Even though my last post complained that I was unsatisfied with Graff’s justification for plainer language, he at least seemed to be arguing for it. I felt that he agreed with my sentiment that academicease is not only a stumbling block for students trying to enter academia, but for academia to communicate within itself. I had hopes of solutions to come, of more on changing and improving the language we use to communicate our ideas. Chapter 13, however, made it clear that this, in fact, is not one of Graff’s goals.

Graff starts chapter 13 saying, “It is not surprising if students feel ambivalent about talking the talk of the academic world, since this ambivalence is pervasive in the larger society in which academics’ funny way of talking is a common joke” (246). By the middle of the chapter, Graff has morphed the topic into bringing “students into a debate over the pros and cons of learning literate intellectual discourse” (257). By the last page, he discusses getting students to “reflect on their contradictory feelings about intellectualism and its talk” (260). What was seen as a joke becomes literate intellectual discourse becomes intellectualism and its talk as if–despite all the earlier discussion of hidden intellectualism–in the end, for Graff there is no separating intellectualism from the way it talks. While my goal is to address the language we use, to address why this language is a common joke, clearly, Graff’s goal is not to change the language but the students.

It seems that all Graff is concerned about is a smoother method of introducing students into academia and academic jargon. He wants to make intellectuals of students, and he argues for a transition by gentle immersion rather than sink or swim, which is noble enough.

As we come to the end of the book, the solutions that Graff offers seemed to jump from too narrow to too broad. Graff concludes with Deborah Meier’s ideas, promoting the notion that “the world of school knowledge and ideas needs to be organized as a coherent and intelligible culture whose practices make sense” (263). Now I have to ask: Would anyone argue with that? I like some of her ideas, but it is too broad a concept to cover in one chapter. The middle chapters had some good ideas, but as Sara mentions, it is rather grab bag. Honestly, the best, most useful part for me was the epilogue. Ultimately, I finished the book feeling frustrated. I like the idea of the word of the day, where students and teacher alike try to assimilate the language of the other. But really? There’s a tremendous gap between students and academia; so, let them have a word of the day? Let them use quotes? I have to ask: Is this the best we can do?

Perhaps, I’m just grumpy because Graff abandoned the issue I want to battle against: academicease. But I think it’s more his overarching goal that rankles me. Graff says, “I see my goal as a teacher, and the bottom line goal of education, as that of demystifying the ‘club we belong to’ and breaking up its exclusivity. I want to help students enter this club” (24-25). Breaking up the exclusivity is nice, but is the goal really just to help students enter the club? If that’s the goal of teaching, what’s the point of the club?

I have been grappling with the purpose of teaching literature, with our goal, from the beginning of this class. The more I read of Graff, the clearer his focus on “the club” became, and the more turned off I felt. Is Graff so emerged in the academic club that he can’t come up with any goal beyond the club itself? In the end, despite Graff’s call for breaking up exclusivity, he seems so very far removed from the real public discourse, so very Marie Antoinette. 

Over the summer, I taught a couple of workshops on writing to my colleagues (communicators in a science agency). These workshops are the major, most tangible reason I am in this program. I want to help scientists and communicators write better about science. One of the constant struggles of the communications people is battling the poor souls who have heard what Laura heard and bought into the notion that “you compromise your career if you write in ways that nonacademics [or in this case nonscientists] can understand” (Graff 115). They fret that to write more simply is to “dumb it down.” I hate that description with a passion.

In one of my sessions, the question came up on how to show scientists the value of dumbing it down. In that moment, I had an unusual clarity of how to explain to scientists that it’s not dumbing it down in a way that might reach them. I remember the epiphany feeling. The “Ah, ha! That’s it!” And I saw from their faces, that they felt the same way. But as is often the case when I speak in front of people, I couldn’t remember anything I had actually said after I had finished. A couple of students asked me at lunch a few days later how I had described it. I gave them my normal answers. They said, “No, what was it you said in class?” I couldn’t remember. I still can’t.

