Uncomfortable Lessons in Literary Studies

Abstract

One weekend last May, my partner and I rented a hot tub to celebrate his fortieth birthday. As we sat there in the steam, our companions in the tub started playing a game. One person leads it. He declares what he's going to bring camping: going camping, and I'm bringing apples. Others respond, claiming that they will bring different things. The leader listens, then pronounces their fate. going camping, and I'm bringing boots Good--you can going camping, and I'm bringing a canoe Sounds great! You can come too going camping, and I'm bringing ... a life jacket? Nope, sorry. You can't The thing that makes this game intoxicating--or cruel, depending on how you feel about your hot tub performance--is its elegant silence about its own rules. The goal is to name things that fit into an arbitrary pattern the leader has secretly in mind; the pattern changes every round. Maybe everything that can come requires a repeated letter in its name. I'm bringing a paddle. You can bring a bubble or a hippopotamus, sure, but not a fork. What would happen if we who teach were to explicitly introduce our students to the rhetorical conventions of our discipline? English has repeatedly been characterized as inexplicit in our teaching, and those studying us generally call us to account for the power dynamics of that pedagogy (see Wilder 133 and Murray 123). In his recent preface to Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Gerald Graff comments on how we tended, at least for many years, to keep professional critical out of the classroom, thus depriving our students of models of the kinds of written discourse we were asking them to produce (xviii). In Working in English: History, Institutions, Resources, Heather Murray observes that we have also tended to keep training in the methods of interpretation a mostly silent affair. Unless we start teaching explicitly, then, we continue a tradition that resembles going camping We make statements that fit the rhetorical conventions of the literary studies game, invite students to make statements that mimic ours in form, and assess their performance according to a set of unspoken rules about what counts. We struggle to explain to some of them, in the margins of their papers, why their arguments just aren't interesting or persuasive. Outside literary studies, the jury may be out on whether we should teach conventions explicitly. In 1993, rhetoric and discourse studies scholar Aviva Freedman influentially argued that teaching is unnecessary and nearly impossible anyway (226): writers routinely learn to produce genres by gradually becoming attuned to the constraints and expressive opportunities of a particular social situation, rather than by being taught to follow a set of rules. They learn by osmosis, as we say, to write genres that are more sophisticated and flexible than could ever have been explicitly described; they learn by interpreting what the situation calls for and from people who are fluent in the genre (although unable to explain it). Hence, Freedman suggests, whenever explicit teaching does take place, there is risk of overlearning or misapplication (226). We cramp students' growing awareness of how to take part in a discipline by explicitly telling them what to do. Since Freedman, though, others have found that it may well be possible, and indeed advisable, to explicitly articulate the conventions of performance and the generic motivations for work in our discipline. In one of the most exhaustive of these studies, rhetoric scholar Laura Wilder compared how both students and professors responded to two different versions of a first-year writing about literature course. In one version students were taught according to traditional pedagogies; in another they were explicitly introduced to the conventions. …