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.

        One feature of Graff’s Clueless in the Academe that I appreciated was that the book itself modeled the points he was making.  In his first chapter, Graff argues that journalistic (or popular) culture and academic culture are not worlds apart as they once were, but in fact, “the university is itself popular culture” (21).  From there, the play on movie titles (Six Degrees of Obfuscation; The Revenge of the Nerds) he uses as chapter subheadings gives the academic book a pop culture feel.

            His second chapter on The Problem Problem is, on the surface, a discussion of the kinds of problems English teachers dig up in texts that do not appear to students to be problems at all.  Of course, Graff’s deeper problem, the failure of students to recognize problems, is the real problem, and Graff has the solution.  “Give the students the help they need to conduct the search [for meaning] well, with a sense of how and why it can be useful” (52).  Their apathy for learning the art of argumentation, as well as their naiveté regarding the value of analyzing the cultural assumptions imbedded in forms of entertainment, is closely linked to their inability to recognize the kinds of problems English teachers “dig up,” and can be ameliorated by helping students see the purpose and power of argumentation. 

            In chapter 4, Graff demonstrates the technique of engaging in argumentation, ironically, in opposition to Deborah Tannen’s argument that argument should be abolished.  He does with Tannen’s book exactly what he wants students to learn to do, being careful to be polite and specific, and to identify the points on which they can agree.  His chapter on Paralysis by Analysis is another example of a carefully planned and executed argument, just to make sure we see how it is to be done, while he makes his point.

            Graff does a good job of showing by his writing style and ample us of examples that “it is possible to do justice to the complexity of academic subjects while communicating clearly to nonspecialist audiences” (134).  His sound bite conclusion to chapter 7 was in keeping with his modeling of ideas:  “It is time to rethink the view that the university in not in the gist business” (154).  As a writing instructor, I was thrilled to hear him say it was his sense of audience that prompted him to revise his writing style.  In fact, most of Graff’s book seemed more relevant to me as a teacher of writing than a teacher of literature. 

           Like Laura, I was thrilled by the fantastic results Carl Lovitt described in his article Using Journals to Redefine Public and Private Domains in the Literature Classroom.  As a diligent student who annotates texts, I even wrote “Title sounds boring, but it’s really a great experiment with wonderful results” next to the article in the Table of Contents.  True story, I promise.  Then Laura knocked me back to reality, reminding us that real students put less thought into their journal entries than what socks they should wear to work.  In fact, all the articles about using writing to teach literature gave that “too good to be true” feeling.  For example, to a disappointing eulogy for a father, Bloom merely commented “A very nice tribute.”  With no further direction from Bloom, the student revised his paper, resolving “never, ever to write anything ‘nice’ again!”            Getting students to rewrite anything, let alone do it with fervor, is my greatest challenge as a writing teacher.  The twist that Bloom added, her struggling as a writer in front of them, is something I have not tried-yet.  I think I have nothing to lose.  Another important ingredient in her workshop was a feeling of a writing community in which erasing the teacher-student barrier also erased the student writer-real writer barrier.  By setting the example, and setting the bar for herself high, she raised the students’ expectations of themselves.  Similarly, Glenn’s experiment with imitation (style, tone, point of view, genre) includes a new twist that sparks enthusiasm in her students.  I loved her idea of requiring students to respond to her comments (as Professor Sample said he has tried) and write out their revision plan before they could conference with her.  This idea struck a chord with me because I spent an hour conferencing with a student recently, and the “revised” paper he submitted was exactly the same as the first draft.  Glenn’s idea puts the responsibility for revision with the student where it belongs.

            When Green’s students wrote their own texts in response to their reading, Green says in Reinventing the Literary Text that the opportunity gave students “strategies they need to ‘read like a writer’-to anticipate the reader’s response” (189).  As a writing teacher, I have always wanted my students to write like a reader-understanding what readers expect and satisfying those expectations.  Teaching literature can make students better writers while teaching writing can make them better readers by enhancing the critical thinking skills necessary for both.

            The lesson I take from these three writing teachers is that if something I am trying is not inspiring my students to create great writing, don’t give up-try something new.

 Like Ginny, I noticed that Scholes recommends that smart English teachers suppress their natural inclination to show off for their students.  Too bad he couldn’t resist.  He sounded like he agreed in principle with Blau, that an English teacher’s role was to enable students to read and interpret a text themselves, but in practice, he gave me the feeling that interpreting texts is a mysterious power held by genius English teachers.  Of interpreting texts, he says “there is an element of intuition . . . that cannot be reduced to formulas”31).  That said, he presents the formula for interpreting a text:  Step 1.  Look for repetitions and oppositions in the text.  Sounds simple enough, but the cultural and geographic information he supplies, as well as some not-so-obvious oppositions he points out, put him in the position of telling the students the correct interpretation of the text.  He says, “In leading a class from reading to interpretation, I would try to uncover the implications of the opposition by exploring all the relationships and differences that link the story’s two main places and episodes” (33).  He asks questions and answers them himself.  His text gives no indication that his students were coming up with the conclusions he makes. Step 2. Determine what these oppositions represent.  About this step he says students must be able to make connection between text and culture based on knowledge, and then teaches the class the cultural knowledge they will need to correctly interpret the text.  Sounds like a show off to me.  I do not question his brilliance.  I just don’t think being in one of his classes would make me feel empowered.

