Bringing Words to Life

AP Literature and Composition teams up with the Create Studio to challenge students to think differently about classic novels by turning metaphors and symbols into concrete artifacts

In the Spring of 2022, students in Damon Van Leeuwen’s AP Literature and Composition course participated in a book club unit. Each student was allowed to choose from one of four books (“Hell of a Book” by Jason Mott, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” by Ken Kesey, “The Memory Police” by Yoko Agawa, and “Exit West” by Mohsin Hamid). After choosing their book, students were then split into book club groups and engaged in a series of discussions, writing exercises, and research to better understand their novel.

At the end of the unit students were then asked to create an artifact from their novel in the Create Studio with the help of Max Nishimura. The artifact could either be a literal, concrete object that appears in the novel or a metaphorical representation of a theme, character, or motif. Students then had to write a 250 word description of the piece, its importance of the novel, and how it was constructed.

The assignment grew from a faculty in-service presentation by Max Nishimura, Simon Huss, and Dahlia Setiyawan that Damon attended in February. The in-service encouraged teachers to think of ways to use the Create

Maddie Doi ’22

Angus Ebeling ’22

Studio in their classes. Damon was inspired by the in-service and chose to make it a part of his next unit.

“I wanted the assignment to still require thoughtful, rigorous literary thinking, but also to encourage the students to think differently about the novel and reading in general. Too often we think of reading as merely an exercise in language, but our mind is always trying to ’picture’ what the words are describing. The assignment was meant to leverage that impulse and get the students to think about the meaning of concrete items in the novel or ways to make metaphors and symbols into concrete artifacts,” said Damon. Maddie Doi ’22, who read “Exit West,” chose to design and create a series of magical doors that are a central element in the novel. “In the novel, the doors can transport people to faraway countries, effectively rendering borders defunct and allowing different people to intermingle with each other,” Maddie wrote in her description of the artifact. “To people like Nadia and Saeed, who are fleeing a country on the brink of full-scale civil war, they represent an escape to a new life—one filled with more opportunities, possibilities, and hope.”

In many novels, writers use the device of a book within a book to amplify themes and create more complex layers. Kate Albert ’22 chose to recreate portions of a novel that the unnamed narrator is writing in “The Memory Police.” “Throughout the novel, the protagonist aims to preserve the disappearing past in the form of manuscripts,” she wrote. “These entries demonstrate how it felt for the author to lose everything that made her who she was. From “I chose to do the artifact option because I love crafting things, and I was excited by how greatly the artifact assignment deviated from traditional English assignments. I appreciated that Damon gave us ribbons to her voice, readers are able to join the author in her battle against the memory police.” Angus Ebeling ’22 the opportunity to showcase our designed and conunderstanding of the book beyond structed a box with a written piece. Although many of a two-way mirror to us created similar artifacts, it was explore ideas of ideninteresting to see how different our tity and race seen in individual visual interpretations of the novel “Hell of a the books were.” Book.” “The theme of -Maddie Doi ’22 ’being unseen’ is prevalent throughout the book as a way for characters to avoid conflict by avoiding reality,” Angus wrote. “For the narrator, a famous and popular author, his racial identity is ’unseen to him’ as he is unable to see the implications of identity in American society. For Soot, a young Black boy whose father is killed, it is an attempt to hide from conflict about his dark complexion. I took inspiration for the piece from a magic trick in which a mirror is used in a box to create the illusion that the box is empty. By turning on a light, the figure of Soot becomes visible behind the mirror.”