Reacting in literary studies: Crossing the threshold from quality to meaning

Abstract

In this essay, the authors extend their ongoing conversations within the overarching project on “critique as signature pedagogy in the arts and humanities” by considering how the position of literary studies within this broader context may explain some of the difficulties students have with a cornerstone activity of the undergraduate literature classroom. Heinert and Chick unpack the work of literary analysis as a pedagogy that helps students develop the habits of mind of the discipline. While literary analysis has long been the signature assessment of literary studies, Heinert and Chick demonstrate how and why it can also be seen as a signature pedagogy.

Keywords

Critique literary analysis literary criticism literature signature pedagogies

An old cartoon familiar to English department hallways pictures students sitting around a seminar table as the instructor asks, “Does anyone have a reaction to the novel, aside from ‘It sucked’?” The comic draws on one of the most fundamental misconceptions of the literature classroom, namely what it means to do literary studies. Here, the specific confusion lies in how one reacts to literary texts. The humor arises from the distance between the students’ anticipated understanding of how to respond to the novel and the instructor’s desire for them to read differently. “It sucked” suggests a specific personal evaluation of the text, a judgment of quality that shuts down both the text and a discussion of it. While this is clearly caricature, the cartoon resonates because it invokes our experiences with students who focus on personal and conclusive decisions, offering an incomplete reaction that doesn’t capture the tasks of a literature classroom.¹

Phillip Motley’s ongoing project on critique in the arts and humanities featured in this special issue of AHHE has given us greater insight into some of these common moments of pedagogical frustration. Through conversations with our collaborators on this project, with the audience at our panel presentation at the 2014 conference of the International Society for the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning (ISSOTL), and with colleagues in the ISSOTL Arts and Humanities Interest Group (AHIG), we’ve been observing how the broader contexts of the arts and humanities inform how our specific field of literary studies is understood and misunderstood by novices and scholars alike.

We’ve seen that the arts and humanities are often presented as cognate disciplines, sharing similar subjects, sensibilities, and perhaps even epistemologies. “SoTL in the Humanities and the Arts: Common Ground and Relevant Differences,” an AHIG panel at the 2013 ISSOTL conference, resulted in the following description of shared characteristics. The arts and humanities are both perceived to

endeavor to understand and express the human experience;

produce human artifacts of the process of reflection;

value complexity, multiplicity, ambiguity, and uncertainty;

embrace subjectivity;

honor process as much as product.

Indeed, the name of this very journal speaks to this common ground.

These similarities, however, can lead us to conflate the ways of thinking and doing in the specific disciplines within the arts and humanities. The renaming of ISSOTL’s Humanities Interest Group to include the arts explicitly reflects the complexity of the relationship between the two disciplinary divisions.² Not wanting to be subsumed by the humanities—especially English, the frequent majority in a crowd of humanists—our colleagues in theatre, design, painting, and music wanted their identities acknowledged and valued in order to recognize not just our shared views, values, and practices but also the characteristics that distinguish these disciplines. Naming both sets of characteristics allows us to better articulate the common ground while also recognizing essential features of each discipline.

An obvious difference between arts and humanities is the form or medium of the discipline’s subject material: sculpture, bodily performance, literary text, painting, historical document, musical composition, etc. Beyond these visible field markers, disciplinary processes vary significantly, producing differences that don’t neatly map separately onto the arts or the humanities. Very broadly speaking, though, we may say that artists are those who create and critique original works and who assess and define issues of esthetics, and humanists are those who analyze texts³ and argue for their meaning and significance within larger contexts. To be clear, we’re not suggesting that the work of humanists isn’t creative, or that the work of artists isn’t meaning-full. Instead of characterizing the work of each, we’re thinking very generally of differences that may align with the signature practices or the distinguishing “habits of head, hand, and heart” of each (Ciccone, 2009: xii). These activities result in distinct products or creations as well. Artists produce paintings, performances, compositions, and poems (to name just a few), and humanists produce criticism, analyses, scholarship, theory, and the like.⁴

