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[hipgeek]

If I had had lit courses that were devoted to telling me that what I thought I found (or what I loved about literature's power to move the emotions) was "wrong," I would simply have dropped the courses and (like many of our students) never read a book again.

Well, I think this is a somewhat misleading characterization of the pedagogy I had described.  No good teacher would say, "you're wrong when you say X."  A lot of teachers instead talk about "showing students the complexity of the text" (which is more or less the same thing as showing students the inadequacy of their own readings, albeit phrased more constructively).  I once had an entire class of (American) students tell me that the message of Toni Cade Bambara's  "The Lesson" was, "If you work hard, you too can get out of Harlem and afford to buy the toys at FAO Scwartz."  Later, I was talking to a colleague who worked at a historically African-American college about teaching that text.  She immediately interrupted me and said, "Let me guess. They said that 'if you work hard . . .  Mine did too."  You think students were "thinking with their own eyes and minds" when they said that?

Yes, they were expressing a collective societal understanding. That's how people think. I don't see the problem.

"Showing students the complexity of the text" mostly bores them. I think maybe you don't have experience with middle-to-lower-level American students, who are often reluctant to read the text at all.

The Fiona

I agree with Fiona that students responding to "The Lesson" in this way are expressing a "collective societal understanding" of some sense. 

But I think there is some problem in that this is not what "The Lesson" is about.

I have experience with American students, both working and middle class, and some would read this kind of cliche platitude into the story and some wouldn't.  These differences have less to do (it seems to me, who has only taught for a few years and whose experiences are, of course, anecdotal) with theory or student background and more to do with just the individual's engagement as a reader, not just of the given text, but of culture in general.

I do think the "apply theorist x to text y" can kill the pleasure of literature and kill student interest in the process.  I know this is a common assignment and I'm just thankful I've been able to largely avoid it as a student and as a teacher.  But applying literary theory or trying to understand the author's position in a specific historical/ cultural moment are often two different things.

[malcha]

I've never understood the "don't do theory because it is joyless and takes all the pleasure out of literature" argument, because that just hasn't been my experience.  I am open to people telling me that in engaging with theory I am alienating myself from truth or endangering my immortal soul, but don't tell me I'm not having fun.  Seriously, if I had to give up sex and chocolate or give up queering medieval Latin epic, I'd cheerfully resign sex and chocolate, and that's not because I am a frigid cocoaphobe.  And if I find the work that I do deeply enjoyable and intellectually meaningful, shouldn't I be able to pass on some of that pleasure to my students?  And if I can't, doesn't that say more about my pedagogy than my methodology?

[hipgeek]

I've never understood the "don't do theory because it is joyless and takes all the pleasure out of literature" argument, because that just hasn't been my experience.  I am open to people telling me that in engaging with theory I am alienating myself from truth or endangering my immortal soul, but don't tell me I'm not having fun.  Seriously, if I had to give up sex and chocolate or give up queering medieval Latin epic, I'd cheerfully resign sex and chocolate, and that's not because I am a frigid cocoaphobe.  And if I find the work that I do deeply enjoyable and intellectually meaningful, shouldn't I be able to pass on some of that pleasure to my students?  And if I can't, doesn't that say more about my pedagogy than my methodology?

That's true.  I was kind of anticipating this response when I wrote my earlier post.  Let me say, as the first in my family to graduate high school, I often struggle with theory.  I do sometimes appreciate it or even get some pleasure out of it, but the rhetoric often (even after years of college and grad school) leaves me feeling alienated. 

I guess what I'm trying to articulate is not that we ought to abandon theory but at least recognize its potential limitations.  I say "limitations" rather than "challenges" because I'm just tired of that euphemism.

