Guitarsophist

Yesterday I turned in my grades. I had one student who tried to submit a paper after I had already turned them in. I need to tighten up on my late paper policies so that this sort of thing doesn’t happen. However, teaching is a kind of dance, especially teaching a course for the first time. I have goals for the course, and the students have needs and abilities and gaps, as well as their own goals and expectations. The trick is to adapt and adjust until it all pretty much works. I learned a lot about teaching from my students this quarter.

After the first midterm, we read the chapter on Structuralism in Peter Barry’s Beginning Literary Theory and a selection from Fernand de Saussure’s Course in Linguistics from the Richter anthology. The tacit theory that most undergraduate English majors bring to reading literature is that the author is a deep thinker who has intentionally designed the literary work to convey hidden meanings that only careful reading can uncover. Up to this point in the course, it was possible for them to fit most of the criticism we had read into this model. However, the structuralist focus on system rather than utterance, the elimination of the author as a limit on interpretation, and the problematic connection between signifiers and signifieds, all conspired to turn the tacit view on its head. Barry says that it is as if people who were very accustomed to studying eggs were now being asked to study chickens. One student wrote in his blog that his head had officially exploded.

From this point on, the students encounter many counter-intuitive questions. To what extent is the author spoken by the discourse? Do signifiers ultimately refer only to other signifiers? Can a work be free from class and ideology? Is language gendered? Up to the first midterm, the students feel that they are adding to what they know. Once they read Saussure, Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault they are beginning to wonder if they know anything at all, or what it would mean to know something.

New learning and intellectual growth necessarily come out of confusion. To prepare the ground, the teacher has to make the students confused. If that is true, I succeeded admirably in this stage of learning. Of course, the confusion has to be productive.

When I designed the course, I thought that I would write online comprehension-check quizzes using the Blackboard 9 quiz module. The first one I tried to write was on Saussure. Blackboard doesn’t do short answer quizzes very well, so they had to be multiple choice. A multiple choice quiz has to have a clear right answer, but the wrong answers have to be plausible enough that a student might choose them. In general, I think that putting lots of plausible wrong answers in front of students is pedagogically questionable. For structuralism, post-structuralism, and postmodernism, it is hilariously impossible. I abandoned the enterprise. I wrote a second midterm instead.

One the last day of class I divided them into groups and had them do an activity based on the Academy Awards. Each group had to select a theory for each of the following categories:

Most mind-expanding theory
Most counter-intuitive theory
Most useful overall theory
Theory most deserving of being cast into the dustbin of history
Theory most useful for impressing your friends

This led to lively discussion and interesting choices. For example, one group decided to put feminist theory, not into the dustbin, but into the “recycle bin” because there were too many conflicts among the theorists, and because they thought that something called “Gender Theory” might be more encompassing and more useful.

Instead of a final, I had each student talk for a few minutes about the paper he or she was about to turn in. Papers were due electronically by midnight at the end of the day, so they had a chance to make some last minute changes if presenting to the class made them want to revise something. This activity was very popular. Several students said that it made the papers more meaningful and several made revisions.

I am teaching this course again next quarter, and I am planning to rework some of the design. All things considered, I’d say the course was a success. I learned a lot. For the students, I think this is a course that plants seeds that sprout a bit now but blossom later. That’s OK.

Well, so far we have gone from Aristotle to the New Critics. For the midterm, I asked them to look at “Ode on a Grecian Urn” by John Keats from at least two different critical perspectives. They had 65 minutes. I really didn’t know what to expect. I designed a 20 point grading rubric that had five categories: response to the question, knowledge of critics and texts, use of theory to interpret texts, development, and academic writing style.

I read the poem to them, and I gave them a few cultural details and some textual issues, in case they wanted to go there. Still, a couple of students seemed to be unclear about what an “urn” was, or that the urn had pictures on it that Keats was describing. One never knows what sort of missing background knowledge is going to send a reading in the wrong direction.

A number of students pointed out that Plato argued that art was three times removed from reality because the object in our world is a representation of the ideal form of that object, and the artistic representation is thus a representation of a representation. This poem about the art on an urn is thus four times removed from the truth. That is a good point. However, many of them also argued that Plato would despise the poem, when in fact he would undoubtedly agree with the maxim in the last two lines: Truth is Beauty, Beauty, Truth. Well, excellence is rarely unmixed.

Many of our students are of the Romantic persuasion. They want literature to be about individual creativity, expression, emotion, and deep insight. Thus Wordsworth’s “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” speaks to them. Fortunately, this approach works well with Keats. However, what they take from Coleridge is the distinction between the primary and secondary imagination, and the fancy. They try to identify elements in the poem that correspond to these different aspects of the mind. This doesn’t really work. Nice try, though.