I’m glad that, as Graff affirms in Chapter 6, that things are changing in the academic world, that the “pretentious style” is being traded for a “more colloquial academic idiom” (124), but my colleagues and I need a better argument to fight those still entrenched in believing that “reaching a wider audience means dumbing yourself down and compromising your intellectual standards” (129).

So how do you respond? (And that’s not a rhetorical question.)

Graff says

• “As I see it, having to explain myself to freshmen or high school students forces me not to dumb my ideas down, but to formulate them more pointedly than I do when I address only my colleagues and graduate students” (10).
• “general accessibility is fully compatible with intellectual integrity. As I see it, the better I get at addressing nonacademics the better I become as an academic writer” (129).

But I’m still looking for my “elevator speech” on why IT’S NOT DUMBING IT DOWN (sorry to shout, but I needed to vent). I need that nugget that will resonate with the stodgiest of the stodgy.

My general arguments are

It’s not dumbing it down; it’s

• being clear and concise
• putting your ideas in language that makes it easier and faster for your stressed, harried, impatient audience (people who in our case are often making very important potentially life-saving or planet-dooming decisions) to process those ideas

It’s

• not that people can’t understand what you wrote (if the ideas are at least in there)—it’s that they won’t take the time to
• not that the ideas themselves need to be reduced or simplified—they just need to be stated more simply
• not about intelligence—it’s about style

Oh, and by the way, people don’t think you’re smart—

• they think you’re not smart enough (or don’t understand it well enough) to put it in their language; or
• they think you’re too arrogant or too lazy to put it in their language—and if you don’t respect their time, why should they respect what you have to say?

Since I had originally been excited about the Difficulty Paper, but was disappointed with my experience with it, I thought I’d share with everyone some more informal reflections on my experience with it as a reader/writer.

Pros

• Helps with difficult texts
• Good heuristic–it provides places for further investigation (helping to get over that blank slate block)
• Engages you with the text, makes you look closer
• Solves problems you may otherwise gloss over
• It is rewarding to solve difficult difficulties

Cons

• Engages you with stumbling blocks rather than your interests
• Some difficulties are less valuable than others
• Solving less difficult difficulties, such as simple misreads, isn’t that rewarding
• May be forcing a method of addressing difficulty that is more time consuming than what more advanced readers do naturally (In some ways, this is good. It forces you to slow down and look closer, but it is annoying).

Truthfully, as I was writing it, I did not really see these cons. I dove in and pressed on to see where it would take me. Even though a couple of the difficulties that I discussed were very easily solved, I found that my discussion went to why those elements of the story were important, which led to a deeper understanding of the text than merely solving the surface difficulty.

It was only in a revision of my reflection paper, when I was trying to hone in on its guiding idea, that I realized my annoyance with the Difficulty Paper. I wasn’t as excited about my paper as I normally am. I think this was because of con number 1. When you choose a topic, you generally choose something that you have a personal connection/interest in. As you develop your thesis, you naturally have to solve difficulties. However, they are difficulties related to something you are interested in and want to pursue rather than whatever random things tripped you up while you were reading.

So my conclusion is that the difficulty paper is good for helping students learn to address difficulties and for initial engagement in the text, but for final products such as this, where they are going to be putting in more concentrated time and effort, it might be best if they can pursue something they find engaging and compelling rather than “difficult.”

As a writer, in reading Bloom’s essay, “Textual Terror, Textual Power” I was delighted to see creative writing being brought into the literature classroom. But I have to admit, I was skeptical at how much mimicking literature would really help with interpreting the meaning of a text. Clearly, writing about literature helps with thinking about literature. (I like that Bloom calls it writing literature, as opposed to Scholes who seems convinced that by definition students cannot create literature, but instead create “practicings.” It’s a semantic thing, but one that probably makes a big difference when trying to empower students.) But Bloom’s examples of the results of this exercise seem to show more that the act of writing literature helped the students to develop a better understanding/empathy with the craft of writing (the rigor, the difficulties, the rewriting, etc.) than developing skills for finding meaning.