Situating our specific discipline of literary studies within this broader conversation about processes and products of the arts and humanities may shed light on the experience captured in the “It sucks” cartoon. This reaction to the subject of study is a key distinction between the arts and the humanistic field of literary studies. Evaluative responses in the arts are frequently called “critiques”—largely assessments of quality—whereas evaluative responses in literary studies are frequently called “literary criticism,” largely assessments of meaning and significance. In literary studies, these reactions precede and often render irrelevant issues of quality, so instead of “Is it good?”—the question answered by the students in the cartoon—or “Is it beautiful?” we ask “What does it mean?” and “How is it significant?” and probably “What does it mean?” again. Randy Bass describes an encounter that illustrates how these two different ways of responding have become confused:

As I was unpacking my backpack before class, I overheard one student (a really good student) say to another student in the front row: ‘I can’t believe that Professor Bass thinks this is a great book.’ I was stunned … ‘I don’t think it is a great book. I think it is an important book’. (1999: 6)

This gap is critical. The students had privately assumed that he thinks about and chooses literary texts according to “greatness” (quality), rather than “importance” (significance and meaning). As the opening cartoon illustrates, we may be asking our undergraduates to demonstrate their learning—their reactions to the literary text—without first agreeing on what this even means. This larger consideration of the arts and humanities has suggested to us that before we ask students to practice the habits of mind of literary studies, we need to help them parse the problematic language of “reaction,” “response,” “critique,” “criticism,” and “analysis,” among others—the words we use to describe how we react to, talk about, and question literary texts.

Troublesome language: Who are we and what do we do?

As in all fields, we teach from the perspective of membership in a shared community of disciplinary language and understanding, a community that by definition excludes novices. Jan Meyer and Ray Land describe the significance of this “troublesome language”:

Specific discourses have developed within disciplines to represent (and simultaneously privilege) particular understandings and ways of seeing and thinking. Such discourses distinguish individual communities of practice and are necessarily less familiar to new entrants to such discursive communities or those peripheral to them (Wenger, 2000). The discursive practices of a given community may render previously ‘familiar’ concepts strange and subsequently conceptually difficult. (Meyer and Land, 2003: 420)

Potential moments of confusion resulting from this combination of expert blind spots and specialized language are found in the regular work assigned in our classes. Dan Melzer’s research in Assignments Across the Curriculum: A National Study of College Writing looks at the language of essay instructions. After reviewing 2,101 writing assignments across the curriculum, he identifies the most common words for the assigned processes in the humanities: “interpretation” (implicitly defined as “explaining the meaning of”) and “analysis” (“respond to ideas in texts and works of arts, consider historical contexts, and theorize and make generalizations”) (2014: 64–65). Melzer notes that the assignments ask students to “interpret” and “analyze” without defining these tasks—doubly problematic when the same terms are used in other fields for very different processes. He found that “analysis” in the sciences, for example, typically called for “collecting, organizing, and assessing data” (65). The instructor in the opening cartoon is asking for interpretation and analysis, but even if he’d have used this more precise language, Melzer suggests that it would be precise to the instructor but not necessarily to the students. These unintentional barriers grounded in language can thus prevent students from doing the work of the discipline.

Even our titles can cause confusion about what we do and what we want students to do. While one who works in biology, or history, or sculpture is easily named (biologist, historian, sculptor), what do we call a person who works in literary studies? We both recall moments early in our studies when we puzzled over this question of terminology and identity, and what it meant for what we would be doing. Expert practitioners of the field are most often called interchangeably “literary critics” and “literary scholars,” though the latter has now nearly preempted the former, older term. The term “literary critic” invokes the judgments of quality, whereas “literary scholar” suggests the disciplinary moves of analyzing for meaning and significance. Where the older term persists, it may of course create the expectation of esthetic judgment based on personal taste.

We dwell on the language of identity here not just because, as PhDs in English, we love and embrace the complexity of words, but also because of the interdependence of words and understanding. A more precise description of who we are and what we do in the study of literature may help overcome some of this troublesomeness—both discursive and conceptual (Meyer and Land, 2003: 420). For example, the term literary critic suggests one who is concerned with questions of quality and popular reception, like a reviewer. Literary analysts—a term we don’t use, even though the activity is fundamental to the discipline—would primarily address questions of interpretation, meaning, and significance. The work of literary scholars (again, often treated as synonymous with critics in what seems to be a misguided and misleading conflation) more explicitly points to a role in a field of study, contributing to disciplinary knowledge. A literary theorist looks beyond individual texts toward making contextual, conceptual, and epistemological contributions to disciplinary knowledge and the frameworks in which scholars situate their inquiries.

