Lit 21 - New Literary Genres in the Language Classroom

Progression LiteratureRepresentatives of progression literature put a heavy emphasis on the past, pursue (an often subjective) truth, imitate how people perceive time and events in their lives, and usually conclude with open-endedness, leaving readers to form their own ideas on the characters’ futures.Example: Me & Lee – How I Came to Know, Love and Lose Lee Harvey Oswald by Judyth Vary Baker (2010)

Flash Fiction Shorties, i.e. short narrative texts, are nothing new as Ernest Hemingway is said to have written the first piece with his 6-word story “For sale, baby shoes, never worn”. With the advent of the Internet, microfiction, however, has experienced a real boom (Botha 2016).Example: Shorties – Flash Fiction in Language Teaching by Engelbert Thaler (2016c)

BizarroThis genre of weird literature contains both strange and fascinating, thought-provoking and funny elements by depicting an unstable universe where the inexplicable becomes the norm and incongruities are made flesh.Example: Shatner Quake by Jeff Burk (2009), a novel about every character that Star Trek ’s lead actor William Shatner has ever played

Based on the preceding chapters, the following decalogue of TEFL suggestions may help you meeting the demands of Lit 21.

1 Assess the quality of the text/genre. Is it trash or treasure? However, it is anything but easy to distinguish between the 3 K’s: Kunst, Kitsch, Kommerz .

2 Judge the suitability of the genre for your learner group. Gran-Lit may not be the most appropriate text type for young adults.

3 Evaluate each individual work. Even highly praised works by distinguished Nobel Prize winners like Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro contain long and dreary passages in the first half of the book.

4 Consider reluctant readers . Multi-modal literary texts can be the answer here as they “enable the struggling reader, motivate the reluctant one, and challenge the high-level learner” (McTaggart 2008: 32). Dual coding can ease understanding, thus helping the struggling reader; comics may encourage reluctant ones to read more because of their positive attitude towards this genre; a close study of text-picture relationships can challenge advanced learners.

5 Employ FVR (free voluntary reading) and rely on extensive reading, fun reading, reading for enjoyment – and your classroom library (Thaler 2008).

6 Do not shy away from DEAR (Drop everything and read) – under two conditions: first, everybody must choose a book and read, and second, all must be quiet.

7 Encourage “thinking out of the box” – which may be all the more important in the COS era, i.e. the age of the competence obsession syndrome.

8 Select suitable reading approaches. Many Lit 21 pieces need not be studied along the segment or straight through approach. The sandwich approach, appetizer approach, topic approach, and patchwork approach are suitable alternatives (Thaler 2016b).

9 Make use of intermediality (intertextuality). Numerous film, TV, music and videogame adaptations for many modern works are available (Thaler 2018, 2009).

10 Balance trad fic and Lit 21. Incorporate modern texts into literature instruction as we have pre-millennial fiction and post-millennial fiction, and beside the DWEMs (Dead White English Males), there are also the LANGs (living authors and new genres). Cuncta fluunt .

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Baetens, Jan/Frey, Hugo (2015). The Graphic Novel . New York: Cambridge University Press.

Beck, Ulrich (2012 [2009]). World at Risk . Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bell, Alice/Ensslin, Astrid/Rustad, Hans (2014). Analyzing Digital Fiction . New York: Routledge.

Blake, Robert (2013). Brave New Digital Classroom . Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press.

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