It was in reading Cheryl Glenn’s account (in “The Reading-Writing Connection – What’s Process Got to Do With It”) of trying to determine if students understood the difference between actual author and speaking voice in Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” that I saw an example where mimicking writing could help solve a specific interpretive issue. I can’t help but wonder if Glenn’s student Dan, who “thinks he doesn’t have to believe what he writes,” might either feel more invested or have a better understanding of what he “will not or cannot see” if he had actually attempted to write a satire. Would writing a satire enable him to see the text from the inside-out rather than from behind a wall that neither he nor his teacher is able to penetrate by simply discussing and writing about the text? In this particular case, mimicking the form of the satire seems a more powerful tool than rewriting from an alternate perspective (an activity both Robert Scholes and Brenda Greene suggest). However, rewriting from another perspective could certainly be used, as Green says, to analyze and evaluate how the author has used the elements of the texts to heighten conflicts and develop themes.

I find Glenn’s journaling account of her classroom model of reading, writing, and thinking to be very compelling. As Scholes pointed out, “what (students) need from us now is the kind of knowledge and skill that will enable them to make sense of their worlds, to determine their own interests, both individual and collective, to see through the manipulations of all sorts of texts in all sorts of media, and to express their views in some appropriate manner” (15-16). Merely spewing facts about a piece of literature on an exam does little to help students learn to interpret their world, and so it follows teaching these facts also does little achieve our real goals. Discussion is excellent, but I think writing has a greater power, both in terms of helping students develop their thoughts and in helping them remember the knowledge and the skills they have learned. As Francois pointed out a couple weeks ago, it is the journey not the destination.

In reading Lynn Bloom, “Textual Terror, Textual Power,” I was happy to be reminded of a problem I had with Scholes’s definition of criticism: the notion that criticism must be a negative examination. Bloom brings up Frey’s point in Beyond Literary Darwinism that “adversarial mode of criticism has dominated the most prestigious journal, PMLA, for at least the past twenty years” (78) and asks “What sparks of creativity can survive in this critical jungle?” (78). While Bloom is arguing for bringing creative writing into the classroom, I can’t help but think this criticism of criticism has other negative implications for both the field and students.

Forgive me as I regress our conversation to largely discussing Scholes here (I owe a post). For the most part, I enjoyed Textual Power. There were several ideas, in the earlier chapters especially, that I appreciated. Unfortunately, for me, his argumentative rhetoric in the last chapter left a sourness in my mind, one that flavors everything he has done up to that point. In this final chapter he seems to go off on a personal rant against Stanley Fish. He gets so caught up in discounting Fish that it seems like he is contradicting himself in his efforts to find fault with Fish’s approach.

Perhaps if I were more familiar with Fish’s argument (or if my brain were better able to absorb all the nuances of so many new ideas) I could understand Scholes’s frustration. But in all the ranting, I just don’t see a major, worthwhile difference between Fish’s idea of interpretive community and Scholes’s idea of cultural codes. Aren’t they both essentially arguing that interpretation is largely influenced by one’s knowledge, culture, and community values? Is saying “Cultural codes enable us to process verbal material” (27) all that different from Fish’s claim that “‘the thoughts an individual can think and the mental operations he can perform have their source in some or other interpretive community, he is as much the product of that community (acting as an extension of it) as the meanings it enables him to produce'” (155)?

Considering Blau’s discussion of how the common interpretations of Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” changed over time, one of the ideas I appreciated in the earlier parts of Textual Power was Scholes’s addressing authorial incongruity. In the first few chapters, Scholes seems to promote accepting that division of ideas exists — not only within a group, but even within an individual: “It would be an astonishing thing if an extended body of written work did not reveal signs of divided consciousness — as if everyday life had no psychopathology, and civilization no discontents” (40).

And so I was surprised when Scholes finds it alarming that Stanley Fish would argue for the cohesiveness of a group, while still acknowledging that “‘Members of different communities will disagree.'” (155) It seems reasonable to allow Fish to define an interpretive community as one that acts to come to agreement, to agree on the principles that govern debate, while not actually resolving all disagreements.