Students and other extra-disciplinarians or novices who assume our work is evaluation and don’t know what we do come to us with an (understandably) incomplete grasp of disciplinary processes and products. At the same time, we assess students’ ability to apply habits of mind specific to disciplinary inquiry. This gap between what students bring and what we want in the classroom is part of the educational enterprise—if we are aware of it and teach to bridge it. To start, we should acknowledge that our use of language for the multiple practices of the field obscures the specific actions and reactions that make up literary studies, including those we regularly assign in undergraduate classrooms.

Meeting students at the threshold: The signature practice of literary analysis

The simultaneous importance of and confusion about the work of the discipline suggest that we’re talking about a threshold concept:

A portal, opening up a new and previously inaccessible way of thinking about something … As a consequence of comprehending a threshold concept there may thus be a transformed internal view … [that] represent[s] how people “think” in a particular discipline, or how they perceive, apprehend, or experience particular phenomena within that discipline (or more generally). (Meyer and Land, 2003: 412)

We have to help students transform how they think about, read, understand, and react to literary texts by first rendering more accessible how we think about, read, understand, and react to literary texts. Only then will we teach students how to grow in the discipline.

The dominant disciplinary process and product sought in the traditional undergraduate literature classroom is literary analysis, reacting to a text not so much through questions of quality but instead through questions of meanings explored through close and contextualized readings. Introductory literature courses give students lots of practice with close reading, a “careful analysis of the individual text” (Bass and Linkon, 2008: 247). Many classes, such as surveys, ask students how the meanings they make through close readings of texts and locate these texts within relevant cultural events, history, or politics, or larger literary movements. Courses that are framed in literary movements will ask students to read a text as important products of such movements: for instance, a course on Modernism asks students to articulate the significance of a novel or poem as emblematic of the tenets and values of Modernism. Courses designed to investigate literature as part of cultural events, geographical divisions, philosophical movements, or genre may ask students to read texts for the particular preoccupations of each course’s theme (a class in posthuman life writing, for instance, may ask students to use text to explore cyborgs, text as self, or the notion of “humanity”). Most upper-level courses also ask students to integrate scholars’ publications on literature into their meaning-making by using professional essays—analyzed, closely read, and contextualized—as evidence in their own work.

Literary analysis is thus the process and product of literary inquiry and thinking. The product is most often performed in essays written as interpretive arguments that answer particular inquiries about the literary work(s) students are analyzing. The evidence that grounds and supports these arguments is drawn from the literary text(s), and often from relevant research in literary criticism or theory, and various contexts. Pedagogically, these essays are intended as assessments both of and for understanding: the goal is not only to demonstrate students’ understanding of the literary thinking and texts, but also—in the process of writing the essay—to develop and advance that understanding.

These students’ practices and products that are central to the literary classroom mirror the creation, production, and value of disciplinary expertise: they

implicitly define what counts as knowledge in a field and how things become known. They define how knowledge is analyzed, criticized, accepted, or discarded. They define the functions of expertise in the field, the locus of authority, and the privileges of rank and standing. (Shulman, 2005: 54)

Indeed, the functions of literary analysis can be traced back to the 19th century in Matthew Arnold’s (1884) “The Function of Criticism at Present Time” (1884). He defines this practice as

an exercise of [curiosity]. It obeys an instinct prompting it to try to know the best that is known and thought in the world, irrespectively of practice, politics, and everything of the kind; and to value knowledge and thought as they approach this best, without the intrusion of any other considerations whatever. (1884: 16–17)