Students tend to like Victor Shklovsky and the concepts of habitualization and defamiliarization. This ode does give us a new way of thinking about ancient urns, at least if you have seen a Greek urn before, so this works. However, Shklovsky is arguing against the idea that art is imagery. Sometimes students read 180 degrees wrong. They read the opposition as the position, or read the hedge and don’t read the conclusion, so they think that Shklovsky is arguing that imagery is all. Some of my colleagues have noted this tendency as well. Perhaps students are not used to academic writing that takes the opposition seriously enough to lay the position out in a nuanced and fair way. The same thing happened with Wimsatt and Beardsley’s article about “The Intentional Fallacy.” They argue that while it is clear that authors have intentions, it is neither possible nor desirable to know them. My students were discussing authorial intentions and citing Wimsatt and Beardsley as the authorities for doing so.

When I first started reading these midterms, I was disheartened. There was so much misunderstanding! However, I have reconsidered. They have actually learned a great deal, as have I, and we still have half the quarter to go.

Now that I have stepped down as writing center director, my new job is to teach three courses a quarter. One of these is an introduction to literary theory. Long ago, when I was an undergraduate, the department where I was studying had three courses in major critics. The first was called “Plato to Pope,” which I remember because the professor complained that the computer shortened the title in the catalog to read “Plato to Pop.” The second was probably Victorians and Modernists (Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, John Ruskin, on the one hand and T.S. Eliot on the other), and the third was probably mostly New Critics and perhaps people like Northrup Frye and Harold Bloom. This was not seen as literary theory so much as literary criticism.

Most of my professors in those days were backsliding New Critics. They had heard of Jacques Derrida and deconstruction, but they thought it was faddish nonsense and were waiting for it to go away. It wasn’t until I got to graduate school that high literary theory became an important topic of conversation. Now the standard texts, such as the one I am using, The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends, edited by David Richter, contain everything from Plato and Aristotle to gender studies and queer theory, all to be covered in one course.

My syllabus starts out with the following questions:

What is literature? What is non-literature?
How is literature created?
What does literature do? How does it work?
What do literary texts mean? How do they mean? Is there a correct reading? How do we know?
Is authorial intention important? Or is literature created by the reader?
What role does literature play in society?
Is literature political? Ideological?
Is literature esoteric and exclusive, or part of popular culture?
Is literature nationalistic, ethnic, or gendered?

I write reading questions for each reading selection so that students read with the purpose of finding answers to the questions. I think this gives them a way into difficult texts. I then use the questions to structure the discussion. If a question provokes insight, discussion, and more questions, I allow that to happen until the vein peters out. Then on to the next question. I think that this is more engaging than lecturing. However, what has happened a number of times is that we end up applying literary theory to popular culture and taking up a lot of time with that. We spent an hour last week talking about what Aristotle would think of slasher movies. Some of the more serious students become frustrated when we do that, but the majority of them are quite engaged.

Some of the students are quite passionate about finding out how literature works. One of them came up after our discussion of Aristotle’s Poetics to say that he was disappointed in Aristotle because he seemed to be saying that the purpose of art was to create emotion. He hoped that subsequent readings would provide more satisfactory theories.

Most of the students merely tolerated classical and neo-classical theories of mimesis and rhetorical effects. They became much more animated when we read Wordsworth and Coleridge, especially after we applied their different poetics to actual poems, Tintern Abbey and Kubla Khan. However, in that activity I found myself teaching literature, something I never contemplated doing after I made my rhetorical turn, back in about 1983. I quickly sampled some critical articles on J-Stor to see what has been said. J-Stor is like a Hubble telescope that allows one to see what critics have been saying about a literary work over a long period of time, sometimes back into the 19th century. Different times, different critical approaches, different critics, different interpretations. Each search is the Literary Theory course in microcosm. So it is rhetorical after all!

I am also going to use a book by Peter Barry called Beginning Literary Theory. Another brief introduction to Literary Theory by Jonathan Culler is like a helicopter overflight of the landscape. The Barry book is like a bus tour where you actually get out and walk around a bit and look at things. Barry starts with structuralist theories, and for every theoretical perspective he gives you a historical overview with major figures, a bulleted list of what critics of that persuasion look for, a summary of a sample article, and questions to ponder. I think this will serve students well for the more recent, and more philosophical, approaches.

So far, this is all a lot of work, and I am having difficulty keeping my head above water. It is great fun, however, and it will get easier. I think the students are learning something. I know I am.