Multigenre Writing in the Classics Classroom

Charles Lloyd

Marshall University

One of the joys of teaching classics classes is the constant opportunity to try out new teaching strategies.  In a rewarding experiment I redesigned a classical mythology class, using as my inspiration Tom Romano’s persuasive book, Blending Genre, Altering Style:  Writing Multigenre Papers (Portsmouth NH 2000), and now regularly adapt this approach for other upper-level classics classes.  The technique involves students’ changing the normal narrative genre of myth as it often appears in primary sources into another literary or non-literary genre.  In this process of metamorphosis, the underlying psychological and anthropological themes become the focal point of student analysis and the basis of the myth’s reinvention.  I will explain in this paper the process of creating and completing multigenre assignments in Classical Mythology and other upper-level classics classes and will show samples of student multigenre projects. 

Relying on texts that provide primary sources—drama, epic, or purely narrative ones like Apollodorus, I require that in virtually every assignment students convert certain myths from their found genres into other genres, both literary and non-literary.  For example, students may convert myth narratives into character sketches, letters to and from themselves, poems, internal monologues, streams of consciousness, dialogues, diary entries, or guides for art exhibitions (html documents).  This multigenre project has two stages.  First with the help of class discussion and some secondary reading, students reduce the material from primary sources to its essence:  the vital cultural, sociological, or psychological motivations and attitudes that lie beneath the surface of the text.   This step may take the form of a writing assignment outside of class, or it may occur in class as a written component of the discussion process.  Then students try to incorporate and integrate this reflective thinking on the essential mythological components into the targeted writing genre. 

Similarly in other classics classes like Ancient Greek Civilization and Ancient Sexuality, I have students complete multigenre assignments to bring important aspects of ancient culture to life for them.  But in these multigenre writings, students add footnotes to show their primary- and secondary-source evidence for the ancient cultural attitudes and practices that appear in their multigenre writing.

 Student projects thus created demonstrate that multigenre writing leads to transformative learning.  In the typical academic essay, students reorganize, reorder, and restate their own and other ideas garnered from reading or class discussion so that the instructor is more or less sure that they comprehend the subject matter.  But in the process of converting ancient sources (often narrative), secondary sources, and class discussion into an new genre, students must imagine themselves in situations that a foreign and ancient culture or myth open up to them and then create a coherent new document that encapsulates and represents those situations in ways belonging entirely to them.  The result is an exciting internalization, interesting to evaluate and deeper than students customarily achieve.  I will show student work to prove this point.