On June 6th a group of my literature students from the Academic Magnet High School will have the privilege to meet with Laurie Anderson in a round table discussion about the creative process. After sharing this news with my students their first question to me was, "Who is Laurie Anderson?" My response was to have them carefully study one of Anderson's most popular work, "O, Superman". Instead of immediately showing them the video and asking them to analyze what they saw I instead helped them slowly discover her work by walking them through the following steps:
1. Read and Mark-up Students read and used literary tools to analyze and mark up the text of "O Superman" with interpretive notes.
Student sample of mark up.
2. Listen
Students listened to an audio recording of Anderson's performance of "O Superman". They used their lyric handouts to note where and how Anderson used music and sounds to communicate concepts in the performance.
3. Origins
Exploring the origins of "O Superman" Anderson constructed the song as a cover of the aria "O Souverain, o juge, o père" (O Sovereign, O Judge, O Father) from Jules Massenet's 1885 opera Le Cid. She was moved by the opera's powerful refrain "O Sovereign, O Judge, O Father!" and identified with the huge emotions at its center. She says, "O Souverain' is basically a prayer for help. All is over, finished! My beautiful dreams of glory, my dreams of happiness, have flown away forever!" Students watched the aria and discussed its connections to "O Superman".
4. Watch
Watch a video recording of Anderson's performance of "O Superman"
5. Discuss Students shared their interpretations of the central theme of "O Superman" and explained how the textual, auditory, and visual elements in the work helped present the theme they identified.
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