In arguing against Fish, he also seems to contradict his earlier conclusion that in terms of literary interpretation, collective judgment is superior to personal judgment. In the earlier sections he promotes the idea that “criticism is not a matter of personal preference but of collective judgment.” (35) However, in attacking Fish he promotes the value of the individual difference in interpretation:

“Different, even conflicting, assumptions may preside over any reading of a single text by a single person. It is in fact these very differences — differences within the reader, who is never a unified member of a single unified group — it is these very differences that create the space in which the reader exercises a measure of interpretive freedom.” (154)

My frustration is mainly with Scholes’s rhetorical choice to argue so heatedly with Fish. As a reader, one who is not familiar with the ongoing dialogue Scholes is engaged in, I would have much preferred if Scholes had — instead of calling Fish dangerous for being partly accurate — acknowledged where Fish’s ideas were accurate, where their ideas were similar, and then shown me where they diverge.

For someone who thinks the discussion on meaning should be over, I sure do talk about it a lot. =) In the very first post, I state a conflict between the intended meaning of a sentence and what I want it to mean. (At least I’m holding true to the idea that both readers and authors have the right to make meaning.) Of course, I use the quote to support what I want it to mean, a meaning that matches my personal experiences with literature — which leads me to the biggest trend in my blog posts: an attempt to put a nugget from the reading into the framework of my experiences. Unfortunately, having no literature teaching experiences, the contexts I put my little nuggets into are my experiences as a writer, student, reader… and consumer of coffee.

Perhaps this is why my posts also tend to put me in the role of a student empathizer. I latch on to methods that address frustrations I have had as a student or that promote practices of teachers I have appreciated. I latch on to ideas that start with the individual students, that help validate student ideas, and that teach students that it’s okay not to understand everything.

As Jennifer writes, “I tend to blend the lines between the analysis of the text I read and the analysis of my life experiences.” Apparently I find interpreting the meaning in everyday life to be a difficult, yet worth while task, and I want to help students use literature as a means of accepting and confronting this difficulty. To this end, I am drawn towards methods and ideas of teaching that show students the complications in texts, that allow for different and even conflicting interpretations, and that focus on developing critical thinking skills that do in fact blur the lines between textual reality and actual reality. As a writer (back to that again), I have embraced the notion that the goal is to capture some element of the human condition. As a reader, I work to connect with the writer’s representation of that condition. And as a teacher, I would hope to help students in their search for that connection.

In looking at the structure of my posts and the construction of my ideas, it’s clear that my ideas tend to circle back on themselves in a sort of spiral. My writing circles around the same threads, pulling in ideas from past readings, classes, and others’ blog posts as it goes around. While I wish the loop were a bit wider than it is, that I had more experiences to draw on, and that I were incorporating a few more new ideas into the loop, I think this spiraling shows that, for me at least, the blog is a way of putting the reading into contexts that are meaningful to me and is, therefore, a useful way to build those mental connections that are essential to learning. And that is one reason why I don’t think any of us should feel guilty about the egocentric nature of our posts.

Perhaps the biggest weakness in my blogging is that in reviewing these, I don’t see the ideas I missed. I stick so closely to my experiences and the ideas that I’m attached to that even in reflection I don’t see where my lack of experience has caused me to misunderstand or completely miss something. I can’t see where (as the TEAPOD discusses) what I know is actually the cause of my difficulty. But I guess that’s where reading the posts of others and classroom discussion comes in. And this is another reason why I don’t think any of us should feel guilty about our egocentric posts: not only are we putting the ideas in meaningful contexts for ourselves, we are lending our contexts to each other. For those of us without teaching experience, this is tremendously valuable. Now that I have made myself aware of my biases, perhaps I can use the ideas and experiences of others not only to build my spiral, but also to knock it onto a different (faster, wider?) track from time to time.

Perhaps the lecture is the teaching method we love to hate because it is the one-size-fits-all solution our teachers used throughout most of our education. If it had been used more judiciously, if it had been just one tool among many used by a variety of teachers in a variety of ways, maybe then I wouldn’t hate it so much. As it is, I hate lectures and take no pity on them.

