3 Approaches to Teaching McCarthy’s The Road

A while back, I blogged about teaching genre and convention in an introductory literature course geared towards the non-major.

As I mentioned, I like using the post-apocalyptic narrative to teach genre and convention because students are familiar with this kind of story. Their knowledge allows us to examine just one or two “case-study” texts so I can avoid devoting a large portion of the course to post-apocalyptic narratives.

Cormac McCarthy’s, The Road, works as an excellent case study of genre and convention—post-apocalyptic or otherwise.  One, the novel enables students to easily perform and understand the larger purpose of generic analysis. Two, while the novel is dark, students tend to enjoy reading it. Three, most students are unfamiliar with both the book and its cinematic remake starring Viggo Mortenson and Charlize Theron, so the novel provides new ground to explore.

After the jump, I describe three approaches to teaching