A Patchwork Life: writing, teaching, learning more each day

Checking my stats is such an interesting exercise for me in seeing how search terms work, and all the different avenues people take to find their way here. This, however, is the first blog post I’ve written in response to those stats, which is also kind of neat.

I first posted about Hemingway’s Iceberg theory way back in July 2007, when I was thinking of it only as a writer of short fiction, not as an English teacher. Since then, I haven’t attempted any more short fiction, but I have been teaching it more and more, and blogged about it from that perspective too. I think in that entry, I forgot to mention that I’d used Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral” when teaching August Wilson’s “Fences”, which was a pairing that worked well. Next year I’m adding A Doll’s House and thinking about teaching The Yellow Wallpaper to go alongside it. Teaching texts together is one of my favorite ways to teach literature, especially when it’s one longer text paired with a shorter one, or two similar texts together.

Anyway, I blogged about the Iceberg theory way back when and thought no more about it, but it is consistently one of the regular terms that leads people here, so I’ve been giving it some thought lately. How would you teach this theory, apart from just throwing it out there and having the students discuss for awhile?

Here’s two ideas I’ve been thinking of:

* give them a short story or passage that is thick with description and embellishment– maybe something from Dickens, or even Henry James or Edith Wharton. Then ask them to remove anything from the story that could be removed, and see what peaks of the iceberg they’re left with, and how much they can trim away while still retaining the necessary elements. I’d allow for minor adjustments along the way. You could also give them a sparsely written story (anything from Hemingway) and have them see what they can add. This might also be a nice way students to think about authorial intent, and how carefully chosen those words are in the first place.

* after giving them Hills Like White Elephants and after they’ve read it and discussed it for awhile, they could chart out the peaks of the icebergs. In my head, this looks a bit like a timeline– one horizontal line across the middle of the page, with lines of dialogue slanting towards the top and notes on what’s remaining unsaid slanting toward the bottom, if that makes sense.

These are not tested ideas, of course, but I’d be willing to try either one in a classroom next year. In my classes, the numbers are usually small, so I’d have them work on either or both of those activities in pairs or small groups. In a larger group, maybe you could split the group in half and have them work on both activities simultaneously, and then compare what they learned.

If you found your way here through this search, I’d be interested in any ideas you care to share, and if you’re a regular reader, I hope this was at least tangentially entertaining for you as well!