I didn’t always hate lectures, but having experienced something better, I can’t go back. Especially after the many community-based classrooms I have experienced here at Mason, I can’t help but respond to instructors who teach through lectures with the feeling that they are arrogant and self-absorbed [though I realize many instructors who continue to use primarily lectures are not arrogant or self absorbed, just … unenlightened =) ]. My time is much more precious now than in high school or undergraduate, and pure lectures seem like a waste of my time—so very focused on what the instructor wants to say and so very little focused on information I can actually use. It seems to me that lectures bypass the process of learning for everyone except the teacher. Blau points out “the ironic paradox of teaching: the fact that the intellectual work undertaken by teachers in the teaching-learning relationship presented richer opportunities for learning to the teacher than anything the teacher might do in the course of teaching his students” (55). This certainly rings true for my experience as a student.

From time to time, we do fit lectured information into meaningful knowledge webs that stick with us, that we can and do apply to the real world, but as Ginny encountered with her optometrist, more often we fail to see how we can apply what we learn once we are out of the classroom. In a similar incident, I was talking with another writer in the Teaching of Writing and Literature program who was curious about the teaching of literature class. She was surprised when I said literature classes were often my favorite in undergrad, as I said, “because we got to sit around and talk about stuff.” After walking away from the conversation, I realized this feeling came from one solitary class that (though I was unaware of this at the time) was an experimental class on English “contexts and contests.”  It was essentially a literature workshop and my first discussion-based class. It focused not only on the contexts in which texts were written, but also the criticism and other texts that came after them and responded to them. All of this was examined in order to explore meaning. The instructor was very hands off. Her silence often forced us to initiate the discussion, to find our own connections, and to draw our own conclusions. We got to see how not only different students/readers, but professional critics disagreed about meaning (and in doing so to study models for finding meaning). Like Blau’s discussion of how the common interpretations of Roethke’s “My Papa’s Waltz” changed over time, as students, we got to see textual evidence of such swings in interpretations. It seems counterintuitive, but it was in this one class where the teacher did the least in-class work that I learned the most important skills: how to think critically and how to examine (and apply) a text in relation to the real world.

“Louise Rosenblatt says that taking someone else’s interpretation as your own is like having someone else eat your dinner for you” (Blau 25). And as Karen pointed out a couple of weeks ago (and as Blau points out in her book), students relish the idea that they can be on equal footing with the teacher, that they can participate as a true academic and work with the teacher to find meaning. While developing and then giving students a formula to swallow may seem like we are doing more for them, spoon feeding them the answers is essentially just setting them up to choke … if they ever do move on to real food, that is. But, as we’ve been discussing over the past weeks, encouraging students to tackle “difficulty,” “questions,” or “confusion” themselves is essentially teaching them how to chew, and to my experience as a student, a literature workshop is a good method for getting students to really bite in and taste what studying literature is all about.

(But I’ve been glutened and have been nursing a migraine most of the night, so forgive me for being both persnickety and rambling.)

Frankly, I find the discussion about meaning tiresome. It’s obvious to me that meaning comes both from the author and the reader. Can’t we accept that and move on? (And as Crosman points out, we naturally feel our opinions are the right ones. So, I’m right. Let’s move on. Hmm… Actually, I am rarely confident that my opinion is correct. Even when I am right, it’s quiet natural for me to doubt myself. — Wait, am I contradicting myself? What’s my point? Where am I going?)

While I’d like to dismiss the debate with the conclusion that meaning is generated both by the author and the reader, Crosman has added some depth and breadth to my understanding of the issue. Perhaps most strikingly by showing how rarely I carry what I know to be true of the writing process over to the reading process. While I tend to start writing with no idea where I am going, with no solid or brilliant meaning to convey, I seem to go into reading believing that this is what authors do: they write with fixed meaning. But as Crosman points out, writers actually tend to make their meaning not only as they go along (developing their ideas) but as they read what they have written. They interpret what they’ve written and rewrite/continue to write accordingly. Certainly most recorded reflections on what they’ve written usually comes in their own re-reading/interpretation of their text. This in itself can be flawed, as not only are our memories faulty, but writing often taps the subconscious in ways the writer may not be fully aware of. For example, a critic in a writer’s workshop may point out a meaning the writer had not considered, and the writer may say, “Brilliant, yes, that’s a huge issue in my life. I hadn’t even realized it, but subconsciously, the meaning was there.” While I had thought of the author’s intended meaning as the most objective meaning to pursue, Crosman points out just how equivocal even that meaning may be.

