Using TV Tropes to Teach Narrative Devices

Instructors attempting to teach students to analyze the formal qualities of a work will often introduce literary devices and tropes into their students' lexicons.  Students, however, often have difficulty assimilating these concepts as anything more than items to be found and labelled in any given narrative work.  They have difficulty understanding why authors do the things they do and what affects the author's choices may be having on their expectations as readers. 

TV Tropes is a wiki that catalogues narrative devices used across a variety of media:  literature, television, film, manga, comic books, video games, etc.  It is rigorously maintained by careful amateur observers of modern media, is often cited on fan websites, and is evidence that Formalism exists on the internet.  John Crowe Ransom would be proud.

Incorporating TV Tropes into your discussion of literary devices and encouraging students to talk about how narrative techniques across different genres and forms of media can assist in making these concepts intelligible and "real" to them. 

This idea originally emerged from a conversation with a student who wrote a paper comparing the video game Dante's Inferno to the original poem.  His observations about the changes in the story led to a productive discussion about the narrative demands of video games vs. medieval poetry.