Over the past ten years, I have really enjoyed watching movies and TV shows in my “down time.” But, increasingly, it is impossible to watch (or, more correctly, binge-watch) the quality “complex TV” (as Jason Mittell calls it) without including these texts in my work on character and sympathy within the novel. The complicated plots, multi-dimensional characters, and expansive narrative scope are all direct outgrowths of the sorts of novels George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, and so many others wrote. So, I find myself wanting to teach the entire series of The Newsroom as part of a course on the social uses of fiction and watching The Blacklist and contemplating Raymond Reddington as a God figure akin to Eliot’s reframing of Jesus in Adam Bede! Given my inability to simply “tune out”—and the sheer joy I find in thinking critically about the long-form fiction that is currently shaping our society—having the opportunity to teach a couple of tutorial sections for an introductory film and television course this term has been quite a lot of fun!
As a literary critic, I see how the long, meandering, engaging stories we’re telling through new and traditional media are shaping our thoughts about growing up, love, marriage, parenting, career, and growing old. But my biggest frustration as a teacher is that my students aren’t usually interested in being part of the community that shapes what stories we tell and how we tell them today. They are interested in consuming—and at times critiquing stories—in novels or on TV but they aren’t interested in writing new and different stories. So, when one of my film and television tutorial students approached me last week about the screenplay he’s currently writing, I was delighted to have a conversation about his work, to hear about the story he wants to tell and how it is taking shape.
As we talked, the problems in my student’s screenplay were glaringly obvious to me as a scholar (and keen consumer) of long-form fiction. While he knew who his characters needed to be and had an outline for what type of story he wanted to tell, he didn’t know what sort of other characters might prove catalysts for the protagonists’ development, or what sort of early enigmas and problems could realistically shape the story he had in mind. Essentially, he was so focused on these disembodied characters and the type of story, he hadn’t given any thought to how the geographic, cultural, and socioeconomic setting, along with the passage of time within the narrative would inevitably shape the sorts of things that the characters could do and experience. As a critic of the novel, I knew that he could only sort out his plot once he answered these sorts of questions.
I don’t usually think of myself as a “creative writing” teacher: I don’t have an MFA and I don’t (yet) write long-form fiction (although I do have a children’s book in the works). But speaking with my film & television student reminded me of the important role literary critics have as educators, not just helping students become intelligent consumers of narrative but helping students become thoughtful, engaged creators of the narratives that will shape our culture.
Jessica Ann Hughes