  The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age.  New York:  Simon & Schuster, 1989.

Chernow, Ronald.  The House of Morgan:  An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance.  New York:  Grove, 1990.

Least Heat-Moon, William.  Roads to Quoz:  An American Mosey.  New York:  Little, Brown, 2008.

Pollan, Michael.  The Omnivore’s Dilemma:  a Natural History in Four Meals.  New York:  Penguin, 2006.

Rabinowitz, Peter J. Before Reading:  Narrative Conventions and the Politics of Interpretation.  Ithaca, NY:  Cornell UP, 1987.

Tobar, Héctor.  Translation Nation:  Defining a New American Identity in the Spanish-Speaking United States.  New York:  Riverhead Books, 2005.