This “exercise of curiosity” illustrates the function of producing and not simply communicating knowledge, as its goals are to “learn and propagate the best that is known and thought in the world, and thus to establish a current of fresh and true ideas” (37). While Arnold traces the practice back to ancient Greece, 21st-century definitions of literary criticism demonstrate how little the practice has changed. In Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice, Charles E. Bressler (1999) defines it as a “disciplined activity that attempts to describe, study, analyze, justify, interpret, and evaluate a work,” a “discerning activity” that explores and “help[s] define our humanity, evaluate our actions, or simply increase our appreciation and enjoyment of … a literary work” (4). Embodied in literary criticism or analysis are the shared “basic attitudes, habits and assumptions” of “literary ways of thinking,” what Sherry Lee Linkon in Literary Learning calls our “common disciplinary culture, … the history of literary theory and critical practice” (2011: 8). As students read, think, inquire, discuss, research, and write within this “critical practice,” they are engaged in both the practices and products of literary studies.

As the quick view of the curriculum above and this history of the practice suggest, the signature activities of literary analysis are building blocks for the diverse practices scaffolded across the literature curriculum. We ask students to react and interact with literature with increasing nuance, complexity, and expansiveness; therefore, we should first unpack—for ourselves and with the students—what we mean by these requests.

This work of meaning-making and learning in literary studies maps onto Grant Wiggins and Jay McTighe’s notion of understanding as a complex and multifaceted process with six interrelated ways of knowing (2005).⁵ First, literary analysis requires students to explain by articulating their understanding of complex, frequently ambiguous texts to an audience of potentially skeptical readers. Explanation is not just stating their understanding, but explaining how and why they read a particular work in a particular way. Second, students interpret as they create and support arguments about the meanings of texts. They will initially select textual evidence and show how each instance helps them build larger meanings or interpretations of individual texts, and then they’ll progress to demonstrating how their interpretations are situated in larger contexts (biographical, historical, cultural, and theoretical)—moves that require them to apply their specific interpretations of texts to broader knowledge beyond the texts.

Students will also practice perspective, recognizing that there are multiple ways of looking at the text and that each is embedded within experiences and assumptions that affect those views. Explicitly unconcerned with questions of goodness, greatness, or quality, this metacognitive move of perspective asks students to demonstrate their “critical distance” (Wiggins and McTighe, 2005: 96) from the text and their own beliefs.⁶ This is the students’ entry into theory: varying schools of thought that apply to texts very different lenses, such as Feminist, Marxist, Deconstructionist, and Postcolonial, among many others. At the same time, literary analysis asks students to use empathy to engage the literature from within the texts. Like perspective, it asks students to set aside concerns of quality or personal taste, and step inside the world of the text—as unfamiliar and uncomfortable as that may be. Wiggins and McTighe describe this as “the ability to get beyond odd, alien, seemingly weird opinions or people to find what is meaningful in them” (2005: 99). Literature asks its readers to interact with its characters; to think according to the beliefs, values, and rules of their world; and then to articulate the meaning students develop through that experience. Finally, literary analysis cultivates self-knowledge. Over time, students will articulate how they read and engage texts: what questions do they usually ask of texts? How do they reconcile the many contexts of the literary work that engage them? What theoretical approaches align best with their answers to the previous questions? Literary analysis thus affords students the chance to demonstrate how the ongoing practice of thinking like a literary scholar has transformed their understanding not only of the literary texts and their reactions to the texts, but also of how they develop these reactions.

Teaching across the threshold: Signature practices through signature pedagogies

Teaching at the threshold of literary analysis is caricatured in the “It sucked” cartoon and overheard in Bass’s preclass experience. Teaching across the threshold requires the intention of a signature pedagogy, socializing students into the “habits of head, hand, and heart” of the field (Ciccone, 2009: xii). Here, we offer just a few steps toward implementing a signature pedagogy for literary analysis.

