It’s a “Go” for Launch! I am taking Anne of Green Gables to SPACE once again in November!
Last fall, I taught “Reading L.M. Montgomery as Fantasy: Anne of Green Gables,” and it was one of my favourite teaching experiences ever. It is an idea that I have wanted to test for a while: rereading the iconic Anne of Green Gables as if it were a fantasy book rather than as realistic youth fiction (as it has traditionally been sold). I ended up broadcasting from different places in the land of Anne, including her grandfather’s homestead. While I had a hunch that the material would work, I was amazed at how powerfully this approach transformed Anne of Green Gables for me as a reader.
So, we are offering “AGG as Fantasy” again in November, with a view to a similar approach in the future to Emily of New Moon, The Story Girl, or another Anne book (Rainbow Valley, maybe?).
Click here to sign up or get more details: http://blackberry.signumuniversity.org/r/tNkb8W.
SPACE is an online, interactive, non-credit short course program for adult lifelong learning. It is quite an innovative program for folks who want to engage in great discussions and learn more about things they love. Classes are $100-$150, depending on how frequently you take the journey, and you can sign up here.
In the course description and video teaser below (where I sort of snuck into a National Park after hours), I make my pitch for why this short course could be really beneficial to first-time Anne readers and old friends of Green Gables.
I don’t know if my “Fantasy Anne Experiment” will create a revolution in literature or anything, but it is a chance to spend 8 classes over 4 weeks close-reading Anne of Green Gables and seeing a classic from a new angle.
Reading L.M. Montgomery as Fantasy: Part 1: Anne of Green Gables
Precepted by Dr. Brenton Dickieson
Within weeks of its 1908 publication, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables became a bestseller. Over the years, this charming orphan story put Montgomery and her imaginative Prince Edward Island on a global map.
Despite the fact that Anne of Green Gables is Canada’s bestselling novel throughout the world—or because of it—Montgomery was ignored by the literati and scholarship. Montgomery was a public intellectual, the first female Canadian fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and invested Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Still she was dismissed as “just” a children’s writer, a regionalist, or a woman. It was 25 years after Montgomery’s death before children’s literature and feminist scholars began to recover her work as worthy of study.
While there is a robust field of Montgomery scholarship, there are areas where our focus is sometimes too narrow. One of these is the category of “realistic” fiction. While there is a kind of verisimilitude about everyday life in the late Victorian era in her work, the realism is pressed to the margins of definition as Montgomery romanticizes the worlds she creates. And can we disagree that there is something magical about Anne herself? By changing our way of approach and by looking at Anne of Green Gables as a fantasy novel, what can we unveil in this classic novel?
Native Prince Edward Islander and Montgomery scholar Brenton Dickieson will lead students through a rereading of Anne of Green Gables using the lenses we use to study fantasy and speculative fiction with the goal of allowing one of the greatest living children’s books to live in new ways.
A Pilgrim in Narnia 
What are the lenses used to study fantasy and speculative fiction?
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Hi Debby, weaving throughout the course is Farah Mendelsohn’s taxonomy of fantasy literature (portal fantasy, immersive fantasy, etc.). We will be challenging the category of realism, looking at “faerie,” tracking the magical transformation in the text, and making notes toward fantasy mapping.
Does that help? It’s a bit heady, but the experiment itself is pretty tangible.
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Yes. Thank you so much! It sounds like it will be a very interesting course.
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Best wishes, Brenton, as always, for this second version of your teaching project on “Anne of Green Gables, as fantasy”.
I am intrigued by the book, the author and her life and work, and the fantasy approach. But I am not able to commit to a course, short or otherwise.
What I hope you might do (as I have done with my own reading of other authors) is publish a relatively short free on-line article that outlines your method of reading a book — this book specifically, “Anne of Green Gables — and your major findings. Such an article would be a way of promoting your course, and its successors, for future teaching (a research-as-teaching or teaching-as-research work-in-progress — the kind of collaborative exploration of literature that IS at the heart of tertiary teaching), for prospective students who would take future courses.
Such an article would also PUBLISH an example of your research as an essay. This would be a vital (literally “living”) addition to your published body of work that would stand alongside your lived-work of teaching.
(As a comparison, C.S. Lewis was famous in his lifetime for his teaching. But he did not publish his lectures, per se, nor did any of his students publish their transcribed lecture notes. Instead, it Lewis’s published books and essays that grew out of his teaching and personal reading that now sustain his reputation as a major contribution to literary research: his “Prefaces” and “Introductions” to books such as “Paradise Lost” and “Romance of the Rose”, and his large and detailed monographs on the History of English Literature, and on his experiments in reading.)
I can imagine, for example, such a short introductory article having an early section with a heading of “The first appearance of fantasy in ‘Anne of Green Gables'”; and another section with a heading such as “Anne as dreamer-shaman”, and another as “Anne’s fantasy vision of Avonlea behind the author’s prose-poetry descriptions of landscape and characters”. A concluding section might have the heading “How a reading-as-fantasy changes our reading of ‘Anne of Green Gables’ while revealing its fictive realism”.
Go! Teach! Enjoy!
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I don’t know if I responded to this a month ago, but I am sorry if I missed it because this is a lovely note!
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You are no doubt correct that some articles are due. They are in the works as part of a larger project. Indeed, as helpful as it is to teach these things, the discipline of writing makes for something more specific, detailed, and precise. It is its own mode!
There is a hint of one part of my method in this article here that I wrote: Rainbow Valley as Embodied Heaven: Initial Explorations into L.M. Montgomery’s Spirituality in Fiction https://journaloflmmontgomerystudies.ca/reading/dickieson
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