FYI, to clarify my own issue:  I’m not having trouble getting their attention.  It’s quite clear (from reading responses and from their small-group conversations) that they’re interested and invested and reading.  They’re just having trouble at moments figuring out how to talk about the book while in progress on a first reading, and I’m having trouble asking the right questions in order to get them to talk.

Anyhow, we had lots of incest and pedophilia and death and prolepses today, so (perhaps because of that) the talking went well.

If this can’t get undergraduates’ attention, nothing can. We should all resign.

The other thing that i tend to do to replicate this is to move the discussion out of the classroom and onto a list or threaded discussion and require participation in those discussions. 

Norman Mailer said he couldn’t get past the bananas, though.

I’d try the reading quiz experiment; you might be surprised.

Typically, I start very small, encouraging students to treat passages almost as if they occurred in lyric poems.  We also talk about narrative conventions, and the way writers flirt with, exploit, or thwart them.  This gives them something concrete to discuss (even if it’s the slipperiness of a metaphor, etc.).

Eventually, enough instances accrete, and there’s a sort of tipping point five- or six-hundred pages in where we can start putting things together.  (And still have another 400 pages to go!)

It is perhaps a bit easier in the Victorian novel, which helps set up conventions that Pynchon, DeLillo, et al., play with, but I would probably work in that direction.

The problem is that these reportings-back don’t translate well into conversation—they become isolated reports, given in sequence.  I’m the one that ends up doing a lot of the connecting.

If, on the other hand, the questions are more open-ended—if I ask not for a reporting-back but for thinking around and developing an idea—then my students are, more often than not, very chatty with one another, but totally mum when they turn back to talk as a large group.  As though they’re willing to expose their confusions and take stabs at incomplete answers with one another, but not with me listening.

I guess I’m hoping to find a happy middle ground—a way to transition from writing or small-group discussions to full-class conversations, in which they talk not to me but to one another, and in which they take risks, speculating on what they do know and admitting what they don’t.

(And, incidentally, I’m fairly confident that the vast majority of the class IS doing the reading.  They’ve got WTF??? written all over their faces; they’re just, for the most part, not willing to ask the questions out loud.)

We don’t talk about big novels, though. Wish we did. I’ve tried to get them talking about Big Articles, which sometimes works, but there are always some who Haven’t Had Time To Read It. One colleague of mine demands ten lines of “thinking-writing” before she’ll let them into the classroom. I think about that every semester but haven’t quite had the heart to do it yet. Kick them out, I mean. I prefer putting them in small group situations where they’ll be horribly embarrassed in front of their peers if they haven’t done the reading. Saves me the bother of being the bad guy.

When I studied big novels we weren’t expected to talk. The professors lectured. We shut up. Students should be seen adn not heard, and lectures were lectures. My impression was, though, that we HAD all read the novels. The whole novels. We loved reading. That was why we were studying something as impractical and certain NOT to get us jobs as literature.

This appears to have changed.

So sorry, no good advice, only sympathy…

If you’re doing these in chrono, and there aren’t a lot of “wtf?” questions about GR, I’d start with the reading quizzes.