 The common thread I found among the blogs I have posted in the last month is questions.  I want to know if these ideas, such as the ones in Blau’s workshops, will work in my classroom.  They are very neatly packaged (scripted, actually) in the text, and I was taught to believe that if something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.  The skeptic in me asks things such as how relying on my peers instead of my teacher will make me feel more empowered to discover the meaning of difficult texts.  I questioned Crosman’s motives and assumptions behind his challenge of Hirsch’s belief about Truth and where meaning lies.  I questioned the value, implicit in the posters by Bass and Linkon, of readers making speculations about a text for speculation’s sake.  Where does authority, to use one of Blau’s terms, of the interpretation and connections fit in?  And my first blog is even titled with a question as I wonder how I can help my students move toward becoming expert readers.

Apparently I have a need to know how to apply all of this very new stuff.  Every week we read about authors, texts, and concepts I have never heard of before, and my way of trying them on to see how they fit is to ask lots of questions.  Doesn’t sound like a bad approach to me.  Naomi

As a teacher of composition with virtually no experience with literature beyond introduction to literature and a Shakespeare class in my undergraduate program more than 25 years ago, I appreciated the practicality of Sheridan Blau’s The Literature Workshop. I teach freshman composition as an adjunct at a very small college with no full time English instructors, but the college is required by the accrediting agency to add fulltime professors and course offerings each year, and I am likely to be the next person they add to their faculty. As the sole member of the English department, I will certainly be teaching any literature courses they add, so I appreciated the book’s theoretical base at least as much as its practical applications.

The Think Aloud activities we conducted in class were very much like one of Blau’s workshops, in which he provided opportunities for students to read and reread a text, and then discuss the difficult parts with their peers to determine what the text was saying. My observation of that activity confirmed what Blau says about the power of rereading to clarify a text. As we read the poems again and again, the “lightbulb” became increasingly brighter. However, I have to say that I never achieved the satisfaction of feeling that I really understood what the poem was saying. And that leads me to question two things about Blau’s workshop on interpretation: 1) What if the students are not able to figure out what the poem is saying? and 2) How is relying on peers to tell me what the poem means any different from relying on the instructor to do the same thing? Either way, I conclude that finding meaning is a mystical power I do not possess. I certainly had that feeling from reading the discussion about the poem “Pitcher,” because I do not believe I would have seen a metaphorical meaning in the poem if I had read it 100 times. I felt much better when Blau admitted that someone had to point it out to him, too.

I can fully identify with the students who feel that their inability to understand a text is a measure of their incompetence as a reader, and simple tools such as rereading, providing necessary background and pretexts, and old-fashioned experience with literature can make a huge difference. I may not have seen the metaphorical reading of “Pitcher,” but with enough experience reading poetry, I may learn to look for metaphorical interpretations. Additionally, I have never heard an English professor candidly confess, as Blau did, to not understanding lines in many difficult poems that he has studied and taught for years. I wonder if my Romantic poetry professor had similar experiences with the poem “Julian and Maddalo,” a poem I admitted out loud in class that I did not finish reading because I did not understand one word. The student next to me who said she thought it was “beautiful” did not help a bit, but I suspect now that she didn’t understand it either.

 The Searle article on New Criticism quotes I. A. Richards as saying “that poetry could be an intellectually respectable substitute for religion in an emerging age of science” and that poetry had the power to “change our attitudes without requiring us to believe in the Magical View found in traditional religion.”  Examples of such religious language make their way into literary criticisms frequently.  The New Critic, Cleanth Brooks decried the reduction of poetry to a prose restatement of its theme or plot as the “Heresy of Paraphrase,” as if one was violating rules of orthodox interpretation, which, of course, did not exist.  The Goldstein article quotes Wolfgang Iser: Readers’ “controlled observation of themselves allows them to escape this fallen world and improve their lives.  The literary text can move the reader to adopt positive values and redemptive beliefs.  I believe this idea of literature as a substitute religion is also evidenced in Crosman’s ideas on readers making meaning.

            Crosman works very hard to justify the coexistence of mutually exclusive interpretations of a text.  Believing that “the idea that Truth is One-unambiguous, self-consistent, and knowable– . . . may now have outlived its usefulness,” he campaigns for peace and harmony through tolerance, which he equates with plurality of meaning in texts. In refuting Hirsch’s position that the author is the one who creates meaning, Crosman depicts those who recognize Truth as narrow minded and judgmental (believing “the mass of our fellow men are stupid or perverse”) and commits the fallacy of either/or when he says people who believe they possess Truth can either “turn [their] backs on [those who do not] in cynical contempt, or try to force them to see the light.”            