[fiona]

I've never understood the "don't do theory because it is joyless and takes all the pleasure out of literature" argument, because that just hasn't been my experience.  I am open to people telling me that in engaging with theory I am alienating myself from truth or endangering my immortal soul, but don't tell me I'm not having fun.  Seriously, if I had to give up sex and chocolate or give up queering medieval Latin epic, I'd cheerfully resign sex and chocolate, and that's not because I am a frigid cocoaphobe.  And if I find the work that I do deeply enjoyable and intellectually meaningful, shouldn't I be able to pass on some of that pleasure to my students?  And if I can't, doesn't that say more about my pedagogy than my methodology?

That's true.  I was kind of anticipating this response when I wrote my earlier post.  Let me say, as the first in my family to graduate high school, I often struggle with theory.  I do sometimes appreciate it or even get some pleasure out of it, but the rhetoric often (even after years of college and grad school) leaves me feeling alienated. 

I guess what I'm trying to articulate is not that we ought to abandon theory but at least recognize its potential limitations.  I say "limitations" rather than "challenges" because I'm just tired of that euphemism.

Everyone operates according to a "theory," and I agree with Hipgeek that what's alienating is the language (the obfuscations, the abstractions) rather than the ideas. Much of theory boils down to, "What you see depends on who you are and where you're standing," dressed up in foggy language.

How we interpret depends on who we are and what techniques we've been taught. Many students do interpret stories in order to find a platitude/nugget. That's not necessarily WRONG, but it's one of several ways to read. We can and should teach other ways, but not (IMHO) make the undergrad/gen ed student feel that s/h/it knows nothing unless s/h/it can cite an authority (Butler, Derrida) who says the same thing. Lit crit should be an engagement with the text itself, not a parroting of what we think experts are saying. That's for grad school, which is Parrot Land.

The Fiona

[malcha]

I think I come at these issues from a somewhat different angle than the mostly English folk who tend to discuss them.  My tiny corner of literary studies is heavily anti-theory, and my own undergraduate formation was so determinedly philological that I wasn't even allowed to consult modern secondary sources for most of my papers -- I can only imagine what the response would have been if I had flung in Judith Butler.  And I'm not altogether sorry for that, because I did come out with a very good grounding in the necessary languages, and I learned to do rigorous just-me-and-the-text close readings that I could later contextualize in less rigidly narrow ways.

But I never got the message that theory was a spiky professional hoop I was being forced to jump through, even in grad school, where the rather mild (by MLA standards) theoretical tilt of my dissertation caused Big Name Guy in my subject to resign from my committee in outrage.  My gut feeling about the theoretical aspects of my work is still something like "oooh, fun thing that I'm not really allowed to do, yet not as dangerous to my health as sneaking out at 1 AM to smoke" rather than "now I must dutifully professionalize this."  I'm not sure that I could avoid making that liberating experience part of my pedagogy even if I wanted to.

Which isn't to say that I think that theory-heavy assignments in undergrad (especially lower level and non-major) literature courses are the way to go.  Without seeing grad school as Parrotland, I do, of course, think that the kinds of thinking you need to do in any subject to be a professional practitioner of the subject are not necessarily identical to the kind of experience you should have of a subject to be a well rounded, liberally educated person.  Take an example from the more technical end of the study of texts:  I don't go sending my undergrad students off to manuscripts to adduce linguistic and paleographical arguments for variant readings.  That's the kind of thing they'd learn to do if they went to grad school in my field, but it isn't something they have to be able to do to be intelligent amateur readers of ancient or medieval texts.  I do, however, make them look at an apparatus criticus, understand what it is and why it's there and why it has all those Roman and Greek letters, and I have them look at images of manuscripts.  And I do this not just to give them a sense of what textual criticism would entail if they went on to do it, but, far more importantly, to make sure they intuitively get that they are not dealing with an unmediated, unproblematic text.  I do think that that is a bit of sophistication they need to have to be certified as intelligent amateurs. 

