March Madness, erudition edition

I'm about to introduce the final paper assignment for my Studies in the American Novel course.

Here's what it is: Students will treat the final two books of the semester, Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections and Ben Marcus's Notable American Women, as though they are competitors in an NCAA-basketball-style tournament of books.

vs.

There's a precedent for this kind of thing: It's called, surprisingly enough, the Tournament of Books and it's totally fun and I totally owe my colleague Dr. Margot Stafford lunch for introducing it to me. 

Here's what students will do: 

1. Determine a "bracket" of the tournament. Something like this:

Students are going to have to look back at the novels published during the 2001-2002 academic year. Could there be a more turbulent, poignant period of time in contemporary American history?

2. Determine the "seed" of each book in the bracket. 

Side-note: I only recently learned of this agrarian metaphor "seed." I guess I'd always assumed the word was "seat." That's the more intuitive (less inventive) metaphor. A team acquires a "seat" on a particular ledge of a bracket. But, no. Jocks be taking liberties with figurative language. Guess what, jocks. The literary people are back and we're taking all our metaphors. We'll plant them and care for them and their fruits will nourish the young and the curious and these fruits will not be stamped with corporate sponsorships. (Nevermind that Oprah logo on Franzen's book.) 

3. Determine the criteria for such a thing as a national "tournament of books" (How do you decide who advances? The better book? What's "better" mean? The more important book? "Important"?) 

My guess is that some students will try to rig the game--basically write the criteria to fit the book they prefer. That's a high crime that only the President of Columbia University circa 1921 would get away with. (That's right, an inside joke, literary-history-style.) 

4. Judge which of the two books (Franzen's or Marcus's) should advance to the next round.

Now, this section will be the most English-papery part of the project. Here, students will flaunt their interpretive acumen--they will 360 dunk on some analysis of specific content from each novel. 

5. Pair up with another student and, during final exam time, write a "commentary" dialogue on some third student's judgment. 

I'm excited, and a little anxious, about this paper. I normally don't assign final papers that are not assertively rigorous, let alone that seem mildly fun. But bear in mind--this is no game! 

Why, just last month an Ann Arbor man was punched during a literary argument. Literary interpretation is getting serious.

Yeah, yeah. I know that last week, two dialysis patients came to blows over the upcoming Kentucky-Louisville game. Fine. We have a way to go to match the sincerity of basketball fans. But we're getting there. We're punching now. 

Here are the English-professory reasons why I like this paper idea: 

1. It will make palpable the civic engagement and intellectual synthesis that comes from debates about what constitutes “good/important literature.” 

2. It will make reading an overtly social activity and not a solely individual one. 

3. It will represent some of the grunt-work that it takes to earn cultural authority.

If successful, students will leave the course confident that they have the chops to do the difficult, rewarding work of caring about the world they live in, of wanting to see it enriched by the very genre of literature that evolved out of the many courageous, crackbrained commitments that novelists have made to the worlds they've lived in. 

At least that's my hope. But I'll settle for a student who learns how to spin a novel on the end of his finger, like a basketball.