Crosman admits that Hirsch never said a text could have only one meaning, rather that it is an unstated assumption.  Perhaps it is Crosman who is making the assumption based on his biases against determinable meaning.  He accuses Hirsch of making a social and political argument for univocality, but Crosman’s position is just as socially and politically motivated as he demonstrates with his plea for peace and harmony.

            Crosman claims that if Hirsch is correct in his historical approach to interpreting Wordsworth’s “Lucy,” “we would have to convict Wordsworth of inability to say what he meant.”  Crosman’s conclusion again denies alternative motivations for Wordsworth’s chosen mode of expression.  The accusation leveled at Hirsch by Crosman that his assumptions flawed his interpretations is equally true of Crosman, and Crosman assumes that Truth is an archaic concept and society is best served by embracing contradiction.

            Certainly Crosman speaks correctly when he points out that the ambiguity of words complicates the transference of meaning from the author to the reader. Readers do have to make their best guess on the intended meaning of the words by putting them into a larger context, but if we cannot do so with a fairly high degree of accuracy, there is no meaning at all.  Naomi

  The enthusiasm the students expressed regarding Sherry Linkon’s Inquiry Project was encouraging because getting students to slow down, reread, and reconsider first impressions are very difficult goals to achieve. Consider the words of one student, Mark: “I liked how I was able to discover MY answers instead of the answers that I thought Dr. Linkon wanted me to find.”  The question I have regarding the project is what is done when “MY answers” are not supported by the text.  I do not see allowance in the course for evaluating the merit of connections that they students make, just that they make them.  However, when student, Rikki, wrote about reading No-No Boy, she said “there were some parts that were confusing the first time I read them, and I had to go back to make sure I was reading it right.”  Rikki understands that there is a right way to read it, which means there must be wrong ways to read it that should be avoided.  Rikki speculates on the connection between style and subject matter and makes a plausible and interesting conclusion, but ultimately, her ideas cannot be proven; not at all sure of her connections, she expresses them in terms of what “seems to” emphasize and what “could be” an extension.  Randy Bass also offers examples of student work on his poster, and we see a similar lack of certainty by his advanced student: “It seems there is a spiritual connection,” he writes. I do not understand the value of forcing students to make such speculations for speculations’ sake.Linkon makes a link between literature and writing when she says that the value of critical thinking and inquiry is to formulate new ideas to be shared.  “No researcher completes the entire study of any text,” she writes.  “Rather, we build on . . . the work done by others,” so “you need to be able to communicate clearly what you’re thinking, and if you can make your work engaging and enjoyable to read, all the better.”  But in addition to being engaging and clear, it should be logical and true.  Due to the interactions of text, reader, and culture, Linkon identifies critical reading, in part, with shifting and contradictory meaning.  I disagree that the meaning of a text changes, and contradictory meaning is non-sensical.  Although my inquiry into the historical and cultural contexts may cause a shift in my understanding of the text, it does not change the meaning of it.  Nor does it make any sense that a text should contradict itself.  Scholarly inquiry should lead me to resolve apparent contradictions.   Naomi

I found the research on the differences between experts and novices very interesting. As I read, the marginal notes I made were simply names of people I was reminded of. For example, the opening sentence says experts “are able to think effectively about problems” in the area of their expertise. This reminded me of Stephen Goodwin here at GMU. Others of you may have had a class with him, and I was amazed (and jealous) by his skill in identifying problems with my writing. Things I never saw jumped out at him as if they were in neon lights. That experts understand problems in terms of “big ideas” whereas novices mechanically work formulas reminded me of my son, who learned over Christmas break how to solve the Rubik’s cube by finding the solution on the internet and practicing the algorithms until he could do them without looking at his cheat sheet. These two examples lead me to wonder how one moves from novice to expert.Though expertise is much more than the memorization of a set of facts, certainly the fundamentals lay a necessary foundation for any area of expertise. As a teacher of reading and writing, I have mastered the basics, so how do I move to the next level? Is the big difference between Goodwin and me simply years of experience? Given enough time, would my son eventually master the 4-square Rubik’s cube in terms of “big ideas” on the workings of the puzzle? The chapter ends by asserting that, ultimately, students must learn to teach themselves. I am thinking it takes a certain level of expertise to recognize when one is at that level.

Another related question is how I can be the guide my students need to move them from manipulation of formulas to understanding big ideas. I do not want to teach them that to write well, they must memorize a set of facts such as punctuation rules and sentence structures. But I do not want them to miss out on learning the fundamentals. Since I am a novice writer myself, my ability to guide them is limited. I can, however, point them to the big ideas I have learned regarding voice, passion, purpose, and audience. I am compelled by my commitment to my students to acquire more expertise both in pedagogy and my discipline.

The concluding paragraphs pointed out a couple cautions regarding the application of this study. As I read the importance of the interaction of the six principle differences explained in the chapter, I smiled in amusement. The experts on this subject noticed problems I never would have thought of.