I don't think one should professionalize undergraduates prematurely or inappropriately, but I also think that part of what we are doing when we teach, in addition to the whole well-rounded-liberal-education thing, is showing that being a professional humanities scholar is a valuable thing (not the only valuable thing) and a little bit of how it is a valuable thing. Further, if I am a theoretically inclined humanities scholar, I should believe in what I am doing enough to show that I think that this kind of work, specifically, is a valuable thing (though not the only possible way of being a professional literary scholar), and a little bit of how it is a valuable thing.  I think a lot of literature professors, consciously or unconsciously, send the message to undergrads that the world of professional literary scholarship is indeed Parrotland, a lot of people spouting awful, obfuscating stuff they don't really believe in order to fit in with their peers, something mysterious and off-putting.  I want to send a message analogous to the message I try to send the Classics kids about textual criticism "yes, this stuff gets very technical and terminology-heavy and it quite probably isn't what you want to do with your life, but I hope you can see how it could be fun and cool to do it if it happened to be your vocation.  More importantly, I hope you see that even without being a practitioner of it you can get out of it a really satisfying, mind-bending, positively orgasmic experience of seeing what you are looking at and how you are used to looking at it in a new way.  Farewell, my children, have fun lives."

[jasmine]

After a semester of interrogating texts, we went one further and actually waterboarded a novel this afternoon. 

[fiona]

I think what Malcha's talking about is enthusiasm, and about epistemology--how you find out things.

I've always found students, in lit and history from many periods, interested in how you find out things, how we know what we know. If nothing else, they love gossip, which would include gossip about such subjects as the Dead Sea Scrolls.

What's missing in much more abstract theory is real enthusiasm for literature and/or for fact finding. Instead, there is that "paying professional dues, making obeisance and learning the lingo to join the club."

I would be delighted to take Malcha's course. I hope she'd bring pictures of her feline.

The Fiona

[popsucket]

As an avid reader not foolish enough to have majored in the humanities, I'm all for enthusiasm and epistemology.

"Showing students the complexity of the text" mostly bores them. I think maybe you don't have experience with middle-to-lower-level American students, who are often reluctant to read the text at all.

Chime to this.

I'm not reluctant to read the text and I do like knowing the historical details and some idea of the way that people thought at the time that the text was written.  However, I don't want someone to waterboard the novel to show me the complexity. 

The "Oh, I'm so much more accomplished and a deeper thinker than you because I can come up with twelve interpretations, four of which normal people without my specialized training never get" attitude leaves me cold.  While I am aware that I don't always have the proper historical, sociological, or anthropological background to fully appreciate every text, I'm suspicious of anyone who can read a straightforward story and tease out all the hidden meanings in the complexity of the text.  I've read Foucault's Pendulum and I am on to the idea that some people want the hidden text available only to the cognoscenti to be there so badly that they will do anything to see it.

Thus, I eagerly await the day when administrators catch on to the fact that the theory people are just playing games while doing nothing worth doing so that they are fired and the money is used to create more lines in things like composition, which is a benefit to normal people.

[colette_capricious]

I found this discussion fascinating.  I've never (that I can remember) taken a Literary Criticism class or even knew there was such a thing!

I think I took an AP English course in 1983, then I went onto (and dropped out of) Engineering. I took on English course at one of the three colleges I attended where I mostly learned to hate The Heart of Darkness and what a framed narrative was.

Almost 20 years later I started back to college majoring in first Religion, then Philosophy and finally Political Science.  It was in my PolySci courses that I encountered the theorists mentioned in the article.  I minored in Ethnic Studies and focused alot on colonization and decolonization.

They were amazing, eye-opening and I reacted exactly as the author of the article said he did to Malcom X.  (I also felt that way when reading Madeline L'Engle as a young teen.) 

Although I never was in a class that required I read and critique fiction through any theorist, I can't help but do it in my 'real life.'  I find it's kind of like having a set of lenses I can put on or take off as I need. I can 'just' read a book and like it or not on its own merits or I can view it through Butler or Fouccault and see who is speaking, what voices aren't heard, etc.  I'm much more likely to analyze books I don't really like to see what is annoying me.

I enjoy feeling like there is a life beyond the text that I am holding. I enjoy thinking of the who, what, where, of the author and the influences that are visible in the book.  I like being able to change my lenses to read a text in different ways and I enjoy watching popular media through those lenses and being able to share those different reads with my daughters.