And the question: What do we mean, by “meaning.” I love the question. Asking people to define a word they use is one of my favorite conversational tendencies. If someone asks if I want coffee, it’s very conceivable that my response will be a slow and cautious: “Define coffee.” Do they mean drive through McDonalds? The sludge that’s been sitting on the burner in the cafeteria for three hours? An hour in the cafeteria going over some work-related issue? A couple hours at Starbucks chatting about life? A casual, easy-to-propose date? Or … do they want me to interpret it and lead the way, leaving me in control of what, exactly, I am saying “Yes,” to.

So often we think we know what someone means, when we have no idea. As discussed last week, our interpretive mechanisms are very biased.

Acknowledging the complexity of meaning seems to be the most helpful thing we can do for students. Crosman points out three ways we tend to use the word when discussing the “meaning” of a text: the author’s intent, the reader’s understanding, and the value. Considering our previous readings on starting with what the student knows, validating their understanding of the text (what they see in it and can connect with) as a legitimate meaning, and then adding to that with the meaning we think was intended by the author (building their connections to historical and other contexts), and then discussing the value/weight of the text (adding significance to these connections) seems like a good way to help students to progress along the stages between novice and expert.

Coffee and Conversation: I wonder how many online profiles have listed this simple pastime as one of their interests, as a means of describing themselves or peaking the interest of others. Generally, people love to talk about what they think and how they view the world. We are excited by ideas and discussing them. And often our conversations revolve around things we’ve read—whether books or magazines… or blogs. So why isn’t conversation used more in the classroom? And why, when teachers try to get kids talking, is it so hard to get the conversation rolling?

As a reader, student, and a rather introverted human being, my personal answer to why it’s so hard to get the conversation going in the classroom is, naturally, multifaceted:

• we’re scared of being wrong;
• we don’t trust our instincts;
• sometimes, we ARE, as Naomi discusses, just flat out (embarrassingly) wrong;
• we don’t have a clue where to start;
• we feel like we’re at a middle school dance and don’t want to be the first one on the floor;
• by the time we walk into the classroom, we’ve forgotten all the brilliant thoughts we had while we were reading (or as we head off to class our brilliance of the night before seems rather obvious in the light of day); and
• so much of school is sadly, as Ginny so eloquently put it, about fetching answers to very specific questions.

Both the Difficulty Paper and the Inquiry Project address many of these issues.

As Sherry Linkon points out, “Too often students’ inquiries are guided by neither their own interests nor any genuine questions.” A.k.a., the difference that students perceive between considering a book over coffee and reading one for school. At school, they often have to follow somebody else’s interests from somebody else’s starting point. Both the Difficulty Paper and the Inquiry Project, however, start with the students—where they are and where they want to go. Like a participant in a conversation, they have some control in steering where the inquiry goes. Not only is this more likely to help them develop awareness of their own thinking process, it is more likely to truly engage them in reading literature and searching for meaning (one that actually means something to them).

I appreciate that the inquiry project asks students to reflect on how they approach the text, to think about the process of reading critically. I think that the root of my discomfort and insecurity with “critical thinking” is that it wasn’t something that was overtly taught in the classroom. Teachers told us that they wanted us to think critically, and then threw us into the texts and asked us to make conclusions without helping us identify when we were succeeding in thinking critically.