Habit of heart: Explore the language

Literary scholars value words and the careful study of language, so let’s apply this habit to the work of the discipline. We can be more clear about our disciplinary practices by, of course, explicitly defining our terms, but we can also explore the metaphors for the work. Some students represent literary analysis as “an act of violence” with language such as “‘take apart,’ ‘tear up,’ ‘dissect,’ ‘break apart,’ ‘pick apart,’ ‘dismantle,’ and other attacks on the texts” (Chick et al., in process: 12). Asking students to explain their experiences that lead to this characterization would surface some of their preconceptions and help us understand any hesitation. Then, sharing with students the common disciplinary metaphor of unpacking would help them understand not only the intellectual moves but also “the sense of anticipation, delight, and wonder” in the work, as unpacking “connotes opening up something, sifting out what’s inside, and exploring the contents,” turning “a singular entity (a text) into multiple elements” (Chick, 2009: 43). It also captures “the literary community’s shared value of complexity” (Wolfe, 2003: 407), our appreciation of the multiplicity and ambiguity of meanings that results from repeated close readings of a text. (We can also share Scholes’s preference of “distant reading” over “close reading.”) The process of unpacking can also be explained as both a vertical and a horizontal move: starting with the specific language at the surface of the text, the reader delves downward and then outward into the multiple connotations and contexts of the text.

Habit of hand: Foreground teaching the processes

Bass distinguishes between “content knowledge” and “method knowledge,” noting that we privilege the former and neglect (if not ignore) the latter. Most North American English curricula are content-based programs consisting of courses in specific genres (20th Century Poetry, Introduction to the Novel), populations and geographies (American Literature, English Literature), and themes (Law in Literature, Literature of War). A program of study so focused on content may present an additional barrier to students’ understanding of the practices of the field. A literary signature pedagogy

engag[es] students in the conversations, questions, and debates central to what we do professionally and, most importantly, in the processes used to carry on these conversations, rather than hiding them altogether or merely exposing students to the results of such debates. (emphasis added, Chick, 2009: 47)

In Literary Learning, Linkon (2011) walks through course design processes that engage students and culminate in the discipline-standard research-based literary analysis essays. We need such coursework and curricula built around asking the repeated practice—with increasing nuance, complexity, and expansiveness—of our various methods, processes, and habits of hand.

Habit of head: Model the processes

In the traditional literary pedagogy of instructors presenting students with fully formed reactions and analyses of texts, students get “the product rather than the process, as the professor has done the disciplinary work without showing the students how to do that work themselves” (Chick, 2009: 45). Performing a think-aloud would demystify the disciplinary work by modeling the processes. For example, we can let students watch us wrestle with a text we’re just approaching ourselves, ask aloud our questions of the text, let them see how we find—or don’t find—answers, show them the connections we make to other texts and contexts, and share how we select and arrange parts of the text to start the meaning-making that becomes literary analysis.

This ongoing project at the intersection of the arts and humanities has illuminated how we, despite the best of intentions, continue to take our disciplinary understanding for granted. This AHHE set of essays exploring how we react to our subjects of study in relevant disciplinary ways has been particularly helpful in understanding and reframing some common frustrations in the literature classroom. Teaching our students to react to literary texts using the ways of the discipline requires us to explore with patience and then cross with intention the thresholds separating novice and expert understanding. Beginning students will still struggle as they attempt the threshold of literary analysis, especially as it inclines toward greater complexity over time, and the humor of the “it sucked” cartoon will probably endure. What we hope to change is how long we leave them at that threshold and how we support them in crossing it.

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author biographies

Jennifer Heinert is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Wisconsin Colleges. Jennifer has taught Writing, Literature, and Women’s Studies courses at UW Colleges since 2006 and has directed the UW Colleges’ Virtual Teaching and Learning Center since January 2012. She is the author of Narrative Conventions and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison. She also has worked collaboratively on research, writing, presentations, and workshops related to faculty development, peer review in the writing classroom, feminized labor in composition, and competency-based education. Jennifer’s current research interests include the impact of course delivery on students’ learning in writing courses and students’ development of interpretive independence in literary studies.

Nancy L Chick is University Chair in Teaching and Learning, the Academic Director of the Taylor Institute for Teaching and Learning, and Teaching Professor of English at the University of Calgary. She coedited two books on signature pedagogies (2009, 2012) and wrote the chapter on literary studies (2009: 36–55), and has published a variety of peer-reviewed articles and chapters of and about the scholarship of teaching and learning (SoTL). She is also the founding coeditor of Teaching & Learning Inquiry, the journal of the ISSOTL. She and Jen Heinert were colleagues together in the University of Wisconsin Colleges many moons ago.

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