Though obviously I can't say much about the author of the article's argument for literary criticism, I can say that learning all the theory added a depth to my interpretation of everything, not just books, that I wouldn't want to have missed.

[innocentpasserby]

I'm a bit baffled by the premise that we are in the business of "transformation" or "conversion." Like Nordicexpat, I thought we were in the business of offering an intellectual discipline to students who were interested in that intellectual discipline, i.e., the study (not simply the reading) of literature. How does one study literature without knowing anything about theories of reading and writing; histories of literary genres, literary production, literary reception; the history of the discipline, etc.? I personally find this far more interesting and stimulating than the "This articulates something I already felt inchoately" moment, which is wonderful for the nonprofessional reader (including me "when she's at home") but not the point of academic study. Does anyone ask chemistry or history that it articulate the students' feelings, transform their lives, or either challenge or confirm their values? These subjects are regarded as having a disciplinary focus and (contested, no doubt) methodologies, and other than the history of literary study as a more-or-less surreptitious substitute for religion I can't see why literary and cultural studies shouldn't be regarded in the same light.

[fiona]

I'm a bit baffled by the premise that we are in the business of "transformation" or "conversion." Like Nordicexpat, I thought we were in the business of offering an intellectual discipline to students who were interested in that intellectual discipline, i.e., the study (not simply the reading) of literature. How does one study literature without knowing anything about theories of reading and writing; histories of literary genres, literary production, literary reception; the history of the discipline, etc.? I personally find this far more interesting and stimulating than the "This articulates something I already felt inchoately" moment, which is wonderful for the nonprofessional reader (including me "when she's at home") but not the point of academic study. Does anyone ask chemistry or history that it articulate the students' feelings, transform their lives, or either challenge or confirm their values? These subjects are regarded as having a disciplinary focus and (contested, no doubt) methodologies, and other than the history of literary study as a more-or-less surreptitious substitute for religion I can't see why literary and cultural studies shouldn't be regarded in the same light.

The readers you describe mostly don't exist on U. S. campuses. The study of literature is dying because students are bored by and won't read "good literature," never mind theoretical approaches. Literary scholars are offering a product that very few people want to buy.

The Fiona

[juanb]

I must admire that I don't get literature as an academic discipline.  What the hell is that?  Literature is one form of art.  So's sculpting.  So's basket weaving.  Should the appreciation and analysis of each and every form of art have its own academic discipline and department?     

I also don't get how and why many (most?) English departments have became Literature departments.  When and how did that happen?  I always thought the purpose of being an English major (or MA or Ph.D.) was to expand one's awareness of and skills with the English language in all its aspects.  When did this goal get hijacked by literature?  Why aren't linguistics and sociology of language and rhetoric and composition (and of course creative writing) just as central to being an English major as studying literature?

[popsucket]

Chime to Fiona and Juanb.

To go back to Lee2051's post:  Hmm.  People can study some made up junk about other made up junk or chemistry, which can be validated by testing against the world so that techniques (not methodologies, that's a humanities word) are accepted or rejected based on evidence and thus seldom remain contested for long.

Yeah, keep arguing for your intellectual discipline.  People will get on board for transformation or having something related to their lives that they were previously missing.  That's the value of literature to the world.  But few people will sign up for a game that doesn't pay well that most non-players laugh about because it is so patently a game with no more importance than chess or Yahtzee.

[juanb]

...because it is so patently a game with no more importance than chess or Yahtzee.

What???!!!  Are you suggesting our university should close down its Department of Chess?  And the tenure-track Yahtzee professors are definitely going to be angry!

[popsucket]

Tough.  We need to cut the budget to concentrate on our core mission.  That does not include chess or Yahtzee.  The Department of Dominoes are making a valiant effort to avoid the chopping block.  If they can ally themselves with the folks over in Poker and Other Card Games, they just might have a shot.