I think Graff’s notion of what high school student writers are capable of producing is exaggerated (“Like Scholes, I think high school and college students can produce this powerful critical talk” (182).) and his opinion of the value of reading literary criticism to improve their writing ignores the fact that they cannot understand it. Graff admits that teachers object to introducing their students to criticism because they find it “opaque and boring” (174). He criticizes teachers for tolerating “a low level of articulation and [letting] students vent opinions and feelings instead of engaging with their classmates” (177) in the interest of getting students to talk. I agree with the students that criticism is unreadable and boring, and it has certainly never sparked a desire to engage in conversation about the text.
Graff’s commercial for his book of critical essays about Huck Finn is supposed to overcome this objection. The failure to achieve stated goals with the text, Graff says, “did not weaken my conviction that published criticism is a vastly underused resource.” Graff relates a similarly disappointing experience of McCann yet concludes the chapter by saying “we came away confirmed in our conviction that working with critical texts can enable students to produce a higher quality of critical thinking and writing” (189).
In Graff’s narrow view, the only acceptable response to literature is engagement in the public conversation about the text. For students not yet ready for published criticism, I think the ideas Lynn Bloom writes in her article, Textual Terror, Textual Power: Teaching Literature through Writing Literature (WWTTL 77) would be more effective. Whereas Graff says British literature students write critical essays, not tragic dramas, Bloom asks, “Why not encourage students to write creative texts in the genres they’re studying, in response to and as a way of understanding these works?” Furthermore, Bloom’s students are given opportunity to use critical thinking by responding to each others’ criticism, making the conversation immediate and real.
So, I have entered the conversation, and I side with Bloom.
I’m with you that literary criticism written in academese is going to be of little or no use to high school students. But do you think it might be possible that someone (perhaps not Graff) could write literary criticism particularly for kids that appeals to them and that could be of any use? Is the problem with the way criticism is presented or is the whole idea of criticism itself the problem?