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Who wants a color-coordinated, cross-cultural core curriculum?
USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 1993 by William J. Reeves
Even the most hard-boiled revisionist would be hard-pressed to advance the thesis that William Shakespeare is not worth teaching. His works are classified as comedies, histories, or tragedies, with the latter occupying center stage in terms of importance.
"King Lear," Shakespeare's classic tale of a tragically flawed king, has been echoed by an Asian filmmaker and a feminist novelist. In "Ran," Japanese director Akira Kurosawa set his version in 16th-century Japan, emphasizing the warrior/king aspect of Lear, and made the conflict over his inheritance a contest among three sons. In her book, A Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley examines the legend from the point of view of two daughters and places the action in Iowa, with Lear as a farmer.
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Another technique in the teaching of Shakespeare is to read a play via the soliloquies. For example, Hamlet's speeches reveal the innermost workings of his mind as he wrestles with suicide in the "Too too solid flesh" and "To be" soliloquies and with his flaw of indecision in "Oh what a rogue and peasant slave am I." Supplementing these subjective observations of a young man who is contemplating murder is the soliloquy of the evil King Claudius, who, in the "My offence is rank" speech, provides the audience with insights about the twisted logic of a murderer.
This use of subjective narratives to present a story also is developed by Ryunosuke Akutagawa's "Rashomon," written in the 1920s, but telling a timeless tale of desire and violence. Here, horizontal integration is used to focus on the literary technique of point of view. In his story, Akutagawa uses six narrators to describe a murder. Each speaker offers a different perspective, a technique that challenges the reader to assume the stance of a juror and evaluate the differing opinions as to who is the guilty party. "Rashomon" reveals how an author from a different culture employs the same literary techniques that were used by an acknowledged "great writer."
One final example of horizontal integration draws on the rich backgrounds of recent immigrants. In a "normal" core curriculum, it would not be unusual to teach the American novelist Stephen Crane, author of The Red Badge of Courage. In addition to composing a classic novella which takes place during the Civil War, Crane wrote many short stories. One, "The Blue Hotel," is the adventure of a man known only as the "Swede" who visits a small, western town and becomes involved in gambling, leading to violence and, eventually, his death.
In a class composed largely of Caucasians, the themes of fear, violence, chance, and the frontier commonly are brought to the fore by the students. In a class composed of immigrants, however, the theme of discrimination assumes importance. These students have an instinctive identification with the dilemma of a stranger with an identifiable accent who tries to "fit into" the society of an alien world.
Completing the teaching of "The Blue Hotel" is Amy Tan's novel, The Joy Lack Club, which details the lives of four Chinese women and their relationships with their daughters as they try to become part of America while at the same time maintaining their identities. This theme of discrimination as it pertains to a stranger in a strange land also is developed by V.S. Naipaul in his novel, The Enigma of Arrival, which examines the life and times of an Indian born in the West Indies who comes to live in England. Also in this vein is Nadine Gordimer's short story, "A Chip of Ruby," about an Indian couple living in South Africa who become at odds as the wife becomes involved in a struggle for racial justice. The husband wants the approval of the ruling, white minority and is wilting to ignore injustice as a price to be paid for acceptance.
