Jarom L. McDonald and Dr. Ed Cutler, English
One of the most beneficial tools for the study of literature is a working knowledge of the culture that influenced the authors of that literature and helped give rise to the social attitudes, feelings, and movements which that literature is trying to reflect. Having first-hand recognized the difficulty of trying to study literature in a “vacuum,” so to speak, my goal was to collect research and develop resources to help future students understand certain aspects of specific cultures and their relation to the literature that they are studying.
In conjunction with Dr. Ed Cutler, I began my research with the target audience of a typical English 201 class at BYU. This class, as part of the History of Civilization series, begins its literary study with ancient creation myths, proceeds through such fields as Buddhism and Confucianism, and eventually moves into pre-Renaissance literature such as the Arthurian Legends and Dante.
My first task was to identify political, historical, social, and scientific elements of Egyptian, Oriental, Middle-Eastern, and European cultures that were most influential or most prominent in the literature. Obviously much of this information is subjective, based on my own study of the literature and my consultations with Dr. Cutler. However, our conclusions are general enough and applicable enough to still be very useful in not only helping students understand the literature, but use those strategies to further their own studies.
The next step in my project was to collect images that represented different areas of the afore mentioned cultural points. The images and the research were then combined in an organized manner, and I created a web-page targeted to the English 201 class so the information would be readily accessible to the students. The address of this page is: http://english.byu.edu/cutler201/homepage.html
Because of the successful results of this research, I followed the same strategies and methods in creating a second page set targeted to an English 363 class. This class studies Modern American Literature (from 1900-1960), and includes a list of links to other WWWeb locations that relate to American literature. The address for this page is: http://english.byu.edu/cutler363/eng363.html.
Finally, my last task was to set up an area for students to do their own research and post their own results of that research relating to the relationship between literature and culture. By training students in rudimentary web page design, photo manipulation, and academic publishing, Dr. Cutler and I set up a site at http://english.byu.edu/19th which contains information completely developed by students as part of a 495 class. This site will change from semester to semester as different English 495 classes get involved with the project.