Both Randy Bass and Sherry Linkon emphasize that success comes with slowing down and putting off making conclusions. And as the section “Open-ended Synthesis” states, “the nature of the other elements of critical reading should make it impossible for a good critical reader to claim any definitive meaning or conclusion.” When every class paper seems built around deciding on your thesis, and then developing your supporting arguments, this approach is positively novel. It becomes more like the type of conversation we might have over coffee, where people hash out their opinions, bounce them off each other; where they can be wrong and not feel like their grade is going to suffer; where the point is simply to explore, to think. And just as in (polite?) conversation, there is no definitive, right answer that everyone has to agree with, just lots of steps in an ongoing conversation.

As I read The Norton‘s sketch on plot, I read it as a writer. (Affirming the importance of knowing who and where our students are.) I appreciated the breakdown of the elements of plot because it made me think about the basics of how a story is constructed, created. I finished, and then thought, but let’s say I weren’t a writer interested in teaching writing. Let’s say I were teaching literature for the sake of literature. Why would I want to teach plot to readers? Do they really need to know terms like exposition and discriminated occasion? (Okay, okay, okay… I love to learn. I believe in science for science’s sake, exploration for discovery’s sake, and sometimes, yes, even memorization for knowledge’s sake. But in order to ask something of my would-be students, I need a better grasp of why I’m doing so.)

It’s blog one, paragraph two, and already I need to stop and backup. Before I can really consider my goals in teaching readers about the elements of plot, I need to think more about something much more basic: What am I doing here (in this scenario in which I am teaching literature)? Why do we teach literature? What are we trying to help our students accomplish?

(Blog one, paragraph three, and already I’m straying from the assigned reading.) The Norton tries to explain “Why Literature Matters,” but frankly, the idea that “by becoming familiar with the conventions of writing a sonnet in seventeenth-century England or of writing a short story in 1920s America you can come to appreciate and even love works that you might have disliked if you simply read them on your own” doesn’t really do it for me (3). I can hear the students now: “So your argument is that I should learn this stuff, just so I can appreciate what I might have disliked otherwise? Why not just stick to what I like to begin with and save myself the trouble?”

But literature–reading it, thinking about, talking about it–is one of those things that almost always gets me truly, deeply excited. So what’s The Norton missing here? I view the literature classes from my undergraduate degree as the most important of all the classes I took–not because they relate directly to my career, but because of how they shaped who I am and how I view and think about the world. The Norton touches this idea: “A realistic story, poem, or play can satisfy a desire for broader experiences, even unpleasant experience… We yearn for such knowledge in a very personal way, as though we can know our own identities and experiences only by leaping over the boundaries that usually separate us from other selves and worlds” (2). That is the power of literature, this leaping of boundaries.

At least one reason why we read is the same as why we write: to connect. And this, were I a teacher of literature, would be my goal: to help my students to connect with experiences beyond their own, to reach beyond themselves, to stretch their minds and better understand (themselves, others, life, politics… everything, any thing). (It’s an idealistic goal, but then so is Salvatori and Donahue’s “to make a difference in the world,” xxv).

The Norton explains why students should “bother with any piece of writing that requires … effort,” saying “as we challenge ourselves to read more difficult literature, we become able to extend ourselves further, much like athletes who train for heavier weights or longer jumps with repeated practice” (2). The Norton seems to mean it in terms of becoming intellectually capable of understanding more difficult works, but I want to read the sentence to mean that by reading things that challenge us, we move beyond our own skin, our own experiences–we extend ourselves by engaging in the experiences of the characters.

And simply recognizing and promoting this idea of the value of difficulty is perhaps what I appreciated most about The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty. As Salvatory and Donahue discuss, as we extend, we are naturally hindered by what we don’t know as well as by what we know that doesn’t fit in with what we don’t know, and it is in tackling this “difficulty” that we often make the most rewarding discoveries.

And so, finally, back to the question of teaching the elements of plot. Developing a better understanding of how someone else has lent a “meaningful pattern to mere chronology” (58) in the life of their characters can help us leap those boundaries that The Norton talks about. Being able to see, to break down and analyze, the exposition and the discriminated occasion–all the pieces that reveal how an author has intentionally constructed her narrative–can help us not only to better understand the difficulties we have with the text but also to be more cognizant as we shape and lend meaning to the events in the world around us.