Teaching Lit Crit as Autobiography

Claude Lefebvre, "A Teacher and His Pupil"

Claude Lefebvre, “A Teacher and His Pupil”

For weeks I’ve been reading student essays, and many of the students have taken me up on my invitation to include personal experience with interpretation. I therefore felt affirmed, when teaching Oscar Wilde, to come across the following passage:

The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography.

I understand Wilde to be saying that, when one’s response to a work of literature comes from a deep place, it tells us as much about ourselves as about the work. In this respect literary criticism is a mode of autobiography.

Wilde points that such criticism can be bad as well as good, however. I have just read several essays that are struggling to move beyond autobiography. While far from the lowest form of criticism—more on that in a moment—they are occasionally guilty of subordinating the work to their lives. For instance, several students admire the poetry of Wendell Berry because he speaks so directly to their concerns with depression and death. Almost because they relate so well to the poems, however, they have difficulty seeing all that Berry is doing.

This is not an entirely bad place for the essays to be, however. The students are now fully engaged with Berry’s poetry and, in the revision process, can be pushed to greater insight. And that’s not all. By leaving their own experiences behind and entering more fully into Berry’s vision, they will then be able to return to their own experiences and “see the place for the first time” (in T. S. Eliot’s famous formulation). By leaving themselves, they will come to understand themselves better.

To encourage this leaving and returning, I suggest to my students that they follow a sandwich organization. In their introduction and conclusion, they can recount their own related experiences but the body of the essay must be given over to the literary work. Thus, if they are writing about, say, how Berry wrestles with depression, they can begin by talking about their experience, then move to how Berry wrestles with depression (which he does by meditating on nature), and then return to the personal significance Berry has for them. (One student talks about how Berry made her realize that walking around our beautiful campus could function as a form of healing in her dark moments.) By honoring a sensibility outside themselves, they end up honoring themselves.

Now for the lowest form of criticism, which is criticism where writers just don’t care.  I encountered a rant against such writers in Slate by an adjunct teacher at St. Louis-Missouri. Here’s Rebecca Shuman unloading on her students in what is more a primal scream than sound pedagogical advice:

Everybody in college hates papers. Students hate writing them so much that they buy, borrow, or steal them instead. Plagiarism is now so commonplace that if we flunked every kid who did it, we’d have a worse attrition rate than a MOOC. And on those rare occasions undergrads do deign to compose their own essays, said exegetic masterpieces usually take them all of half an hour at 4 a.m. to write, and consist accordingly of “arguments” that are at best tangentially related to the coursework, font-manipulated to meet the minimum required page-count. Oh, “attitudes about cultures have changed over time”? I’m so glad you let me know.

Bad as these essays sound, I’ve got some serious problems with Schuman’s complaining and think that the problem may line more in her–or rather, more in the teaching situation within which she finds herself–than in the students. I grant that many teachers, even good ones, feel the need to complain about their students upon occasion. Venting can even be healthy. But what bothers me about Schuman’s article is its contempt for the students. Maybe she thinks she’s being witty, but there’s too much of an edge in her stereotypes of them:

Students of the world: You think it wastes 45 minutes of your sexting time to pluck out three quotes from The Sun Also Rises, summarize the same four plot points 50 times until you hit Page 5, and then crap out a two-sentence conclusion? It wastes 15 hours of my time to mark up my students’ flaccid theses and non sequitur textual “evidence,” not to mention abuse of the comma that should be punishable by some sort of law—all so that you can take a cursory glance at the grade and then chuck the paper forever.

Schuman’s solution is to require only English majors to write literary essays. Everyone else can take exams. (More testing—now there’s a solution.) Here’s her conclusion:

Sure, this quashes the shallow pretense of expecting undergraduates to engage in thoughtful analysis, but they have already proven that they will go to any lengths to avoid doing this. Call me a defeatist, but honestly I’d be happy if a plurality of American college students could discern even the skeletal plot of anything they were assigned. With more exams and no papers, they’ll at least have a shot at retaining, just for a short while, the basic facts of some of the greatest stories ever recorded. In that short while, they may even develop the tiniest inkling of what Martha Nussbaum calls “sympathetic imagination”—the cultivation of our own humanity, and something that unfolds when we’re touched by stories of people who are very much unlike us. And that, frankly, is more than any essay will ever do for them.

Perhaps it’s a mistake for a teacher to write an article like this at the end of the semester when stress is at its greatest. In any event, it’s absurd to confine essays to English majors. The course I’ve been talking about is Introduction to Literature, which fulfills a requirement and is filled with psychology, computer science, biology and anthropology majors. When it comes to cultivating their humanity, an exam wouldn’t come anywhere close to cultivating their humanity the way that an essay can.

Now, I grant that I, a teacher at a liberal arts college (albeit a public one), am in a very privileged position. Schuman is an adjunct teacher who figures that she makes (when she adds up the time she spends grading essays) 75 cents an hour. If this is true, and if her students are being sent messages that college is a set of hoops they must jump through to make it into the middle class, then what we are witnessing here is an intense case of alienation, something along the lines of an exploited factory worker throwing wrenches into the machinery to protest abysmal working conditions.

I could go into detail about what I see wrong with Schuman’s teaching approach—there are much better ways to interest students in literature than workshops “dedicated to avoiding vague introductions”—but I think her article should be seen instead as a symptom of our country’s growing income disparity. There are very expensive liberal arts colleges that feature some of the best teaching environments in the world and there are education factories where teachers like Schuman are beaten down and screwed over because the country is not willing to pay them what they are worth. Maybe we should think of her rant as a PTSD episode from one caught up in higher education’s free fire zone. Because if she really believes what she says about her students, then she shouldn’t be in the profession.

I’ve got my foot somewhat in both the public and the private education worlds since, as a public liberal arts college, St. Mary’s College of Maryland is trying to provide a liberal arts experience to students who couldn’t normally have access to one. But our small classes, our emphasis on one-on-one instruction, and our insistence on fulltime rather than adjunct instructors, means that we are the most expensive public college in our state. We boast very high graduation rates for students of color from inner city Baltimore and Washington—close to 80%–even though we are half the cost of private liberal arts colleges. But we’re still more expensive that the University of Maryland and Salisbury State and as a consequence our admissions have taken a hit, resulting in painful budget reductions.

I don’t know what I’d do if I were teaching in Schuman’s straitened environment. Since everyone needs literature—not just smart students—I like to think that I’d find ways to make it meaningful to virtually anyone. Taking the students seriously and helping them see how their concerns are addressed by literature is a good start. If they know that literature cares about them, they are more likely to  reciprocate.

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